“Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast… What we’re exploring here is not what we eat but how we eat it.”
Entirely self-taught, Heston Blumenthal is the Chef that revolutionised cooking through a British gastronomy that draws on science, history and an unstoppable curiosity – creating a cuisine widely acknowledged as innovative and original. Blumenthal calls his holistic approach to cuisine “multi-sensory cooking.” Inspired by a visit to L’Oustau de Baumanière as a teenager, Heston later re-worked the comparative lack of space and opulence at his first restaurant the Fat Duck into a 3 Michelin category of his own – substituting the overt beauty and indulgence of L’Oustau’s history and architecture with an inward journey that captured imaginations through the mysteries of flavour perception.
After being diagnosed with ADHD (2017) and Bipolar (2023), he has since focused on a second revolution: increasing awareness about mental health and neurodiversity, and promoting greater understanding and inclusivity in the hospitality industry and beyond. Through books like Is This a Cookbook? and his investigations into the microbiome and mental wellbeing, Heston’s intention has always been to open people’s eyes and encourage them to explore by thinking deeply and differently; encapsulated by his motto “question everything and every thing.”
Mixing Molecular Memories
The event that cemented Heston’s interest in sensory subjectivities was the creation of a crab ice cream as an accompaniment to risotto. “People had difficulty accepting crab ice cream, yet if it was renamed ‘frozen crab bisque’, they suddenly found it more acceptable and less sweet.” The phenomenon was subsequently researched by Martin Yeomans and Lucy Chambers at the University of Sussex, who served test subjects a version of Blumenthal’s ice-creams flavoured with smoked salmon. The researchers told one group they would be tasting ice-cream and the other that they would be tasting a frozen savoury mousse. Although all consumed identical food, those eating what they thought was savoury mousse found the flavour acceptable while those eating what they expected was ice-cream found the taste salty and generally disgusting. For Blumenthal, this confirmed his ideas. “If something as simple as a name could make a dish appear more or less salty … what effect might other cues have on flavours and our appreciation of them?”
In 2004, working on a commission for the photographer Nick Knight, Blumenthal created a Delice of Chocolate containing popping candy and arranged for diners to listen in to the little explosions on headphones as they ate – a pioneer of the ASMR food frenzy. With Professor Charles Spence, head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford University he has conducted several experiments into how our sense of sound can affect perception of flavour. In one experiment, test subjects consumed an oyster in two-halves: the first half was accompanied by maritime sounds, the second by farmyard sounds, and they were then asked to rate pleasantness and intensity of flavour. Unsurprisingly, it was found that oysters eaten while listening to seaside sounds were considered significantly more pleasant. In a similar experiment, test subjects tasted bacon-and-egg ice cream while listening to sounds of bacon sizzling, followed by tasting it while listening to the sound of chickens clucking. The sizzling bacon sound made the bacon flavour even more intense.
In Blumenthal’s view, experiments such as these show that our appreciation of food is even more subjective and holistic than we are consciously aware of, constructed by the concerto of information sent from the senses to the sentient: “the ways in which we make sense of what we are eating and decide whether we like it or not depend to a large extent on memory and contrast. Memory provides us with a range of references – flavours, tastes, smells, sights, sounds, emotions – which we draw on continually as we eat.” Heston’s dishes, therefore, tend to be designed to appeal to all the senses at once, and through this – to trigger memories, associations and emotions. Thus the Nitro-poached Green Tea and Lime Mousse on the Fat Duck menu is served with a spritz of ‘lime grove’ scent from an atomiser; and the Jelly of Quail dish includes among its tableware a bed of oak moss, as well as being accompanied by a specially created scent of oak moss that is dispersed at the table by means of dry ice.
One of the most complete expressions of this multi-sensory showmanship, is the dish ‘Sound of the Sea.’ In this, ingredients with a distinctly oceanic character and flavour – dried kelp, hijiki seaweed, baby eels, razor clams, cockles, mussels, sea urchins – are fashioned into a course that has the appearance of a shore’s edge, complete with sea ‘spume’ and edible sand. Served on a glass-topped box containing real sand, and accompanied by headphones relaying the sounds of seagulls by means of a small iPod (placed in a conch shell); it is deliciously distant from the real.
Sifting Sensory Signatures
Blumenthal became interested in cooking up historical concepts in the late 1990s upon obtaining a copy of The Vivendier, a translation of a fifteenth-century cookery manuscript that contained unusual recipes, such as a chicken that appears roasted but wakes up as it is served. He said “I’d had little idea that the cooking of the past could be so playful, audacious and creative.” Following this, he attended a Symposium of Food and Cookery where he met the food historians Richard Fitch, Marc Meltonville, and Ivan Day, culminating in a collaboration of dishes inspired by recipes from historical British cookbooks. The first completed dish based on such a recipe was Quaking Pudding, which was followed by Beef Royal and Chocolate Wine. The opening of Dinner by Heston Blumenthal presented far greater scope for historical cooking, and its menu is composed solely of dishes inspired by the recipes of the past – catalogued in his book, Historic Heston.
In June 2013, the College of Arms granted Blumenthal a personal coat of arms – featuring a Golden Duck (symbolic of being caught somewhere between landing and take-off, as well as the need to embrace flux, change and impermanence), Sprigs of Lavendar (the sensory and culinary influence of L’Oustau de Baumanière; memory and nostalgia, and the ways we draw on the past to spring into the future), a Magnifying Glass (our sense of sight, investigation, awareness and curiosity), an Apple (in the spirit of taste and scientific enquiry, non-linear thinking and pushing for discovery), Outstretched Hands (tactile and textural knowledge, reaching towards something, and making contact with others), Heraldic Roses (the traditional emblems of England, recreating historical dishes and a nod towards his 3 Michelin Stars), Two Lyres (a sense of sound and resonance), and his Motto – Question Everything.
As for Heston’s favourite dish? “I don’t have one. Do you mean my favourite food right now? Or my favourite food in winter? My favourite food at Christmas? My favourite food on my birthday? My favourite food on my kid’s birthday?… Basically all the work that I’ve been doing for the past few years has been on water. We know what to do with water: we bathe in it, we swim in it, we drink it, we cook with it, we power engines with it. But we don’t know what it is…. The only food I remember eating where my throat decided to tell the rest of my body to ‘get stuffed’ – was on a fishing boat in Iceland. I was given kæst skata, which is fermented skate: I think they used to pee on it, but now they bury in the ground to let the ammonia develop. The flesh looked really beautifully cooked, and it’s a delicacy for older people in Iceland, but I went to swallow it and my throat basically catapulted the fish straight out of my mouth. My body or my gut said: No, you’re not coming in.”
