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For 11 years, the Gourmand World Media Awards have been the international Oscars for food and wine books.

You will meet there well known chefs coming from all countries, authors, journalists, publishers…..gathered all together for their passion: cooking.

Design and Food

Conference of May 19, 2006, with the partnership of Royal Selangor.

The moderator was Scott Givot, board member of IACP, International Association of Culinary Professionals.

The speakers present their view of the role of design in tableware:

Speakers:

• Erika Langerbielke Professor of design at the University of Vaxjo, Sweden
• Alberto Bali, designer, Paris, France
• Birgita Watz, Professor of art and design at the University of Orebro, Sweden

Erika Lagerbielke
 is professor of design and specializes in the relationship with the wine glass. Her vision is Design for all the Senses.

When you meet around a tables design has to bring something to that moment, not make it more complicated.

The role of design is:

• To identify the problem
• To solve it
• To give a practical form to that solution

We can identify two types of wine glasses:

• The social glass which enables the host to show his personnality and identity. Its function is not to showcase the wine
• The functional glass, which will focus on bringing the wine forward. Today it is recognized that the shape of the glass has an influence on the taste of the wine. Thus, we know that to enhance this taste, one must:
• Bring out the aromas of the wine in the glass
• Take the aromas to the nose

Nevertheless a wine glass should not modify but dress a wine, just as a beautiful woman can be prettier with the appropriate dress.

Of course ideally you can have glasses adapted specifically to each type of wine, but this creates financial and logistics problems.

After some tests and studies, Erika believes that you can divide the red wines in two categories, young and mature wines. So she has created two glasses. The first one is more elongated to show the youthful qualities of the wine, the second one is shorter and more ballooned, which improves the smell of more mature wines.

With the same process, she has created a more elongated glass for dry wines, and more open for fruity wines.

Without forgetting the champagne glass, the glass for sweet wines is close to the red mature wine glass, which is logical for the grapes used for sweet wines are also mature.

Erikas last creation are two wine glasses without stems for pleasure moments.

Alberto Bali
 lives in Paris as a designer for many great restaurants and food brands.

With a happy talking style, Alberto Bali shows us the work for the Staub Brand of Cocottes, dutch ovens with elegant french style and pure design lines, with a renewal of 19^th century style, remembering the strength of the industrial times, while explaining clearly the usage and brand.

This cocotte (dutch oven) is offered in many colours, and for several purposes. The smallest is to serve caviar!

Woks and other kitchen utensils make the rest of the Staub product line, with its golden button on top. There is even a big pan with two handles which is specifically designed to cook easily and pour, without getting burnt.

Another design by Alberto Bali is the new bottle for Saint Geron mineral water. The callenge was to make a square bottle flowing into a round neck, which is made with elegant and futuristic lines: the advertising shows a bottle in New York, towering in the middle with giant buildings.

Birgita Watz,
Professor of art and design at the University of Orebro in Sweden, speciallized in the art and design when associated with the meal.

Design is defined along three directions:

• Service
• Know How
• Art

Art implies genius and taste. Taste includes quality, elegance, style, refinement and culture.

Let us take the example of a Champagne glass. One will find:

• the disorder of bubles
• The order and symetry of the glass
• Between them, the agreable chaos of the spirit, caused by alcohol.

Thus champagne symbolized the fact that chaos alone leeds to nothing. That order alone is not interesting, and that only both order and chaos together are interesting. This association is equilibrium.

In nature, even among the most ancient fossiles, you will find this equilibrium, which is symbolized by the golden number 1,618.

How do you make people aware of this equilibrium? As a professor of design, the idea may be to ask every morning the pupils to do one drawing, and for the teacher to do one, to express this equilibrium.

For there is always something in the air. When we talk about the atmosphere, this is what we imply in a conscious way. It is important to develop the capacity of the mind to understand what is in the air. For it is this capacity that allows us to communicate. Culinary art is nothing else.

It is also interesting to work on a specific theme, such as colour. It is surprising to see that students who organize one complete meal around a given colour will develop treasures of imagination and creativity in order to find an equilibrium around this colour.

The different studies on this matter have shown that the association of white with colours known as cold will work, for white will give energy to these colours. Similarly, black gives energy to colours known as warm.

Only blue is a problem in the kitchen. A test has offered the same food on plates of different colours. The blue plate is much less often chosen than the others, nearly never in winter, and seldom in summer.

We have been pragmatic, styliste, and poetic.

These three ways to apprehend design in the culinary art give us a good framework: esthetics at the service of the practical, to bring cookery to its highest point and give to the moment of the meal a new dimension.