page_title: Molecular gastronomy
section_title: Precursors
hierarchical_section_title: Molecular gastronomy / History / Precursors
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford Deutsch: Benjamin Thompson, späterer Graf von Rumford; mit Hubertusorden; einflussreicher Berater des Kurfürsten Carl Theodor von Bayern.
context_page_description: Molecular gastronomy is a subdiscipline of food science that seeks to investigate the physical and chemical transformations of ingredients that occur in cooking. Its program includes three areas, as cooking was recognized to have three components: social, artistic, and technical. Molecular cuisine is a modern style of cooking, and takes advantage of many technical innovations from the scientific disciplines.
  The term "Molecular and Physical Gastronomy" was coined in 1988 by late Oxford physicist Nicholas Kurti and the French INRA chemist Hervé This. Some chefs associated with the term choose to reject its use.
context_section_description: The idea of using techniques developed in chemistry to study food is not a new one, for instance the discipline of food science has existed for many years. Kurti and This acknowledged this fact and though they decided that a new, organized and specific discipline should be created within food science that investigated the processes in regular cooking (as food science was primarily concerned with the nutritional properties of food and developing methods to process food on an industrial scale), there are several notable examples throughout history of investigations into the science of everyday cooking recorded as far as back to 18th century.
caption: Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753–1814)
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