The rendering time

Note: I’m taking a few days off, so I’ll be republishing some of my favorite pieces from earlier in this blog’s run. This post originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on December 30, 2015.

Last year, I went through a period in which I was baking a lot of bread at home, initially as an activity to share with my daughter. Not surprisingly, I relied entirely on the no-knead recipe first developed by Jim Lahey and popularized by Mark Bittman over a decade ago in the New York Times. As many amateur bakers know, it’s simplicity itself: instead of kneading, you mix a very wet dough with a tiny amount of yeast, and then let it rise for about eighteen hours. Bittman quotes Harold McGee, author of the legendary tome On Food and Cooking, who says:

It makes sense. The long, slow rise does over hours what intensive kneading does in minutes: it brings the gluten molecules into side-by-side alignment to maximize their opportunity to bind to each other and produce a strong, elastic network. The wetness of the dough is an important piece of this because the gluten molecules are more mobile in a high proportion of water, and so can move into alignment easier and faster than if the dough were stiff.

Bittman continues: “Mr. McGee said he had been kneading less and less as the years have gone by, relying on time to do the work for him.” And the results, I can confirm, are close to foolproof: even if you’re less than precise or make a few mistakes along the way, as I tend to do, you almost always get a delicious, light, crusty loaf.

And the idea that you can use the power of time to achieve results that would otherwise require intensive work is central to much of modernist cuisine, as the freelance food scientist Nathan Myhrvold notes in his massive book of the same name. Government food safety guidelines, he points out, are based on raising the core temperature of meat to a certain minimum, which is often set unreasonably high to account for different cooking styles and impatient chefs. In reality, most pathogens are killed by temperatures as low as 120 degrees Fahrenheit—but only if the food has been allowed to cook for a sufficient length of time. The idea that a lower temperature can be counterbalanced by a longer time is the basic premise behind sous vide, in which food is cooked in a warm water bath for hours rather than more rapidly over high heat. This works because you’re trading one kind of precision for another: the temperature is carefully controlled over the course of the cooking process, but once you’re past a certain point, you can be less precise about the time. If you’ve ever prepared a meal in a crock pot, you already know this, and the marvel of sous vide lies in how it applies the same basic insight to a wider variety of recipes. (In fact, there’s a little gadget that you can buy for less than a hundred dollars that can convert any crock pot into a sous vide machine, and although I haven’t bought one for myself yet, I intend to try it one of these days.)

But the relationship between intensity and time has applications far beyond the kitchen. Elsewhere, I’ve talked about the rendering time that all creative acts seem to require: it seems that you just have to live with a work of art for a certain period, and if your process has become more efficient, you still fill that time by rendering or revising the work. As Blinn’s Law states: “As technology advances, rendering time remains constant.” And rendering, of course, is also a term from the food industry, in which the inedible waste from the butcher shop is converted, using time and heat, into something useful or delicious. But one lesson that artists quickly learn is that time can be used in place of intensity, as well as the other way around. Many of the writing rules that I try to follow—trim ten percent from each draft, cut the beginning and ending of every scene, overlap the action, remove transitional moments—are tricks to circumvent a protracted revision process, with intense work and scrutiny over a focused window taking the place of a longer, less structured engagement. If I just sat and fiddled with the story for months or years, I’d probably end up making most of the same changes, but I use these rules of thumb to hurry up the revisions that I would have made anyway. They aren’t always right, and they can’t entirely take the place of an extended period of living with a story, but I can rely on them to get maybe ninety percent of the way there, and the time I save more than compensates for that initial expenditure of energy.

And art, like cooking, often consists of finding the right balance between time and intensity. I’ve found that I write best in bursts of focused activity, which is why I try to keep my total working time for a short story to a couple of weeks or so. But I’ve also learned to set the resulting draft aside for a while before the final revision and submission, which allows me to subconsciously work through the remaining problems and find any plot holes. (On a few occasions that I haven’t done this, I’ve submitted a story only to realize within a day or two that I’d overlooked something important.) The amount of real work I do remains the same, but like dough rising quietly on the countertop, the story has time to align itself in my brain while I’m occupied with other matters. And while time can do wonders for any work of art, the few good tricks I use to speed up the process are still necessary: you aren’t likely to give up on your dough just because it takes an extra day to rise, but the difference between a novel that takes twelve months to write and one that takes three years often amounts to one you finish and one you abandon. The proper balance depends on many outside factors, and you may find that greater intensity and less time, or vice versa, is the approach you need to make it fit with everything else in your life. But baking no-knead bread reminded me that we have a surprising amount of control over the relationship between the two. And even though I’m no longer baking much these days, I’m always thinking about what I can set to rise, or render, right now.

