Heat (15 page)

Seventy-six thousand years ago, someone near Barcelona left behind sixty hearths, burned bones, and imprints of long-gone wooden cooking utensils. Forty thousand years ago, someone in France’s Dordogne region dropped fire-heated stones into water, a method of boiling water in the absence of fire-resistant pots.

We called ourselves
Homo sapiens,
“the wise man,” but we may more aptly have called ourselves
Homo crustulum,
“the cooking man.” Our brains grew larger, but our teeth shrank, our intestines grew shorter, and our jaw muscles grew pathetically weak.

After all of this, we find ourselves with the science of molecular gastronomy, the cross between the laboratory and the kitchen. It took a physicist and a chemist, one Hungarian and the other French, to turn food science into molecular gastronomy. They did so through seminars and presentations. They held workshops on texture, on chewing, on swallowing, on foams made from egg whites that go by the name of mousse, on dough.

The physicist was Nicholas Kurti, and the chemist was Hérve This. Starting in the 1990s, they brought scientists together with chefs. They put graduate students in kitchens. They asked questions. What happens when you roast meat? Does slow heating make the best broth? What is the perfectly cooked egg? They held seminars on the methods of heating: by liquids, by steam, by air, by radiation. They quoted Count Rumford, the man who married Lavoisier’s widow, who showed that friction generates heat, that the heat released by the boring of a cannon could boil water: “In what art or science could improvements be made that would more powerfully contribute to increase the comforts and enjoyments of mankind?”

The science of molecular gastronomy asks how something works, and it asks why something works. Cooking is the work itself. “We shouldn’t confuse science with technology,” Hérve This once said. “The application of that knowledge is the cooking part,” he said, “and that’s technology. Cooking is a technique, combined with art.”

In Hérve This’s world, the boiling of an egg becomes a matter of scientific interest and technical importance. As the egg warms, proteins unravel and then coagulate into a molecular net, a mesh, but the proteins of egg whites and egg yolks unravel and coagulate at different temperatures. Use different temperatures and cook different eggs, with different consistencies. The time of cooking is not important. As long as the temperature is controlled, the three-minute egg is no different from the five-minute egg or the twenty-minute egg. Hérve This talks of eggs of different degrees. For example, he might talk of a 149-degree egg with a soft orange yolk, or he might talk of a 153-degree egg with a firmer yolk, yellow rather than orange.

A journalist once recorded This spotting an undercooked egg in a restaurant. It was not that the egg was inedible but that it was a 147-degree egg sold as a 149-degree egg.

I throw a slab of halibut, freshly caught and filleted, onto my grill. Halibut, undercooked, has an unacceptably mushy texture and the taste of raw fish. Overcooked, it is tough and tastes of cardboard. The difference between undercooked and overcooked is a matter of seconds. Hérve This has not commented on the cooking of halibut, but he would certainly mention the importance of timing in the coagulation of proteins. He would mention, too, that cooking removes water from the flesh. And he might suggest something about Maillard reactions, the same reactions that color bread crust, give beer a golden luster, and darken cooked meat, reactions involving amines and Schiff bases and Amadori products that react with other compounds to become aromatic molecules—molecules in the shape of a ring that sometimes come with an odor. But in all the chemistry, Hérve This would not lose sight of the technique and art of cooking. I flip the halibut twice and remove it just in time, within seconds of disaster, but, in this instance, perfectly prepared and ready to increase the comforts and enjoyment of mankind.

In 1957, Thomas E. Briscoe told arresting officers that he had been setting fires since he was twelve years old. By his own estimate, he had set more than a hundred fires. In the past year alone, he had set more than fifteen fires in the area where he was arrested, and the fire that led to his arrest was his second fire that night. According to his confession, he would wake up at night feeling what court documents referred to as a “strong sexual urge.” To satisfy the urge, he would light a fire. He would call the fire department and watch them work, and afterward he would obtain “sexual gratification, sometimes with his wife and sometimes by masturbation.”

The arresting officers were quoted as saying that Briscoe “was sick and needed psychiatric treatment.” One examining psychologist said that Briscoe “was suffering from a severe degree of mental defect.” Another found Briscoe to be a “borderline mental defective” but not “strictly a mental defective.” The legal question was not one of mental defectiveness but one of mental competence. Could his guilty plea be taken seriously? Did he know what he was doing when he lit the fires? Did he know what he was doing when he pleaded?

The psychologist’s report declared him competent. Briscoe was “not suffering from mental defect of a sufficient severity to render him mentally incompetent.” He had probably been “of sound mind” when he lit the fire and when he confessed.

A confounding factor: Briscoe’s intelligence quotient, his IQ, measured fifteen years earlier, was somewhere between 41 and 46. An IQ as low as Briscoe’s has been described by various terms and phrases over the course of time, many of which came into the lexicon with good intentions but later became stigmatized and derogatory: cretin, imbecile, moron, feebleminded, trainable but not educable, and retarded.

In an appeal, Briscoe withdrew his guilty plea. The change in plea led to legal machinations but not a trial. Briscoe sat behind bars. “It is even possible,” wrote the judge involved with the case, “that the unjust sentence will have been served before decision of the appeal.” Injustice was served, not only on Briscoe but on society. “Since release from the penitentiary is generally based on passage of time rather than fitness for release,” wrote the judge, “appellant, if he has the pyromania to which he confessed but which was not shown because he was denied a trial, would again imperil the community.”

