PAUL ISKOV'S DIALECTICAL GASTRONOMY

The struggle in food today is not between Paris and the peripheries, Michelin and San Pellegrino, slow and fast, Old World and New, El Bulli and El Celler, foraging and farming, tradition and experimentation, haute cuisine and home cooking, thin crust and deep dish, or Daniel Humm and Daniel Barber. No, it is between the chef and their ingredients, between palate and terroir, between the subject and the object of the art itself. This might appear to be a simple enough proposition; a proposition that seems unremarkable. But, the reader who thinks this way may also be thinking: hasn’t that always been the struggle? Isn’t the entire history of food a series of incidents like this from the caveman’s roasted yam to the superstar’s postmodern tagliatelle? What other banality could be offered? If you asked any of those questions, maybe it is best to look away now, to go back to your cereal or stir that casserole. This, after all, is a naval gazing exercise. In articulating world cuisine today, it is necessary to break down each brick that forms the walls that continue to divide bread from gold. That is surely the utopian task before us; surely that is the role for the diner as critic. 

I was thinking of all this, of the struggle that is food, of the future of world cuisine, as I ate a slice of apple pie remembering a meal cooked for me by Paul Iskov. Iskov has staged at Pujol, Noma, DOM. His regular gig is Fervor, a self-run, high end, pop-up dining experience in remote locations on the west coast of Australia. But tonight, this night, as I sat here in the concrete jungle of New York, that world capital which is its own island, eating things that were totemic, it seemed appropriate to think about the future of cooking. Tonight, I came out from habit, came into something wholly new because it was unfamiliar. Simply the memory of Iskov’s food scraped away the winter shell I had made; removing the calcified funk that one creates in preparation for the February snows that are yet to come. So, what is this cuisine, what is the movement Fervor belongs to and why is it like finding a ray of sunshine on a winter day?

It is, of course, about tradition and the new, quality and taste, balance and impact. In that way, we have become accustomed to ‘deconstruction’ in food, as both a technical feat and a critical paradigm. You see it in everyday kinds of places now, where brownie a la mode is turned into its parts, a crumb here, a schmear there, ‘deconstructed’ as the everyman might say.  But what is the truth of particularity in our day and age? To my mind, it is about dissemblance, which is what comes after deconstruction. This is the systematic breakdown of the dish into its essence using a family resemblance of ingredients, a logic that is a poetic diremption rather than a scientific undoing that reaches its apotheosis in molecular gastronomy. It was there when I tasted Iskov’s ‘macadamia lotsa ways’, which prepares macadamia in five different ways to be a textural sensation at once creamy, crunchy, chewy, fluid, crisp. Its ultimate reconciliation comes in ‘nuttiness’, which is the category to which macadamia belongs. Iskov’s dish calls forth the inwardness of the ingredient in such a way that we catch sight of a new reality.

We might not recognise that new reality at first, instead thinking that it is familiar, or old, or even something habitual. But through a process of reduplication we can find ourselves changed in a changing context. That is why Iskov’s marron matters. A freshwater crayfish from the south west of Western Austraila, this is both a reflection of the classic langoustine et buerre, and the popular shrimp on the barbie. But it does not chart the middle way. Instead, it is a reduplication, which in its very process makes material from a higher spirit. Simply charred over wood coals and served with a lemon myrtle emulsion, the dish is a shadow of a madeleine, a kind of spectre haunting the tongue that one might be tempted to say is ‘European’. In this dish, you realise what might be the localised expression of universal spirit. It lays claim to objective good taste.

That is where the multifaceted lime sorbet with green ants enters play. Composed of several different varieties of lime you find in drier regions of the Australian interior, this dish is simply ice-cream with sprinkles for the contemporary age. You might call this harmony, and it has that, but in harmony one tends to taste the elements that make up the dish in a balanced way, drawing on the palate to do the labour of bringing it all together. In this case, the taste is uniform and only the texture would suggest that it is not entirely singular. Iskov has synthesised in a complete way what is a new way to think of and through ice-cream, gelato, sorbet; a dish of the world that sees itself in chef and ingredient alike and alive today.

And so, Iskov’s is dialectical gastronomy.* I mean dialectical as movement, and dialectical as being a part of a  sub-language, of being how a particular people in a particular place at a particular time speak about who they are and what they imagine they can become. In this case, it is a language of food that does not stay still and has no claim on being a lingua franca of mac ‘n’ cheese, chicken nuggets or cola. Nor is this place as a nation, of responding to an established set of flavours that one thinks of as ‘Australian’. Instead, it is an expression of geist from a unique location, which is a deeper engagement with country than that commonly expressed in ‘regional cuisine’.

In Iskov’s case, his art is a shared process of reconciled futuring between Indigenous, settler and migrant that connects with food traditions that are 60,000 years old. It is a type of utopian dreaming. It is that belief, that optimism, which makes his work that of a genius. With him, we can respond to Brillat Savarin when he said ‘the discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity than the discovery of a new star’. Fervor asks us to shout from the rooftops of the Upper West Side that we can catch sight of a new gastronomic universe that we must find our very selves in once more.

* I prefer gastronomy to cuisine because of the etymological roots of each word, the former coming from the Greek word for 'stomach', the latter from the French word for 'kitchen'. Given that Iskov is often cooking over fires outdoors, it seems important that we use the reference to stomach as an organ of the body than a built location precisely because the body travels to places the kitchen cannot.

Fervor comes to New York City for one night only thanks to VICE.

See details at: www.fervor.com.au 

December 19^th 2017.

Photograph by Chris Gurney.