The rendering time

Over the last month, I’ve started to bake bread at home, initially as an activity to share with my daughter. Not surprisingly, I’ve been relying on the no-knead recipe first developed by Jim Lahey and popularized by Mark Bittman a decade ago in the New York Times, which I recently rediscovered after neglecting it for years. As many amateur bakers know, it’s simplicity itself: instead of kneading, you mix a very wet dough with a tiny amount of yeast, and then let it rise for about eighteen hours. Bittman quotes Harold McGee, author of the legendary tome On Food and Cooking, who says:

It makes sense. The long, slow rise does over hours what intensive kneading does in minutes: it brings the gluten molecules into side-by-side alignment to maximize their opportunity to bind to each other and produce a strong, elastic network. The wetness of the dough is an important piece of this because the gluten molecules are more mobile in a high proportion of water, and so can move into alignment easier and faster than if the dough were stiff.

Bittman continues: “Mr. McGee said he had been kneading less and less as the years have gone by, relying on time to do the work for him.” And the results, I’m pleased to confirm, are close to foolproof: even if you’re less than precise or make a few mistakes along the way, as I have, you almost always get a delicious, light, crusty loaf.

And the idea that you can use the power of time to achieve results that would otherwise require intensive work is central to much of modernist cuisine, as the freelance genius and food scientist Nathan Myhrvold notes in his massive book of the same name. Government food safety guidelines, he points out, are based on raising the core temperature of meat to a certain minimum, which is often set unreasonably high to account for different cooking styles and impatient chefs. In reality, most pathogens are killed by temperatures as low as 120 degrees Fahrenheit—but only if the food has been allowed to cook for a sufficient length of time. The idea that a lower temperature can be counterbalanced by a longer time is the basic premise behind sous vide, in which food is cooked in a warm water bath for hours rather than more rapidly over high heat. This works because you’re trading one kind of precision for another: the temperature is carefully controlled over the course of the cooking process, but once you’re past a certain point, you can be less precise about the time. Anyone who has ever prepared a meal in a crock pot knows this, and the marvel of sous vide lies in how it applies the same basic insight to a wider variety of recipes. (In fact, there’s a little gadget that you can buy for less than a hundred dollars that can convert any crock pot into a sous vide machine, and although I haven’t bought one for myself yet, I intend to try it one of these days.)

But the relationship between intensity and time has applications far beyond the kitchen. Elsewhere, I’ve talked about the rendering time that all creative acts seem to require: it seems that you just have to live with a work of art for a certain period, and if your process has become more efficient, you still fill that time by rendering or revising the work. As Blinn’s Law states: “As technology advances, rendering time remains constant.” And rendering, of course, is also a term from the food industry, in which the inedible waste from the butcher shop is converted, using time and heat, into something useful or delicious. But one lesson that artists quickly learn is that time can be used in place of intensity, as well as the other way around. Many of the writing rules that I try to follow—trim ten percent from each draft, cut the beginning and ending of every scene, overlap the action, remove transitional moments—are tricks to circumvent a protracted revision process, with intense work and scrutiny over a focused window taking the place of a longer, less structured engagement. If I just sat and fiddled with the story for months or years, I’d probably end up making most of the same changes, but I use these rules of thumb to hurry up the revisions that I would have made anyway. They aren’t always right, and they can’t entirely take the place of an extended period of living with a story, but I can rely on them to get maybe ninety percent of the way there, and the time I save more than compensates for that initial expenditure of energy.

