A friend pointed out to me that my discussion of ingredient-focused cuisine in my last post is somewhat ambiguous (most of my friends are lawyers; they're real big on precision). So let's clear things up a bit.

There are at least two ways ingredients can occupy the center of a culinary philosophy, and I sort of conflated them the other day. The first emphasizes the skill of the chef in taking what most would consider undesirable ingredients and turning them into something magnificent. It requires a deep knowledge of cooking techniques and a sublime understanding of the ingredient itself. You can see this attitude at work in the bones and tails of Blue Ribbon, in the delicate cold tripe salad at Cibrèo, or in the celebration of offal on display at London's St. John. These are just some examples of a school of thought that seeks out the true nature and the inner virtues of that which is edible but generally overlooked in favor of less challenging, more predictable, more expensive ingredients. At its core, the philosophy underlying this trend is to rediscover and celebrate the primitive, humble ingredients that have been given short shrift by the luxury and rigidity of modern Western cuisine: marrow, viscera, sinewy cuts of meat. Like the romantic poets casting off the shackles of neoclassicism, chefs in this school of cooking are invoking primal lessons from the cuisine of poverty to teach us something we already knew, but had forgotten for want of practice. They are awakening the nobility in the most common ingredients.

The other way one can focus on ingredients is to insist on only the very best ingredients and manipulate them as little as possible, simply allowing them to speak for themselves. In an age where most of our produce is picked weeks before it is ripe, where most of our meat animals are raised on high-volume farms on a diet of formula feeds and antibiotics, the chefs who focus on the natural beauty of the life on which we feed -- its seasonality, its eccentricity, its subtle and marvelous variety -- are doing us no small service. Their influence is evident in contemporary cuisine; my friend pointed out the work of Tom Colicchio at Craft; Anthony Bourdain describes the same phenomenon at Masa Takayama's sushi temple (scroll down). Of course, if this trend is reduced to the point of absurdity, the chef becomes little more than a broker: seeking out the very best ingredients from around the world for the benefit of those who lack the time and skill to do so themselves but have the money to pay for it. We haven't reached that point yet, though, and for now these chefs are still bringing considerable expertise to bear on the preparation of their painstakingly selected raw materials.

My friend seemed to be quite content to have both these schools of cooking at work in the world today, and I think he's got a point. From an ideological perspective, though, I have to admit to being more enamored of the first trend than the second. Seasonality, variety, and quality are all obviously virtues, but they shouldn't be the exclusive province of elite restaurant chefs. If we could learn how to better nurture and develop our food supply, I think the brokerage function of high-end restaurants would quickly collapse as rank-and-file food lovers were able to find fresh, high-quality, seasonal products for themselves. But the world will always need skilled chefs to coax out the grandeur of challenging ingredients. It's easy to make offal taste foul; it's nearly impossible to make it taste glorious. That's why I have boundless respect for chefs who face challenging ingredients head-on, and show us how rich our lives can be if we are willing to let go of the familiar. Their restaurants are examples of how cuisine can transcend its function as nourishment, transcend even its potential to be art, and become something far more significant: culture.