10 Days of Cookbooks: The Fat Duck Cookbook

Photo: Martha Williams

A common initial reaction to Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck Cookbook (a new $50 version of last fall's $250 Big Fat Duck Cookbook), is that the recipes aren’t doable. Not exactly true. They are doable—it’s just that not many home cooks would want to invest the time and energy. Blumenthal himself writes, “The recipes are complicated and I make no apologies for that…To change any part of these recipes so that they are more easily achievable would be to compromise—something this book does not to.”

He’s not kidding. To replicate the dishes served at Blumenthal’s Michelin-starred house of molecular gastronomy in Bray, England, would take immense patience, an average of six hours spare time and, for starters, a digital scale to weigh out ingredients like malic acid, isomalt and “National Starch Flogel 60” by the gram. This is not your mother’s cookbook.
This cookbook is for geeks. It’s for young cooks hell-bent on staging at El Bulli, Alinea and, of course, Fat Duck. It’s for the dining elite with the means to eat at those restaurants and the intellect to remember every bite. And it’s for voyeurs, those with an interest in the mad scientist that is Blumenthal and the desire to read 110 pages on exactly how the chef thinks and how his restaurant became legendary. Those that lack the patience could be satisfied by simply flipping through the book’s pages—extreme, abstract food photography and illustrations from macabre cartoonist Dave McKean combine for at least a few hours of slack-jawed ogling.

But the third of the book dubbed “Science” (the other two-thirds are “History” and “Recipes”) is not for scanning. Here, Blumenthal throws down the gauntlet on culinary geekiness, nearly challenging any other cookbook author not named Harold McGee to rival the collection of information, which ranges from a diagram of the structure of tastebuds and their distribution in the mouth to essays from science academia on everything from emulsifiers to multisensory flavor perception. What did you expect from a chef who at one time presented the seafood course of his tasting menu with an iPod playing the sound of ocean waves to enhance the diners’ experience? Like I said, this one’s for the geeks.