Does Science Make It Good?

Puzzling out the excellence of a good drink

The Toursini at Bar Vlaha.

My most thought-provoking taste-based experience this week came at Bar Vlaha, a new restaurant in Brookline that is getting all kinds of great press and neighborhood enthusiasm. The food itself was excellent—a take on the cuisine of the Vlach people, an ethnic group living in the mountain ranges of central and northern Greece—but what really grabbed my attention was the cocktail menu. Full of spirits and flavors I’ve never encountered (petimezi, commandaria, mastiha), it was a highly specific, thoughtful list that also showed how I still have to learn when it comes to Greek cuisine, and cocktails. Nick ordered the Phantom of the Opa, a take on the old-fashioned that incorporated a housemade tsipouro and a pine cone syrup known as mugolio, topped with a spear of chewy black walnut. I ordered the Toursini, a blend of gin, diktamo, Carpano Bianco vermouth, and finished with a sprinkling of saffron threads and a clarification of goat milk, and served with a side of pickled vegetables. The result was an impossibly briny yet silky smooth martini, easily one of the best I’ve ever had.

As I passed my drink around for others to sample, the conversation about the goat milk clarification became more expansive—was it the reason that the drink was so good? Is there something specific about the chemical transformation of the milk clarification process that made for a better drinking experience? Or did we all like it (yes, even the non-martini drinkers) because we were socially and historically primed to do so—to seek out a touch of goat in a Greek restaurant, to find aesthetic pleasure in its velvety finish? How much could science explain why we liked what they were serving?

A bit of research into the history of milk-clarified cocktails helps to answer at least a few of our questions. As Jack Schramm of Booker & Dax fame explains at Punch, mixologists and consumers alike are drawn to “crystal-clear cocktails with only a transparent whisper of color,” but the process does more than produce an unclouded cocktail. The process of straining a cocktail through milk curds causes milk proteins to bind to those elements in a drink associated with bitter or astringent tastes; drinks that are shaken and then strained after this process have their most acidic or tannic edges rounded out. This certainly makes sense for drinks like cocktails made with tea leaves, but why do it for a martini, especially one that lives on the pickled/dirty spectrum as the Toursini does? Because the transformation wasn’t only to the flavor profile, but also to its texture and appearance. Even as the goat milk curds pull out the bitter-tasting polyphenols, the slightly tangy whey proteins of the goat milk stay behind, perfectly suspended in the alcohol. The goat milk flavor remains in the whey and complements the tang of the drink while also acting as an emulsifier to the drink overall, giving it a satiny texture and delicate mouthfeel.

Finding the scientific explanation for how my drink came together is edifying, yet not entirely satisfying. What initially drew me to the Toursini was its novel manipulation of the martini formula—the use of saffron, laurel, and olive oil, all ingredients with symbolic, historical, and economic significance in Greek life and culture. The martini, a drink that many believe to be a nineteenth-century American invention, has also historically been synonymous with cosmopolitanism, a go-to drink for high society, advertising executives, and intellectuals. (I credit my fascination with martinis to an aphorism I first heard from Dorothy Parker, long before I ever actually tried one: “I like to have a martini, / Two at the very most. / After three I’m under the table, / After four I’m under my host.”) Yet at Bar Vlaha, the Toursini didn’t speak of the Algonquin Club, but of the taverna—rustic in its ingredients, fermented and funky in its accompaniments. It thrust the martini backwards into a pastoral age, one that felt perfectly in sync with the restaurant’s approach to hearty, rustic Greek cuisine.

Ultimately, did I like the drink because of what its clarification-facilitated polish gave me, or because of the surprise inherent to its Arcadian reframing? What part of the brain rules what we ordered, and what part responds when we take our first, and last, sips? As much as science can explain why a dish or a drink comes together in its particular form—what happens when onions caramelize, why an egg’s white firms before its yolk, how a mayonnaise breaks, and how it can be put back together—chemical explanations for what we eat and why do little to explain the nature of pleasure and delight, or the link between curiosity and satiety. In his landmark book On Science and Cooking, the food writer Harold McGee calls taste and smell chemical senses, “the means by which we sample the chemical composition of our surroundings and our food.” Yet even if we are rational creatures, appetite can hardly be fed by reason alone.

The carrot that baits us into trying something new is often much more ephemeral and mysterious than formulaic. When people ask me why I cook what I cook, more often than not I point to an ingredient or dish that provokes an amorphous feeling or idea rather than a coherent thought. Perhaps this is the humanist in me, or just the romantic, but when I try to put my culinary philosophy into words, I think often of the food journalist M.F.K.’s Fisher’s recipe for winter tangerines in Serve it Forth:

“In the morning, in the soft sultry chamber, sit in the window peeling tangerines, three or four. Peel them gently; do not bruise them…separate each plump little pregnant crescent…Take yesterday’s paper… and spread it on the radiator…After you have put the pieces of tangerine on the paper on the hot radiator, it is best to forget about them…On the radiator the sections of tangerines have grown even plumper, hot and full. You carry them to the window, pull it open, and leave them for a few minutes on the packed snow on the sill. They are ready…

As Fisher says of the resulting dish: “I cannot tell you why they are so magical. Perhaps it is that little shell, thin as one layer of enamel on a Chinese bowl, that crackles so tinily, so ultimately under your teeth. Or the rush of cold pulp just after it. Or the perfume. I cannot tell.” Give me a radiator tangerine any time, no explanation required.

Recommendation: I still haven’t written about The Bear (it’s coming, I promise), but boy did I love this piece by Nicky Beer at Electric Literature about the show’s radical, political commitment of depicting a young woman exploring her landscape and mind through food. The third episode of the show depicts Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), a young gift Black chef-de-cuisine, eating her way through Chicago as a palate “reset”. The enthusiasm with which she eats—and the transparency with which she thinks and processes while eating—makes for a fantastic television viewing experience. Beer’s article is an ode to solo contemplation, to the on-screen depiction of gustatory pleasure, and to the depiction of the female creative process untethered from domestic or marital obligations. As Beer writes, “A woman unemotionally thinking alone must mean she is neglecting someone or something elsewhere…[Yet] these ten minutes of a television show celebrate the life of a woman’s mind.” Brava.

The Perfect Bite: Bar Vlaha aside, my best bite this week came from Newton’s own Cabot’s Ice Cream & Restaurant. Open since 1969, Cabot’s is about as old-school diner as you can get in our town, and I got to revisit my new favorite diner order, the patty melt, with a side of cottage fries. It’s basically everything you want in a burger, but loaded with caramelized onions and made slightly easy to handle with slices of rye bread rather than a soft bun. I’m very glad that despite new ownership, throw-back dishes like the patty melt remain on the menu, at least for the moment.

Cooked and Consumed: Despite the very unpredictable weather we’ve had this summer, the fronds on our fennel plants have gone absolutely bonkers, and I finally had to cull them just to give the surrounding plants a fighting chance. After hauling 6+ cups of fennel fronds into the house, I set aside some for infusing vodka and gin (will report back on the ensuing cocktails) and turned the rest into a rich pesto with walnuts, garlic, olive oil, and lemon juice. No cheese needed, tossed with some hot rigatoni and locally-made sausage, it made for a fabulous dinner. I froze the rest into 2-tablespoon pucks, and we’ll be eating it long after the garden is depleted.