Probably whatever you would do, unless you live in New Orleans, would not be nearly as awesome as what someone at a neighborhood grocery store called the Breaux Mart did: make a cake for the BP oil leak.

People wag their fingers at Louisianans for their cliché of laissez les bons temps rouler — letting the good times roll. “Those people are never serious,” they say. And hey, I’d be pissed off too if I were in a car on a street that suddenly just got blocked for 20 minutes while a second line showed up and a dance party suddenly broke out. I’d be pissed, that is, if I wasn’t in the dance party, which I was.

So those people are missing the point. It’s a place where the culture matters as much as the facts. It’s a place where food matters so much that a grocery bakery can be a place of protest. It’s a place where wit triumphs over invective. But whatever. My point now isn’t to yap about the culture of New Orleans — it’s to share a slice of this genius cake, courtesy of Flickr user Skooksie. 

Biggie’s rhymes hum with complicated life. He took the invisible details of his world — the cry of a killed rival’s baby daughter; a lover’s orgasmic shouts of “You chicken gristle eatin’ motherf**ker!”– and made them glow so that, in between head-nods to sick beats, anyone could see his stories. And for me, never having killed a man, never having had sex good enough to require that kind of name calling, it was the little things Biggie shared that invested me in the lives lived in his rhymes. “Born sinner, the opposite of a winner, remember when I used to eat sardines for dinner,” he rapped in his breakout hit “Juicy.” The scenes and characters he crafted were vivid and real.

But when I heard him rap about cookies in “Sky’s the Limit,” Biggie Smalls became to me something truly greater than a just a wit and storyteller:

Here comes respect:
His crew’s your crew, or they might be next
‘Look at they man eye! BIG, man, they’ll never try.’
So we rolled with ‘em, stole with ‘em.
I mean loyalty: n**gaz bought me milks at lunch.
The milks was chocolate; the cookies, buttercrunch.

He was bragging about being harder than you, tougher than you, even when he was a child in school. But he was still a child. He loved his chocolate milk. He remembers the flavor of his favorite cookies. The Notorious B.I.G., this spinner of murder rhymes and playboy fantasies, made himself vulnerable. “Sky’s the Limit” is a song about how far he’d come from the street life, but it’s also a song about the innocence he lost even when he was trying hard to never be innocent at all. Under all his bluster, under the killer braggadocio of “Hunt me or be hunted: I got three hundred fifty seven ways to simmer, sauté” (“Unbelievable”), he still had his throat exposed to the world. Usually you couldn’t tell because he was rapping, straight-spittin’, but sometimes, you could see underneath and it was fleshy and soft.

There’s much more in that song — stories of how he sewed fake Izod logos onto his shirts to seem richer than he was — but it was the cookies, buttercrunch, that made me understand food’s potency as a symbol, its ability to bridge enormous gaps between him, his characters, and the listener, whether that listener hustled on his corner or was a Chinese kid from the suburbs. Everyone can imagine the horror of hunger, the anger it can engender. Everyone, no matter how hardened, can remember the foods that defined their childhood. And everyone knows, whether you are eating sardines or lobster, that what you eat and what you want to eat says much about you.

For years, I tried to listen to other tapes in my little suburban family sedan, but I would just keep going back to the Black Rhinoceros of Rap, listening to him drop unexpectedly like bird shit. He died 13 years ago today. He was 24. I knew then I would never get to see him grow as an artist, and only years later would I realize how I’d learn from him. I just kept playing him in my car, and I let my tape rock until my tape popped.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A collection of Biggie’s finest food rhymes

Biggie was a funny man, and he mastered the silliness of sex and food. Back to “Juicy”:

The Moet and Alizé keep me pissy
Girls used to diss me
Now they write letters ’cause they miss me
I never thought it could happen, this rappin’ stuff
I was too used to packin’ gats and stuff
Now honies play me close like butter played toast
From the Mississippi down to the East Coast

And he built a legacy in masterpieces of carnal seduction like “Big Poppa”:

We can rendezvous at the bar around two.
Plans to leave, throw the keys to Lil’ Cease.
Pull the truck up front and roll up the next blunt,
So we can steam on the way to the telly. Go fill my belly –
A T-bone steak, cheese eggs and Welch’s grape.
Conversate for a few, ’cause in a few, we gon’ do what we came to do.
Ain’t that right, Boo? (True.)

I mean, if he can make your girl leave you for that level of romance, what couldn’t he do? Outside of sex appeal (when “b**ches used to go, ‘Ewww!’”) Biggie also rapped often about his fabulous wealth, invoking culinary luxuries, like here, in “Hypnotize”:

I can fill ya wit real millionaire shit: escargot.
My car go
160, swiftly. Wreck it, buy a new one –
Your crew run run run; your crew run run.

