But I also got into the French Laundry in another sense altogether, one that had to do with Mr. Keller's intensity of focus, his relationship to the market, to techniques of cooking, serving, sanitation, management and also, ultimately, to finesse.
For ages, "the techniques of cooking have been about taking the raw ingredients of the kitchen and making them into something wonderful," said Nathan Myhrvold, the author of "Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking," the recently published six-volume, 40-pound high-and-low-tech food encyclopedia, which retails for $625.
Sous vide, the technique of cooking food in vacuum-sealed plastic bags at low heat, may seem too fussy for a naturalist.
Poisoning the dinner guests would be significantly reduced, because the technique of cooking the turkey at very low temperature overnight could be discarded.
They knew the old technique of cooking en papillote, in an oiled paper bag, to seal in flavour and juices; plastic was simpler.
For example, confit, the French technique of cooking slowly in fat, is supposed to impart a unique taste and texture as the fat penetrates the meat.
(NB: an internet meme is doing the rounds suggesting a Julia Child technique of cooking the egg in its shell for 10 seconds prior to cracking it. I haven't found this really helps).
Since then, in Houston, the traditional Creole method for making crawfish (boiling the bugs in a heavily spiced water broth) has been eclipsed by the Vietnamese technique of cooking the crawfish alone, then dousing them in a spiced butter sauce.
I have never seen the heretical technique of cooking the spinach with the pasta anywhere but in the kitchens of American home cooks (though at least one of those was of Italian extraction), and it's certainly not in the canon.
Originally planned as a 300-page discussion of sous vide, an increasingly popular restaurant technique of cooking food in vacuum-sealed bags in warm water baths, the book has swelled to 1,500 pages that will also cover microbiology, food safety, the physics of heat transfer on the stove and in the oven, formulas for turning fruit and vegetable juices into gels, and more.
And simple to make, too, once you have the technique of cooking Japanese-type rice under your belt.
