Herve This on Love and Cooking

We have been featuring some of the scientific knowledge the Herve This brings to cooking and food, including some steps for the perfect hard-boiled egg. However, at the center of “building a meal” is the far less quantitative concept of love. Here’s a passage from Hervé This’s Building a Meal: From Molecular Gastronomy to Culinary Constructivism:

“This brings us back, finally, to the question of love. Serving a meal is to give happiness to others, not to supply nutriments: fats, proteins, carbohydrates, and so on. Even the best soufflé, both in nutritional and artistic terms, will be bad if you don’t make your guests feel at home. A meal shared with disagreeable people, no matter how elaborate or well prepared it may be, will never be good either—whereas a sandwich shared with dear friends is a perfect delight. And our grandmothers, whose cooking we all adored, may not have been very good technicians, but what they gave us before everything else was love. Yes, cooking is first and foremost about love, and only then about art, and after that technique.”