It was a vibrant clash of sweet, sour, cold and crunchy: a rollercoaster of flavours.
This cause referred to cultural ideas about humoral imbalances leading to illness as a result of consuming foods that are sour, cold, cold-producing (eg, yoghurt, cucumber), heat-producing (eg, chicken, heavily spiced food), unsuitable (eg, guava) or oily.
Sweet, sour, hot, cold, crunchy, moist, fatty – this is brilliantly balanced cooking, at once intensely foreign and familiar.
Soft-boiled eggs wrapped in tinfoil; vinigret, the Russian beet salad, overflowing a reused container of sour cream; cold chicken served between crisp white furrows of a bulka.
The things Buergel and his partner and chief curator Ruth Noack have said about Documenta 12 are also reminiscent of the piquant, sweet, sour, hot, cold, earthy, fishy, savoury froths Adrià engineers in his kitchen: tasty, in a weird sort of way, but not the sort of thing to sate mere hunger.
The sequenced products were yoghurt, sour cream, cold sauce and crème fraiche, all with multiple flavours.
This mood of cold, sour irony, familiar to all travellers, persisted.
With no sour cream added, cold borscht ($3) is a perfect starter, pleasantly sweet and sour, with plenty of onions, dill and black pepper.
The ideal dessert, after such heavy fare, is the ripe poached pear with a touch of mascarpone in a peppercorn-scented cold sour cherry and mango soup.
Appetizers include bean curd crepe vegetable roll; crispy fried won ton with sweet and sour sauce; sesame cold noodles; and shredded chicken with sesame peanut sauce.
Cream of asparagus was delicate and smooth; onion gratinée topped with Emmentaler cheese, classically delicious; and sour cherries blended cold into a broth of red wine and ginger made a bracing palate cleanser.
