Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

by Bee Wilson

Six years earlier in Britain, a Hungarian physicist named Nicholas Kurti had been making some discoveries of his own. In 1968, Kurti gave a Friday-night lecture at the Royal Institution, entitled “The Physicist in the Kitchen.” Kurti found it very sad that the role of science in the kitchen had not been given more attention. He showed the audience a series of hypodermic syringes, which he used with a dramatic flourish to inject pineapple juice into a loin of pork to tenderize it (pineapple contains an enzyme, bromelin, that breaks down proteins). He used a microwave oven to construct an “inverted Baked Alaska” with an outer layer of chocolate ice cream encasing an inner layer of hot meringue and apricot puree. Finally, Kurti brought in a leg of lamb cooked for eight hours at precisely 176°F until fantastically tender: here already was a version of the sous-vide idea of cooking meat low and slow at highly controlled temperatures. Kurti is now revered among the modernist chefs and food scientists as one of the fathers of high-tech cuisine.