And art, like cooking, often consists of finding the right balance between time and intensity. I’ve found that I write best in bursts of focused activity, which is why I try to keep my total working time for a short story to a couple of weeks or so. But I’ve also learned to set the resulting draft aside for a while before the final revision and submission, which allows me to subconsciously work through the remaining problems and find any plot holes. (On a few occasions that I haven’t done this, I’ve submitted a story only to realize within a day or two that I’d overlooked something important.) The amount of real work I do remains the same, but like dough rising quietly on the countertop, the story has time to align itself in my brain while I’m occupied with other matters. And while time can do wonders for any work of art, the few good tricks I use to speed up the process are still necessary: you aren’t likely to give up on your dough just because it takes an extra day to rise, but the difference between a novel that takes twelve months to write and one that takes three years often amounts to one you finish and one you abandon. The proper balance depends on many outside factors, and you may find that greater intensity and less time, or vice versa, is the approach you need to make it fit with everything else in your life. But baking no-knead bread has reminded me that we have a surprising amount of control over the relationship between the two. And as we approach the start of a new year—or what the Irish once called the Day of the Buttered Bread—we should start to think about what we can set to rise, or render, right now.

The endangered tome

Last week, a cardboard box the size of a mini fridge arrived on my front doorstep. Inside it was a single book, along with what seemed like twenty gallons of styrofoam packing peanuts. To be fair, this was no ordinary book: it was Howard B. Adelmann’s Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology, which at five folio volumes and over two thousand pages is probably the single heaviest book I’ll ever own, not counting my Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. If you haven’t heard of Malpighi, that’s fine—neither had I. For the record, Malpighi is well worth knowing in his own right: he was one of the greatest natural historians in a generation that included William Harvey and Antonie van Leeuwehoek, and his contributions to science, undertaken with the aid of one of the earliest microscopes, include the discovery of capillaries and the first detailed account of the structure of the lungs. And his life, which occupies the set’s first seven hundred pages, is so interesting that I’m tempted to write a novel about it. But I was even more interested in Adelmann and his huge book, which is both the end result of decades of painstaking scholarship and an astonishingly beautiful example of the bookmaker’s craft.

And I bought it sight unseen, after a chain of events that wouldn’t be out of place in a story by Borges. Earlier this year, I acquired a copy of The Plan of St. Gall, arguably the most gorgeous book printed anywhere in the last half century. Tucked inside the first volume was a photocopy of an article by D.J.R. Bruckner of the New York Times, from October 18, 1981, on the recent slate of monumental projects funded by academic presses. After his account of the publication of The Plan of St. Gall, which took more than three years in the printing alone, Bruckner continues:

Such an investment is not unprecedented. The Cornell press hired Oxford University Press to manufacture Howard Adelmann’s edition of Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology, a five-volume set of 2,548 folio pages selling for $200 a set. (Go to a library and see it one day; it is wonderful just to look at.) The Oxford printers took five years to make the book. Roger Howley, director of the Cornell press, says it would cost $1,000 a set to reprint now, only fifteen years later.

That’s the kind of description I found hard to resist, and after discovering that Adelmann’s work wasn’t available in any public library in Chicago, I knew that the only way I’d have a chance to see it was to shell out for a copy for myself. (I ended up paying about $80 for mine.)

After a week of fascinated browsing, I’d say the price was more than worth it, because Marcello Mapighi may be the most splendid example I’ve ever seen of the kind of book with which I’ve found myself increasingly obsessed: a tome. By definition, a tome is big and heavy, a lapbreaker more comfortably read on a lectern than in bed, but it has other qualities that may not be as obvious. A tome is old and out of print, and it smells a certain way, as the lignin in the paper breaks down and releases the scent of vanilla. The best ones come in multiple volumes. And they’re often the product of an academic press, which can afford to devote the necessary time and attention on a project that might never break even. A tome isn’t just an aesthetic object: it’s an expression of a particular idea about books, which holds that certain subjects and ideas can only be adequately treated in two thousand folio pages. They’re both a reflection of the sacred act of reading and a pragmatic sense that this is the only way to preserve and convey particular kinds of information, in deep books of wisdom that can’t be casually approached or condensed onto a Kindle. Adelmann explains in his preface that the book is less about Malpighi than a way of using one scholar’s work as a window into an entire field, and if the result is both chatty and a little insane, it’s only because Adelmann saw no other way of doing it.

