Ask TracyFood: The Periodic Table of Dessert 17 April 2007 1:54 pm
Posted by Tracy in : advice, baking, coconut, cooking, dessert, eating, friends, people , trackbackSo back during spring break (woo!) the fabulous Chiara emailed me to say:
Dear FoodTracy:
I do not understand this but I think you might like it, and then you can tell me what it means:
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Dear Chiara,
I like this very much! You see, instead of taking a bunch of desserts and arranging them in a chart shaped like the periodic table of the elements used in chemistry, the creator of this chart has arranged a bunch of dessert ingredients into the periodic table shape. Both of these periodic tables are not just about lists of stuff in a particular arrangement, but rather about the component parts that stuff is made of, and their properties, and listing those component parts in a meaningful manner.
Just like anything is built up of chemical elements, desserts are built of ingredients like butter and sugar. And just like the “real” periodic table of the elements is sorted into rows and columns according to the atomic structure of the elements (and thus their chemical properties). In particular the columns of both periodic tables share properties, like how this periodic table of desserts is sorted into groups like fats and sweeteners and flavorings, and these groups with similar properties are arranged into columns (e.g. all the fats on the far right). Which is awesome. I could get geekier about it, but then I would have to remember a whole lot of stuff I forgot almost as soon as I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to fail Frosh Chem at Mudd. The very pedantic part of my brain that kicks in about baking and thinks entirely too hard about the function of various food ingredients and looooves Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking is all about nitpicking the chart and pointing out that not all the colunns work equally well, and even keeps trying to remember the real periodic table (which I have thus far managed to avoid looking at) for comparison purposes. But mostly I’ve been successful at telling that part of my brain to shut up, because molecular gastronomy is not my thing and as long as they didn’t hose the halogens or noble gases too badly, I’m happy. (Okay, maybe I wish that the chart went from less-refined ingredients on top to more-refined on bottom, but the existing arrangement of most-commonly-used on top to most-obscure on bottom is probably better for helping people figure out what the table means.)
Other thoughts: it’s nice how the table ranges from sweeteners and other flavorings on the left on over through things that are both structural and flavorful like fruit and nuts to more purely structural elements like starches all the way into the fats, which are of course both structural and flavorful and so essentially delicious all on their own that I very much agree that they should be the noble gases of the periodic table of desserts (the only problem with the analogy is that in chemistry the noble gases are the ones that don’t really react with other elements because they’re so fancy on their own, and of course in cooking fats do interact with pretty much everything and make it more delicious). For much more about the role of fats in cooking, see Chewing the Fat, a fun series of articles by Matthew Amster-Burton on Culinate (that link goes to Part 1 of the series; Part 2 is here). Yum! Also, I have no idea what is up with the thermal spectrum thingy at the bottom of the chart, but I like the various illustrations of concoctions like pie crust and puff pastry up and down the sides, which mimic drawings of chemicals (there’s a technical term but of course I’ve forgotten it) only using dessert elements instead of chemical elements. Finally, it’s adorable that highly processed dessert ingredients like icing, little silver balls, and sprinkles are in the same place on the periodic table of desserts occupied on the chemical periodic table by elements that aren’t found in nature but have been created by people in labs. Cute!
So. It may not be a cleverly shaped menu, but I think Andrew Plotkin’s periodic table of desserts is much cooler than that. Also when Peter looked over my shoulder at it he said something about Plotkin being known in dork circles some kind of crazy nerd extraordinaire, so there ya go. It’s apparently got real geek cred with the hard science freaks or some such. Me, I’m just trying to avoid thinking too hard about the fact that most if not all of the ingredients of Tracy granola are in the periodic table of desserts. It’s still a healthy breakfast, I swear! Especially with yogurt! Um, right. I hope I answered your question!
Love,
-Tracy
Comments»
Um. Sort of. I like the idea of structure/flavor though, that part I got. Also I enjoy the phrase “molecular gastronomy.”