And just imagine him, all 300-plus pounds, lazy eye and top hat, rollin’ through his English gardens, contemplating seafood as he does in “I Love the Dough”:

Country house, tennis courts, and horseback
Ridin’, decidin’: cracked crab or lobster?
Who says mobsters don’t prosper?

His language was his weapon against the world, and so he bragged with ferocious skill. No detail, no material, ever escaped his eye or its place in his quiver. He was a rapper who didn’t have to rely on street slang because his eye for detail in the larger world was so acute. This is from a freestyle with DJ Mister Cee:

All it’s taking, is some marijuana and I’m making
MCs break fast, like flapjacks and bacon.

But he was always clear on his relationship with hunger. This is from “Things Done Changed”:

If I wasn’t in the rap game
I’d probably have a key, knee deep in the crack game
Because the streets is a short stop
Either you’re slingin’ crack rock or you got a wicked jumpshot
Shit, it’s hard being young from the slums
Eatin’ five-cent gums not knowin’ where your meal’s comin’ from. 

Burger Patty (Thin Mints, revised from Bon Appetit):

1 ½ cups all purpose flour
¾ cup unsweetened cocoa powder (preferably Dutch-process)
¼ teaspoon salt
¾ cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1 teaspoon peppermint extract
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup sugar
1 large egg

1. Whisk flour, cocoa powder and salt in medium bowl to blend.
2. Using electric mixer, beat butter in large bowl until smooth. Beat in peppermint extract and vanilla extract. Beat in sugar in 3 additions. Add egg and beat until blended. Add dry ingredients and beat just until blended (dough will be sticky).
3. Divide dough between 2 sheets of plastic wrap. Using plastic wrap as an aid, roll dough into 2-inch-diameter logs. Wrap with plastic and refrigerate dough until well chilled, at least 2 hours. Position 1 rack in center and 1 rack in top third of oven; preheat to 350°F. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. Unwrap cookie dough logs; roll it out and cut it with a 1-inch cookie cutter. Place on the cookie sheet and bake for 15 minutes.

Burger Bun (Shortbread, revised from Girl Scouts):

1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons. baking powder

1. Cream butter and the cup of sugar; add well-beaten eggs, then milk, vanilla, flour, salt and baking powder.
2. Refrigerate for at least one hour. Roll dough into 1/3-inch-thick pieces; cut it with a 1-inch cookie cutter. Bake at 375° for approximately 8 to 10 minutes or until the edges begin to brown.

Lettuce (Icing):

½ cup powdered sugar
½ tablespoon milk
2 drops green food coloring

1. Combine all of the ingredients, adding the food coloring last. (To make lemon icing, which contrasts a bit too much with the peppermint in this recipe but is great for icing shortbread cookies separately, add ½ tablespoon lemon juice and 1 teaspoon lemon zest.)

When all three elements are ready, assemble the shortbread cookies as the bun, the thin mints as the burger patty, and the icing as the lettuce. I’d make mock tomatoes to go with the burger theme but tomatoes aren’t in season. Hee-hee. 

He’s calm, swirling the poker in the liquor inferno like he was stirring sugar into midsummer iced tea. “The intense heat allows you to actually caramelize the sugars in the drink,” he tells me, which is something you could never do by heating it on a stove without boiling off all the water, which, you know, wouldn’t make for a very liquid drink.

I take a sip. It was right tasty before, a bright mix of ale, cognac and lemon, but now it’s incredible, totally transformed, tasting of toast and butter, darkly complex with a subdued sweetness. Still, mixing a drink with a flaming sword is not among the most technologically advanced of Dave’s tricks.

He and Nils Noren, the institute’s vice-president of culinary and pastry arts, are superstars of the cooking-geek firmament. Their latest blog post tells you how to make ketchup that melts and hardens like chocolate, and one of their greatest hits is turning fish into a wood-print. (Huh? Right … watch the video.) But it’s not just navel-gazing showoff stuff. Their goal is to push the boundaries of what we think is possible in food and make what they find useful for chefs and, in some cases, ambitious home cooks.

I, frankly, am not ambitious enough to build a low-temperature rotary evaporator distiller for my sauces, but I appreciate their work for how inspired they are. I confess that I also tasted in my glass of Red Hot Ale the giddy flavor of novelty, but it turns out that the idea is older than any suspenders-clad hipster bartender would dare to go, back to colonial taverns that kept loggerheads hot in the fire for their drinks. (Maybe because no one’s remade a fashionable tri-corner hat yet?) It’s the obscurity of this inspiration — in a sense, this respect for tradition — that convinces me that Dave and Nils aren’t enfants terribles, out to destroy the old in the name of their egos, but rather genuinely excited and profoundly creative cooks, just ones with lots of toys.