Which may be why I’ve had to go back several decades or more to find the tomes I crave. This isn’t just a fetishization of the old for its own sake—although this strikes me as just as worthy than the fetishization of the new—but a reflection of the fact that the realities of contemporary publishing have made this kind of grand intellectual project ever harder to justify. There are exceptions, of course: my ongoing fascination with tomes dates back ten years, when I picked up the seven-volume McSweeney’s set of William T. Vollmann’s Rising Up and Rising Down, and you see a similar impulse in the enormous, faintly monstrous volumes published by the likes of Taschen. (There’s also the occasional freak impulse from authors wealthy enough to publish their books independently, like Nathan Myhvold’s Modernist Cuisine, although its slick production makes it feel less like a tome than like a forty-pound magazine.) But the true tome is a dying species, even if it has managed to sporadically hang on over the last century. I’d like to think that we’re on the verge of a resurgence: in order to compete with their digital equivalents, physical books may need to become bigger and more beautiful than ever before. Yet the patience and time they require will only grow more scarce. In the meantime, I’ll keep hunting down the ones that still exist, and I’m heartened by the idea that they’ll be waiting for me, on some dusty shelf, until I manage to find them. Other books may come and go, but a real tome is forever.

In the novelist’s kitchen

I do a lot of cooking. Even before our daughter was born, my wife and I would make dinner at home at least four or five times a week, and now that Beatrix is here, I don’t think we’ve eaten out more than once or twice in the last few months. I’m not much of a chef, but over time, I’ve picked up a few simple tricks. I know how to use a wok and how to blanch and sauté vegetables, and I know that my best friend in the kitchen is the broiler. At this point, I can put a pretty good meal on the table in less than half an hour, which is a useful survival skill with a baby in the house. I don’t often cook from recipes, but I also don’t move far out of a fairly narrow comfort zone, and I’m at a point where I’d rather stick with what I know than try to figure out something new on a weeknight. (I’m also the kind of person who tends to eat the same breakfast and lunch every day, with the result that I’ve gotten very good at making exactly one kind of omelet.)

In short, I cook the way I write, and the more I think about it, the more I feel that writing and cooking have a lot in common. In both cases, we start out by following the rules very closely: a cook who dutifully measures out a necessary teaspoon of turmeric isn’t so different from a writer who checks his work for unnecessary adverbs and dangling participles with The Elements of Style at his side. And that’s a good, honorable approach. Later on, we start to work more by intuition, seasoning to taste, throwing things together, trusting in experience to know when to use sesame oil or oyster sauce, or when to cut a chapter or combine two characters into one. And then, much later, we begin to figure out how little we really know, and undertake a second apprenticeship that tells us why those practical tricks really work. On the cooking side, maybe we’ll subscribe to Cooks Illustrated, or read Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, or even venture into the enticing labyrinth of Modernist Cuisine. And more often than not, we’ll find that we’ve been doing everything wrong.

Of course, it’s one thing to tinker in the kitchen for your own pleasure, and quite another to become a professional. Here, too, there are many possible paths. You can attend a culinary academy—or an MFA program—or you can start out as a dishwasher and work your way up. Once you’ve started to cook for a living, you can focus on turning out simple dishes perfectly prepared, or you can push the entire art form into new directions, like Grant Achatz of Alinea, the David Foster Wallace of cuisine. You read reviews, listen to customers, and revise the menu accordingly, either by changing an entree here and there or throwing out the whole thing and starting from scratch. At the same time, you remain very interested in what other professionals in your field are doing, and if you feel a stab of jealousy when a friend wins a James Beard award, you use this to figure out what you could be doing better. And in the end, it all comes down to the experience you can offer a diner who sits down to eat something you’ve prepared for the first time.

If anything, I wish novelists were as open about their technique as chefs tend to be. Every celebrity chef ends up publishing a cookbook, and even the glossiest and least practical have some useful ideas. Very few writers have done the same, and it’s a great loss: The Paris Review interviews and a handful of decent books on writing fill some of the gap, but for the most part, writers seem content to stay in the kitchen. Personally, though, I’d love to see a big, fat coffee table book by, say, Ian McEwan—a novelist who serves up some of our best and bitterest dishes—with discarded drafts, failed recipes, and accounts of how he found the ingredients that worked. Because as clean and tight as a good novel can look, when you peek through the kitchen door, you’re bound to find a cutting board loaded with peelings and rinds, a sink full of dirty dishes, and a burned sauce or two, all for the sake of that one perfect plate. And as messy as the process can be, we’re all trying to achieve something like good taste.