Pyromania combines two Greek words:
pyro
for “fire” and
mania
for “loss of reason.” The pyromaniac is crazy for fire. He or she—but usually he—has problems controlling impulses. In a moment of inspiration, the mind says, “let’s light a fire,” and the pyromaniac, lacking impulse control, follows through. In this sense, pyromania may be related to any number of destructive behaviors. Among these are kleptomania, pathological gambling, mood disorders, unexpected verbal and physical assault, and nail biting. Another is trichotillomania, the pulling of one’s own hair.

Sigmund Freud associated pyromania with childhood bed-wetting. Whether or not the young Thomas E. Briscoe wet his bed is not known.

Setting fires is more common among the young—kids who are six or seven or eight years old. Some of them do not necessarily understand the potential danger. They do not feel a sense of sexual excitement. They are not pyromaniacs so much as curious kids with matches and lighters and sometimes cans of gasoline.

Another Briscoe, a woman named Rosa Briscoe, probably unrelated to Thomas E. Briscoe, opened a store in Mississippi in 1981. Things did not go well. In 1982 she allegedly told an acquaintance that “the store needs to burn and it needs help.” The acquaintance allegedly found an arsonist. Rosa allegedly agreed to a $5,000 fee. The arsonist taped kitchen matches and sandpaper to the telephone bell in the back of the store. He loosened a gas pipe. A phone call ignited the gas.

Rosa Briscoe may have been guilty of arson and stupidity, but she was not a pyromaniac. She felt neither emotional nor physical arousal. She was fascinated neither by the fire itself nor by the burned building. She did not light one fire after another.

In a momentary lapse of impulse control, I stab the base of a match into a cork so that the cork forms a stand. I light the match. Match and cork go into my microwave oven. I close the door and push the button. Eight seconds later, a flare flashes across the inside of my oven, a mix of fire and lightning, really a plasma, carbon stripped of electrons, with the buzzing noise of sudden ionization, of an electric chair. It is a phase change, akin to ice becoming liquid water and liquid water becoming steam, but here the phase change is from gas to plasma. It is a phase change that makes me smile and laugh, but I have no sense of emotional or physical arousal, no sexual urge at all.

Afterward I question my own intelligence, reminding myself that I am an adult and should behave accordingly, and hoping that I have not ruined my microwave oven.

Microwave ovens make certain molecules spin. To spin, the molecules must have an uneven distribution of charge. Their electrons must be crowded toward one end or the other. Water has just such an uneven distribution of charge. Its electrons crowd around its oxygen atom. Its two hydrogen atoms poke out like positively charged pigtails.

Imagine lines in a powerful magnetic field. Place a bar magnet in that field, and it lines up parallel to the field. Now reverse the direction of the magnetic field. The bar magnet turns around, realigning itself. In a microwave oven, the microwave radiation is the magnetic field, its direction reversing two and a half billion times each second. The water molecules are the magnets. The magnetic waves are perhaps five inches long, peak to peak, and they travel at the speed of light.

In an active microwave oven, water molecules spin this way and that. They pirouette. They reverse pirouette. The dancing is heat. It is the same heat felt from the sun or from a fire or from friction.

The microwave oven came from radar. Specifically, the microwave oven came from the radar’s magnetron, the component that generated the waves used to detect enemy aircraft.

Soon after World War II, a man named Percy Spencer was working in a Raytheon factory that built radar systems. He carried a chocolate bar in his shirt pocket. A magnetron melted his chocolate.

Spencer returned with popcorn. He popped popcorn in front of the magnetron. He returned with an egg. He blew up an egg in front of the magnetron.

Spencer talked to Raytheon’s patent lawyer. A hundred thousand dollars later, Raytheon had a prototype. They marketed it as the Radar Range, selling the first unit in 1947 for three thousand dollars. It was too big for home kitchens, so they sold it to restaurants and hotels. They redesigned it. They got it down to 750 pounds and then passed the torch to Hotpoint, Westinghouse, Kelvinator, Whirlpool, and Tappan. In 1955, Tappan released a model the size of a conventional oven. By 1966, ten thousand Americans owned microwave ovens. Foods packaged for microwave ovens appeared. The ovens grew smaller. By 1970, when Spencer died, forty thousand microwave ovens were sold each year. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, microwave ovens were in virtually every home in America.

The molecular gastronomist Hérve This has written of cooking in Spencer’s invention: “Cooked in a microwave, beef is rejected by taste testers, who find fault with its grayish external color, its toughness, its lack of succulence, and its bland taste.” The microwaves, according to This, penetrate the surface of the meat, heat the water molecules within the meat, and create steam. The temperature never goes above the boiling point and is never hot enough to trigger Maillard reactions, the reactions of browning. “The oxymyoglobin,” This wrote, “is not denatured and retains its color.”

But he does not oppose the use of microwaves for certain foods. They can be used, he advises, for poaching fish. And he says they are good for cooking eggs: “Placed in a bowl without an ounce of fat, an egg will cook rapidly; its taste is acceptable, and the figure benefits.”

I forgo the use of a bowl and ignore This’s implied advice regarding the need to remove the egg from the shell before cooking with Spencer’s machine. I place the egg in the middle of my microwave oven. I decide on a three-minute egg. But the egg has other ideas. At forty-three seconds, it explodes. It is a minor explosion, a disappointing pop. The door of my oven remains intact. The eggshell is split, exposing a reasonably well-cooked yolk surrounded by egg white of varying consistency. I do not have the eye of Hérve This, but to me this looks like a 158-degree egg, with hints of a 153-degree egg around the outer edges of the white, most of which are spattered on the walls of my oven.