An interview with Carlo Cracco

The big event of the Milanese spring 2007 has been “The New Italian Design” exhibition held at Triennale.
More than one hundred “young” designers have been selected by a committee directed by Andrea Branzi. There is also a cute catalogue designed by Mario Piazza.
“The New Italian Design” has been a very controversial exhibition: what was in it was very interesting, what was kept out was even more interesting.
For the first time ever we saw a big Italian design exhibition without a single piece by Alessi. Nor was there any of the usual henchmen of the sofa/table/chair industry. An odd exhibition that generated discussion, sparks, thoughts and some fights.
The show featured a lot of young talent, most of them not yet famous. There were all kinds of new experiments, all sorts of strange and whimsical stuff.
A whole section of the show was dedicated to food-related design. Although food was quite visible in the Fuori Salone show of last year, this was a different show.
It is one thing (usually not so exciting) to see the designer working on food. It is a completely different story when the cook (or the expert on food), exercises his talent on design-oriented production.
While going around Triennale, we were impressed by some strange packaging containing colorful edible clouds, transparent sheets with fragments of flat deliciousness, and an incredible book with the pages made of different types of seafood.
Imagine this: a black book called “Quaderno di Mare” (Sea notebook), with thematic pages. One page was made of squid, another of shrimp, another one of octopus and so on.
Each page was kept separate by a transparent plastic sheet. The notebook lasts eight to ten days (at 4 degrees Celsius).
As we said earlier, the exhibition on New Italian Design was a fascinating one, and there were all kind of interesting and curious things. Nothing could match this delicious food transformed into objects of desire.
As you can easily imagine, we wanted to know more…

Triennale di Milano, beginning of February 2007

Is a dish that can stimulate the hearing impossible to produce?
CC. Not at all, quite the opposite in fact, that is what cuisine is all about: there are dishes which produce sound, like the sound of the jaw. Foods have different consistencies, provided by the structure and essence of the dish. Sometimes the courses are liquid. In the menu there are always dishes with different consistencies. For example, we bake minced potatoes which produce crackling sounds, it's like eating paper, because they are prepared in such a way that when you chew them you blend them together again. It is all a game of calibrated structures and consistencies. Menus are conceived in such a way that they always have an alternation of consistencies and colours. If one of the courses on the menu is fried, there won't be another fried course. The same goes for sight and taste. If one of the dishes has tomato in it, there will be no other dish with tomato.

Spaghetti d'Uovo, Aglio, Olio e Peperoncino

How do you experiment new dishes? Do you improvise?
CC. You can never improvise. Everyday when the shopping, namely the raw material, arrives we decide what to do.

Don't you ever think of dishes in advance that afterwards become the dishes for that season?
CC. It is hard to design a dish in advance when you don't have the raw materials at hand. You can imagine it, but until you try you never know what it will turn out to be. Usually I start off from the raw material and then I achieve the finished dish.
We do try to prefigure what the next menu will be each season, but then everyday there are different ingredients that become the product of the day.

Do the providers decide the product of the day?
CC. The providers together with the chefs. I usually ask the providers what they have available on the spot.

Do providers come to you?
CC. Yes, in our case it's the providers who contact us. The restaurant is in the centre of Milan, therefore it's difficult to send a person off to the market at four o'clock in the morning and expect them to get back in time.

Do you match each product to a technique?
CC. Not really. We try to work a lot on what can become of the transformed product. But It's very subjective.

Are you the guinea pigs of your own experiments?
CC. There are no experiments. Experiments are for things you don't know anything about. We work on the combination and matches of ingredients which can be more or less successful. The kitchen has been a laboratory of creativity from the beginning of time. Once chefs put into practice specific sophistications, what used to be called “the secrets of the chefs”. But really it is chemical-physical reactions naturally taking place, all there is to it is to know the raw materials and the way they react with one another.

Do you use any particular technology?
CC. Food doesn't have to be made with special machinery. Naturally, there are prototypes of extraordinary tools, and there are also cooks who design extraordinary tools. It's always important to be updated and know all about what the market can offer, but then the difference is in manual ability and experience. Technology can be of some use as a support, to work less and quicker, but it can't make the dish or replace the chef.

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Cuisine design is a subject that can't be protected by copyright?
CC. In our field that is useful. Cuisine adapts to culture, therefore it is an art in constant evolution. It is the consequence of a series of outside actions starting from food farming and production, down to distribution and trade: a very complex productive thread beyond us chef's control.
Within our line of business, it is useful to produce original an personal creations, to then present them at conferences and meetings, where new things are presented. Obviously the greater risk is that someone can come along a minute before your turn and present the same things as you, but this is part of the game. And then, perhaps each convention has three thousand participants who in theory can copy each other's ideas, but the main thing is that that specific dish is recognised as one of your inventions. This is what those conferences are for. Amid earnest professionals nobody copies from one another.

When you think about a dish do you have a particular kind of customers in mind?
CC. No, because my clients are very different, and my recipes can't be standardised.
My dishes are always different, not because what I've done before isn't good enough, but because to me it is important to constantly exalt cuisine in all its nuances. Italian cuisine is an inexhaustible source for variation and special garnishing. Abroad Italian cuisine is all about spaghetti, tiramisù and mozzarella. When people come from abroad they are surprised and ask “is this Italian cuisine?”
Only Japanese food is always the same repeating itself, because it finds its identity in sushi and sashimi. Just like for us pizza, with the difference that pizza doesn't exhaust Italian cuisine.
Italian food is establishing more and more abroad thanks to more care that is increasingly being put into the preparations. What is still missing is first quality products, which are much more difficult to find abroad. Not like the French who have created an industrial system around their cuisine, which goes from the producer, through the distributor down to worldwide trading. If someone wants to eat French scallops in Hong Kong, all they have to do is send an e-mail and they get it right away!

No doubt your cuisine is very expensive, so only a certain kind of people can afford it … Can the public be widened?
CC. I wouldn't think so, for the simple fact that it is very tough to create quality trying to reduce the costs. And moreover a lot of people work at our restaurant: currently twenty-seven people work at the Cracco-Peck, to serve an average between from 60 to 70 people every day. This job requires a lot of passion, it is hard work and working hours are stressful. We train people between 18 and 27 years old. We've decided non to accept internships, because we think that internships are a kind of work exploitation. It is a wrong mechanism, because young people think they can apply to an internship here, and another one there, and become geniuses. But this simply cannot be. Formation takes its time, it requires at least a year's work in the same place.

Have you got a project you never put into effect?
CC. No, I haven't. If I have a project in mind I carry it out.

Link:
http://www.peck.it/

Bibliografia:
Carlo Cracco
L' utopia del tartufo bianco / White Truffle Utopia
Folini editore, 2002

Carlo Cracco
La quadratura dell'uovo / THE squaring of the egg
Folini editore, 2004

Carlo Cracco, Alessandra Meldolesi
Cracco. Sapori in movimento
Giunti editore, 2006