Are we still eating purees? Babies, of course, unless they are being fed the on-demand complementary feeding method. But adults… only when the dentist condemns us to oral implants, when he forbids us to chew solid food until the wrong tooth is screwed in, and feels half childish and half old in the process? What’s up, not at all: puree still lives in the homes of chefs who continue to chop up anything, veggies, mushrooms, fruit or lentils, because puree is the easiest way to enjoy it with a spoon. Some of us even crave the bag flakes that our childhoods freeze dried.
But what happened in the restaurants, have the purees disappeared? It seems. Or not: maybe the hummus, the reason for Lima, or the red fruit coulis are not simple purees? Wasn’t guacamole called “the puree of the gods”? What else does a salmorejo contain if not tomato puree with sauce? The same goes for Yankee peanut butter or Dominican banana mangu: then why should the 21st century chef be ashamed of a word that encapsulates both a technique and a seed of recipes?
The puree in cooking history
We turn to several gastronomic bibles from different eras to understand how this burial was forged. In Escoffiers My Kitchen, published in 1934, 17 purees and 12 creams appear. In Simone Ortega’s 1,080 kitchen recipes from 1972, you will find 13 purees and 14 creams (including pastry creams). In the first volume of The Menu of the Day by Karlos Arguiñano, from 1992, five creams. The puree was therefore a fundamental part of gastronomy in the last century, but has since fallen into oblivion like the rough mountain poured onto the plate by the protagonist of encounters in the third phase.
In 1999, to celebrate the turn of the millennium, Ferrán Adrià and Juan Mari Arzak published a book of exquisite recipes intended to cheer up the first Christmas of the 2000s: lunches and dinners with the family based on truffles, lobster, sea bream, eel and co much foie . . A smug shopping cart that represented a time when little did we know the scaffolding of speculation would collapse, that the internet was more than just technology, that the joyful industrial relocation would leave us at the mercy of China and this economy of workers with bemeuves and swimming pool he would be finished in 2008 never to return. In 1999 Spain only saw fields of roses and oysters.
Ferrán and Juan Mari presented their book at the turn of the century as “a consequence of many efforts made in Spain over the last thirty years”, as a synthesis of the “modernization” of our kitchen, after having joined “the movement represented by Paul Bocuse in France “. So to nouvelle cuisine. The last pages of Celebrating the millennium with Arzak & Adrià included the basic preparations for these complex recipes: oils, broths, juices, sauces and also three purees: chickpeas, leeks and potatoes.
However, the purees were not mentioned in the names of the dishes. They remained buried except for the “fat mashed” or mashed potatoes with foie. Because the age of the brick was also the age of the duck: everything that touched their liver turned into culinary gold. When we stop saying “porridge,” we start pronouncing “cream,” “foam,” “air,” “cloud,” swelling like late payments on a credit card.
Twenty-two years later, it is extremely rare to find a puree as a main course on a menu, or even as a side dish. Few chefs have a banned word that even suggests professional laziness in the snobbish Instagram mentality: It looks like you’ve just mixed things up, a poor, spooky pumpkin that can’t scare anyone on Halloween, or a miserable, tearless one Pea. At best, the menus present a “parmentier” or perhaps a lonely “creme”, a term also not used because it is associated with the sick, with hospital food. to die Do the dead have anything to say about the mush? Well, a lot. Even our oldest ancestors.
origin and end
Considered the greatest chef of the 20th century, Paul Bocuse passed away in 2018. In his most influential 1976 book, Market Cuisine, he left a homage to the humble mashed potatoes that encapsulated his philosophy and applied all his ingenuity to the kitchen a quest for the perfect puree. New kitchen to embellish what was inherited, the humble consumption of his grandparents. Joël Robuchon, the chef with the most Michelin stars in history, also passed away in 2018. Do you know what was his most acclaimed dish, highlighted in all the eulogies? Wow: the mashed potatoes.
Perhaps the Spanish incorporation into nouvelle cuisine forgot the popular nature of the movement, the bourgeois roots of this happy French coven. Because here we didn’t really start justifying the market kitchen, the product against the avant-garde, until we ran out of money after the 2008 recession. When the techno kitchen ran out of middle-class customers and we returned to power.
Some excellent purees, like those of Hilario Arbelaitz or Martín Berasategui, have been celebrated by the gourmet community, but in general we have forgotten a dish that contains the history of cooking, that represents the origin and the end: porridge with which you receive the life that illuminates your maturity and that bids you farewell in old age as the last supper. But also puree as the genesis of the intelligent ape, that evolved mammal that is now heading towards extinction and destroying its planet.
The kitchen, understood as the mastery of fire to better nourish us, began with the burning of grains, vegetables and greens to later be crushed and made digestible. Richard Wrangham, author of Catching Fire. Since the kitchen made us human, he emphasizes that the tubers played a key role in this process, favoring the reduction of our stomach and the enlargement of the brain when eaten. The puree raised us as Sapiens above Australopithecus. We made the planet a market when we learned to cook, heat and chop it.
the original item
In the case of Mashed Potatoes, the king of kings, his story is even more intriguing. The potato is native to the Andes of Peru and northwestern Bolivia, where the original plant was poisonous. Some animals learned to ingest by first licking clay to which the tuber’s toxins adhered, eliminating the danger to the organism. Skilled Andean people did the same, often crushing it to break its toughness.
By the 16th century, when the Spanish invaded America, the potato was already edible, but despised as a notorious food for the poor and beasts. The Church did not accept it as payment of tithes, and the aristocracy threw it to the pigs and servants. The European peasants of several centuries owe their survival to the stupidity of the rich: when the tuber was absent, hunger killed at will among the unfortunate.
The love of potatoes only spread in the 18th century when Antoine-Augustin Parmentier was captured by the Prussians during the Seven Years’ War and forced to eat potatoes like an enemy pig. Liberated, well-fed and with the monumental Stockholm Syndrome, Parmentier returned to France to meet Louis XVI. to persuade to encourage the cultivation and consumption of potatoes among his subjects. If you met it on the street, Parmentier gave you an amazing caption about how delicious it was, especially when mixed into a butter puree: It got so heavy they ended up giving the recipe their last name.
Since then, the mush has been identity in half the world. In the United States and United Kingdom, it is served as an accompaniment to Thanksgiving turkey and breakfast sausages, two main courses. In Germany, pea meal also accompanies the patriotic knuckle of pork. In Spain we ate purees up close, from beets to chestnuts, because it is not for nothing that it takes us longer than the rest of Western Europe to stop being toothless to access progress. “Pure” comes from the French “püree”, which in turn derives from the Latin “purer”, which means “to purify” or “to refine”. It’s quite sad that we forget it precisely because we think we’ve refined ourselves in the face of the old.