Last year as I was beginning culinary school in Charlotte, I read enviously about the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences’ inaugural course, “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter.”
Last Year’s Harvard Science & Cooking Lecture Schedule
The only food-related course I took while an undergraduate at the College was an excellent Food and Anthropology class taught by Dr. (now Professor Emeritus) James Watson. Watson is an ethnographer who studied South China for four decades. While he certainly peppered much of this core class offering with lessons from his research in China, I recall covering a range of cultures and issues. We were also able to choose our own topic for our major research paper. I wrote on the history of the bagel/its assimilation into the culinary mainstream of America and consequently spent some fun hours sleuthing in the culinary collection of Schlesinger Library.
But I digress . . . All this is to say that there was certainly no science of cooking curriculum during my college years; nor could I have dreamed of the possibility. When I learned that I would be interning in Boston this fall, I knew that I wanted to take advantage and attend the (free) public lecture series based on the Science and Cooking Harvard College General Education course. Culinary heavy hitters, including some chef deities, come for free every Monday and give us mere mortals a peek into their fantastic brains.
The Monday, October 3 lecture (entitled “Food Texture and Mouth Feel”) featured visionary chef and author Grant Achatz. The topic of the night was Achatz’s ground-breaking, innovative cocktail bar, The Aviary, which he opened this year in Chicago’s meatpacking district.
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