The chemist who put 20,000 kitchen sayings on trial — and invented molecular gastronomy

A physicist, a chemist, and 20,000 sentences from cookbooks

In 1988, a Hungarian-British physicist named Nicholas Kurti and a French physical chemist named Hervé This sat down to name something that didn’t have a name yet: the systematic study of why cooking works the way it does. This proposed “molecular gastronomy.” Kurti, a physicist to the end, insisted on “molecular and physical gastronomy” — because heat transfer and texture are physics, not just chemistry. The full name stuck until Kurti’s death in 1998; This has used the shorter version since.

That naming moment gets most of the attention, but it wasn’t really the point. The actual project — one This has now run for close to four decades at INRAE and AgroParisTech in Paris — was far more specific and far more useful to anyone who runs a kitchen: take the sayings professional cooks have repeated for generations, the ones every apprentice hears and never questions, and test them.

This calls these sayings “precisions” — the little technical claims buried in old cookbooks and oral tradition (“add salt to make water boil faster,” “sear meat to seal in the juices,” “add a pinch of salt to egg whites to whip them better”). Working from French culinary literature, he and his collaborators eventually collected more than 20,000 of them. Some turned out to be true. Some were true only under specific conditions. A large number were simply wrong — repeated for a century because they sounded plausible, not because anyone had checked.

The rebellion that came first: nouvelle cuisine

None of this happened in a vacuum. Fifteen years before Kurti and This coined their term, French cooking had already staged one revolt against inherited rules — and it’s the reason a scientist questioning kitchen dogma in 1988 didn’t sound absurd to French chefs.

In 1973, food critics Henri Gault and Christian Millau — the pair behind the Gault&Millau guide — published a manifesto naming what they’d been watching happen in a handful of kitchens: Paul Bocuse, the Troisgros brothers in Roanne, Michel Guérard, Alain Chapel. They called it “nouvelle cuisine” and wrote it up as ten commandments. The core of it was a direct rejection of Escoffier’s classical repertoire: no more of the heavy, long-simmered mother sauces (espagnole, béchamel) built a day ahead — replace them with fresh herbs, good butter, lemon, vinegar, and a sauce made to order. Shorter cooking times, to keep the natural flavour of fish, game and vegetables instead of cooking it away. Smaller menus, so a kitchen could actually execute everything well instead of holding forty dishes half-ready. Market ingredients, not the walk-in.

Nouvelle cuisine wasn’t science — Gault and Millau were journalists, not chemists, and the “commandments” were culinary philosophy, not testable claims. But it did something molecular gastronomy needed to exist: it normalized the idea that a French chef could publicly discard a rule that had stood since Escoffier, and be taken seriously for it. Kurti and This weren’t attacking tradition from outside the profession in 1988 — they were extending a fight the profession had already started with itself.

Why “sealing in the juices” survived 150 years

The searing myth is the classic case, and it’s a useful one for any kitchen because it shows exactly how a false “precision” spreads. The claim — that a hard sear forms a barrier that traps moisture inside a piece of meat — was proposed by the German chemist Justus von Liebig in 1847. It sounds mechanically reasonable. It is also measurably false: seared meat loses roughly the same moisture as unseared meat cooked to the same internal temperature. What searing actually does is drive the Maillard reaction — the browning that builds flavour, colour and crust. It took the food science community the better part of 150 years to formally retire the “seals in juices” explanation, even after the physical chemistry had been settled.

That gap — between what a kitchen believes and what is actually true — is exactly the space Kurti and This built molecular gastronomy to close. Not by throwing out tradition, but by checking it.

The workshops where cooks and scientists actually talked to each other

Kurti and This didn’t just publish papers; they built a room where the two professions could argue face to face. Starting in 1992, they ran the International Workshop on Molecular and Physical Gastronomy at the Ettore Majorana Centre in Erice, Sicily — four days at a time, 30 to 40 participants, a mix of university researchers, food-industry scientists, and working chefs. After Kurti died in 1998, This renamed it the “International Workshop on Molecular Gastronomy ‘N. Kurti’” and kept directing it alone for another two decades. It is one of the few forums in food history where a physicist and a head chef were expected to sit at the same table and defend their claims to each other.

A shorthand for describing what actually happens in a pan

One lasting, practical output of that work is less famous than the myth-busting but arguably more useful: a notation for describing culinary transformations precisely instead of impressionistically. This developed shorthand like O/W (oil dispersed in water — a classic emulsion, such as mayonnaise) and its variants for gels, foams and more complex multi-phase mixtures, so that “what kind of a thing is this, physically” could be written down instead of argued about.

