I have often thought about a particular moment in our discipline: when an organic substance ceases to be merely the witness of a season and becomes a rewriting of it. A ripe fig, the smell of a mushroom, the dampness of the forest floor already tell us so much about the world. Even before the cook’s gesture, everything was already there: a geography, a climate, a memory of the earth that has no need to be reinterpreted.
There is perhaps, in our gestures, something unnecessary, even distorting. We are, after all, the only animals that cook. Other living beings perceive the world, often with an acuity greater than our own, without the same need to transform it. And yet we do. We bring materials together, shift a fragrance, extend a texture, as though our relationship to the world also passed through this need to reread it. To cook is to intervene in this sensory perception of the world, in what tastes, smells and materials leave within us before words.
From that moment on, the gesture becomes fragile. Because to rewrite is also to risk betraying and blurring what was already there, adding too much and covering over. But perhaps cooking is born precisely from this tension.
I have often drawn a parallel between cooking and photography. Both begin by listening to the world, then inventing a language singular enough to offer a reading of it to others. There is something deeply personal in this, almost egocentric, and yet also the desire to place the body, the senses and perception at the service of something larger than ourselves. The cook and the photographer become mediums: passages through which a perception of the world can circulate. They do not show the world as it is, but as it has passed through them.
The materials remain profoundly themselves. But brought together, transformed, they may cease to be merely witnesses of autumn. They become a rewriting of it. Another way of looking at what was already there.
So here is our rewriting of autumn at ESqUISSE.
Roasted fig with Japanese black sugar, fermented Amazonian cacao mousse, porcini ice cream, and a Banyuls wine reduction infused with cardamom and black sugar.