I’ve been rereading Herve This’ book Molecular Gastronomy. It’s at once philosophical, academic, practical and at times, utterly useless unless you, for example, happen to have field full of dairy cattle on which you can test out the tricky influence of terroir.

While the term Molecular Gastronomy has been hijacked as shorthand for any chef that presents peculiar foods built from a combination of foam and hubris, This’ concern remains the application of science and scientific rigor to anything that concerns human nourishment rather than the whims of food fashion. His goals for molecular gastronomy are far loftier than making emulsions from meat (which admittedly, was the first idea I attempted after my first read. Hot dog foam is not delicious). For all our advances elsewhere in science, home cooking is the most resistant to change.

In an article in Nature after the publishing of his book, This writes:

Despite having a huge impact on other aspects of our lives, scientific advances have done little to change our cooking habits. When it comes to preparing food—the most important aspect of our life from a physiological point of view—citizens in developed countries still cook almost the same way as their ancestors did centuries ago. Of course, some foods and products—notably potatoes, tomatoes and new spices—were introduced into European cuisines only after the discovery of the New World and with increasing trade with Africa and Asia, but the culinary processes themselves did not change. Kitchens are equipped with basically the same pans, whisks and sieves that cooks used in the seventeenth century. Similarly, culinary books from the fourteenth century to the twenty-first century all look the same, despite the introduction of new recipes; for example, the first emulsion described in a French culinary book appears in 1674.

Our tastes and palates may have shifted over the past 500 years, but few of our approaches to cooking in the home have kept pace. (It is worth noting that outside the home however, many of the processes in food preparation from making corn syrup to artificial flavouring have changed our definition of what even constitutes food). Most home kitchens would be immediately recognisable to our distant ancestors. The materials to build them may be different but the fundamental cooking implements are the same.

As an example, my kitchen looks decidedly retrograde when we consider advances in food over the past few hundred years. Not including the stove (which is a small step above wood-fired, but still recognisable as a stove) and lighting (I could be using candles), everything except the stab blender and ice cream maker existed half a millenium ago. Even thermometers have been around since the late 1600s. Similarly, ice houses have existed for at least 4,000 years. Not in a form convenient to the home cook like a modern refrigerator but nonetheless in existence.

I might be eating a diet packed with foods that have never coexisted until recent times, but the way that I cook those foods has not changed for millennia. Is it worth considering a new kitchen gadget when so little has changed? or should new foods take precedence?