Alinea and the theater of cuisine

On Saturday, to celebrate the publication of The Icon Thief, my wife and I had dinner at the legendary Chicago restaurant Alinea. The result was undoubtedly the most memorable meal of my life, not to mention the most expensive—the bill more than consumed my earnings for my last three writing assignments, not counting the novel—but it was emphatically worth it. Alinea is arguably the country’s leading stage for modernist cuisine, or molecular gastronomy, a form of cooking that isn’t so much about flavors themselves (although these were delicious) as about deconstructing and rethinking our approach to food, often using methods straight out of a mad scientist’s lab. By definition, it makes great demands on a chef’s creativity, ingenuity, and technical skill, as well as the perspicacity and curiosity of the unsuspecting diner, who is inevitably drawn into a dialogue with the meal itself. The result is something like a three-act play, with a large cast of servers and sommeliers serving as both narrators and crew, but with the spotlight squarely on the food, which taught me more about the creative process than any book or movie I’ve encountered this year.

Among other things, it was the first meal in my life where I felt obliged to avoid spoilers. Alinea’s nineteen-course tasting menu has been dissected online with a degree of scrutiny normally reserved for the final episodes of Lost, complete with surreptitious videos reminiscent of the bootleg trailers from Comic-Con, so after a while, I decided to forgo all this discussion and go in with an open mind. I’m very glad I did. Alinea’s menu is structured as a sequence of surprises, sometimes all in a single bite, and as with most good stories, it’s best not to know all the plot twists before going in. I’d already had a few moments spoiled for me—like the truffle explosion and hot potato/cold potato, both of which are Achatz trademarks, like the doves in a John Woo movie—but for the most part, I didn’t see any of it coming. And this is a meal that delights in its theatricality. For the final course, when the server brings a sphere of dark chocolate to the table, pours liquid nitrogen inside, and then smashes it open in front of you—”Dark chocolate as a pinata,” he explains—the moment has the explosive, full-stop quality of, say, the last scene of The Departed, except with more cotton candy and meringue.

Indeed, it’s hard to describe a meal at Alinea without using concepts from the movies or, more appropriately, the stage. When you’re seated, you see what looks like an ice sculpture shot through with bands of red liquid sitting on your table. At first, it seems like the centerpiece, but no, it’s actually the eighth course, waiting there in plain sight the entire time—sort of like one of those experimental plays where the audience member chatting in the seat next to you turns out to be a member of the ensemble. The menu repeatedly draws on the principle of Chekhov’s gun, in which an unexplained component is placed on the table—a pair of red cabbage leaves on wire trusses, a bubbling alembic full of seaweed and other mysterious ingredients—only to play a crucial role several courses down the line. In most cases, this air of showmanship has less to do with the dish itself, which could have been just as readily prepared in the kitchen, than a sense of pleasure in suspense for its own sake, a magician’s delight in allowing the audience to participate in the mechanism of the trick, even as they’re being fooled.

Grant Achatz, the chef behind Alinea, is a fascinating figure—you can read his famous New Yorker profile here—and the more I think about him and his restaurant, the more I see him as a model of what a creative figure in any art form can be. Achatz works out his ideas on paper, sketching concepts and designs late into the night, and then has to realize them in collaboration with his talented staff, which often requires inventing new techniques and approaches. The sticking place where inspiration meets execution is one that every artist can understand, and Alinea’s menu provides a particularly thrilling illustration of how that collision can be part of our engagement with any work of art. Looking at a dish like the penultimate dessert, in which green apple taffy is filled with helium and inflated into a perfect fairground balloon, complete with edible string, and you’re both impressed by the craft on display and as tickled as a child in Willy Wonka’s factory. Few works of art manage to move us on both levels at once—The Artist, for one, strives mightily to do so—but Achatz pulls it off beautifully. I had assumed that this was the meal of a lifetime, but now I can’t wait to go again.