Recently, a few days after their holiday cocktail class, I sat down with them to talk about that creative process, what they think we’ll all gain from their work, and how much garlic you can eat in one sitting.

Let’s start with how you got into this. Nils, you moved on from being an accomplished chef to being an administrator at this culinary school, and Dave, your background isn’t even in food. Why does this lab even exist?

Nils: Well, it doesn’t hurt that it’s fun; I don’t actually get to work on this stuff enough. Research and development is such an important part of what universities do, and we think that’s what this school should be doing. We want to support the culinary industry, and these experiments are hard for chefs to do in restaurants, because of time, space and the demands of running a kitchen, when you have service to prep for and orders coming in. At Aquavit, where I was the chef, we were doing some of these things, but didn’t really talk about it.

Dave: Right. We publicize the technology because we want people to use it, not because the customer needs to know. That’s when you really win: when it just tastes amazing and for the customer, it’s not about the technology. Here, we get to go overboard to get the very best possible result. But for every 10 things we do that won’t go very far outside of these walls, there’s one that can have real lasting impact in the way people cook.

Take cooking a burger. You can: 1) overcook it, 2) leave it underdone in the middle, where it’s all squashy or 3) use a low, even temperature to get the whole burger the right texture. That’s why people sous-vide. You don’t want to sous-vide a burger, because the first thing about burgers is you want to be gentle with the patty to keep it tender, and the vacuum packing in sous-vide will crush the patty. So we learned to flash-fry the patty to set the shape, then put it in a ziplock with butter or beef fat, so it’s floating in there, all happy, and you can cook the pouch in a slow water bath to the right temperature and flash-fry it again to finish browning it.

Sous-vide is actually a great example of how industrial and fine-dining techniques can become useful at home. The technology for maintaining water at very steady temperatures was originally for medicine, and then made its way into fine dining. But you know, it’s great at home for parties. It switches the work from service time to prep time; all your food can sit, hot and ready to go any time. I had a bunch of people over for steaks, and the whole party was in a water bath.

It sounds like we’re talking about a different kind of party now. Hot tubs aside, how does your partnership work?

Dave: Ha. My background was in philosophy and sculpture. Anyone who says they “do art for themselves” is lying. Art is all about eliciting reaction, and cooking gives a lot of the same sort of immediate feedback.

Nils: I started cooking because I couldn’t make a living playing reggae in Sweden.

Dave: In art, most pressure is internally driven, except when you have shows. So I wait until just after it’s impossible to get things done, and then I get to work. But Nils is very organized. He has to be, with his experience running kitchens. And we’ve been doing this for three years. We respect and trust each other’s approach and palate.

Nils: We often don’t even need to talk. We can work and taste something and know exactly how we want it.

Dave: It’s interesting when we disagree, though, because while there’s room for opinion, most of the time it’s just right and wrong. I probably shouldn’t say that, but you know, there’s delicious, and there’s not so much.

So how do get you inspired to do your projects?

Dave: Sometimes it just starts with “I wonder …” David Chang came up to us once to talk about ike jime [a Japanese fish slaughtering technique, supposed to produce better flavor and texture]. He was like, “Harold McGee says it’s bullshit.” So we say, “Well, is it bullshit?” and it started from there. We’ve done a bunch of experiments on this, to the point of anesthetizing the fish before killing it, and we’re getting amazing results.

Nils: We often return to our experiments. We might stop working on something, but we’re never done with it.

Dave: You never stop learning about something. You might think you’re pretty close, but then something can throw you for a loop and you start over, excited to try it again.

What is a project you’ve done that will have long-range influence?

Nils: I think our pressure cooker work is really exciting. Most people use pressure cookers to just cook things faster. But you can make amazing stock in it. And we’ve found that you can use it to create new flavors — the high heat and pressure can kill sulfur, for instance. So onions become so sweet you can make them into ice cream. You can make horseradish that has all its flavor without the pungent heat, and you’ll find that it’s sweet, because it’s a root vegetable after all. You can make garlic that you can eat whole — two whole heads and still be able to talk to people. You can’t even do that with roasted garlic.

Dave: Yeah, that’s a problem. I once roasted a bunch of garlic, and then didn’t have anyone to talk to at the party. I sat there and just kept eating garlic. So then, the next day, I didn’t have anyone to talk to either.

Nils: Yeah, that’s just kind of how he is.

You can follow the adventures of Dave and Nils on their blog, cookingissues.wordpress.com, where they also post information about upcoming classes.