The mayonnaise example is the one This uses most often to make the point concrete: a plain oil-in-water emulsion, put under enough heat (in a microwave, in his demonstrations), doesn’t just cook — it makes a second transition, from an emulsion into a gelled emulsion, because the proteins in the egg denature and set around the dispersed oil droplets. Two physical states, two different transitions, one dish. That is the level of precision the notation is built to capture — the same level a recipe card should capture, and usually doesn’t.

Note-by-note: the more radical idea

This’s most provocative contribution is “note-by-note cooking,” a term he coined in 1994: building a dish from its extracted or synthesised chemical components — pure proteins, sugars, fats, flavour compounds — rather than starting from a carrot or a chicken breast. It’s a genuinely divisive idea inside the food world, and This has argued it publicly as one answer to resource-constrained food production, not just a chef’s party trick. Whatever one thinks of it, it is the clearest sign that This sees cooking as an engineering discipline with raw materials that can, in principle, be specified — not a craft that has to stay opaque to be good.

The label the chefs never asked for

Here’s the twist, and it’s a genuinely useful one for a kitchen audience: the food most people picture when they hear “molecular gastronomy” — Ferran Adrià’s foams at El Bulli, Heston Blumenthal’s liquid nitrogen at The Fat Duck, edible spheres, deconstructed dishes — isn’t what Kurti and This’s term was ever meant to describe. It’s a separate word, “molecular cuisine,” which a newspaper article first used in 2002 to describe what those chefs were actually doing in a dining room: applying scientific technique to build new dishes, as opposed to studying why old ones work.

The chefs most associated with the “molecular” label spent years trying to get rid of it. At the end of 2006, Adrià, Blumenthal and Thomas Keller — joined by food-science writer Harold McGee — published a joint statement pointing out that “molecular gastronomy” had been coined for one 1992 scientific workshop that hadn’t influenced their cooking at all, and that the term didn’t describe their food or any coherent style of cooking. Three years later, at a 2009 round table in Madrid, Adrià, Blumenthal, chef Andoni Luis Aduriz and McGee reached the same conclusion from a different angle: the chefs lumped together under “molecular” cook so differently from each other that the label can’t be describing a shared technique at all — it was a journalist’s shorthand that stuck.

It’s a fitting footnote to an article about testing kitchen sayings: even “molecular gastronomy” itself, as most people use it, turns out to be one more “precision” that doesn’t quite hold up to a closer look.

What this has to do with running a kitchen today

Most professional kitchens will never do note-by-note cooking, and don’t need to test 20,000 sayings to run well. But the underlying discipline scales down perfectly to an ordinary production kitchen: don’t keep the technique in someone’s head as an unverified assumption — write down what actually happens, and why, so it survives a staff change.

That is the same problem a “precision” solves and the same problem a recipe management system is built to solve. Whether the fact is “searing doesn’t retain moisture,” “this vinegar’s real acidity depends on what else is dissolved in it,” or “this emulsion needs 68°C to gel, not 60°C,” the value is identical: a documented, testable fact beats an inherited assumption every time production scales, staff turns over, or a supplier changes an ingredient. In CalcMenu, that discipline is what a recipe card is for — hydration, temperature, technique and yield notes travel with the recipe itself, not with whichever chef happened to write the “precision” down first.

Hervé This spent a career proving that most kitchen folklore deserves to be checked. The kitchens that take that seriously — that turn “we’ve always done it this way” into “here is why, and here is the number” — are the ones that keep the quality when the person who knew the trick moves on.

If you want your own recipes’ technical detail — temperatures, ratios, yields, technique notes — to travel with the recipe instead of living in one person’s memory, book a 15-minute call.

Sources and further reading

• Hervé This — Wikipedia
• Molecular gastronomy — Wikipedia (Erice workshops, Kurti collaboration, 2006 Adrià/Blumenthal/Keller/McGee statement, 2009 Madrid round table, “molecular cuisine” terminology)
• Hervé This: The Father of Molecular Gastronomy — Le Cordon Bleu
• Molecular Gastronomy Can Save Us From Food Shortage: Hervé This — Michelin Guide
• Herve This, the father of molecular gastronomy — Engineering and Technology Magazine
• Modern Cooking, Science, and the Erice Workshops on Molecular and Physical Gastronomy — Curious Cook (Harold McGee)
• Molecular Gastronomist Hervé This Tries To Define What We Eat — C&EN
• Nouvelle cuisine — Wikipedia
• In 1973: the ten commandments of Nouvelle Cuisine — Gault&Millau
• Science and cooking: the era of molecular cuisine — EMBO Reports