What are the differences between harmony and balance? How did these concepts evolve in the world of gastronomy?
Harmony and balance, two terms known to everyone; but how well are they really known? The first one immediately recalls music, but also architecture or even higher concepts such as the harmony of the universe or the perfect agreement between people or colors. In other words, a pleasant consonance. The second one, instead, refers to the state of quiet of a body and can have many connotations, including being stable or unstable, dynamic or even elastic. There are also political, economic and mental balances. Both terms are very used, sometimes even abused in the food and wine world. We should ask ourselves, indeed, how much they are properly used, when and whether it really makes sense to talk about harmony or balance when referring to a dish or a wine and which of the two terms is preferable, for example, when talking about a dish.
Certainly, there are plenty of opportunities and I believe that there is already a subordinate relationship between the two terms, because harmony certainly refers to a richer and broader concept than balance. It is a matter of focusing on what the two terms actually mean and, above all, how useful they are in providing a description that, in any case, will always be a little subjective, even if in small part.
However, thanks to experience, it is possible to solve the question, at least in part. To put it simply, if there is a profession (the one of the writer) which consists in judging a dish, a pizza, a product or a beverage, this implies a regular practice of tasting that allows developing a minimum consistency.
Getting to the heart of the matter, is it better that what you taste is balanced or harmonious? There is not only a single answer, of course, because it depends in each case on points of view and approaches. Let’s take for example the world of wine, where until some time ago balance was an essential value and harmony was a fundamental requirement in order to get a high quality product.
In recent years, the so called “natural” wines are getting more and more popular as opposed to the traditional ones; simplifying as much as possible, these wines have peculiar characteristics such as no treatments in the vineyard, no “processing” in the cellar and indigenous yeasts. Frequently (not always) it is possible to obtain wines that do not reflect at all the ancient and unavoidable standards in terms of quality definition and that often show peculiarities that do not make them balanced or harmonious. Nevertheless, they are pretty successful on the market, because this declared meaning of naturalness conquers consumers even before the taste; in the meanwhile, it should be remembered tastes change.
Another issue concerns cooking, a field in which it is much more complicated to define balance and harmony of a dish. If we look at Italy, we see a country made of thousands of bell towers, to each of which corresponds the right recipe for a local tradition, changing from one area to another. So which one will be the most balanced? There is no answer, obviously. Things change in the field of haute cuisine, although this is also a world without real objective parameters allowing establishing boundaries.
Certainly, however, cooking has continuously evolved from the revolution started about fifty years ago by great French chefs under the direction of critics Gault and Millau. Year after year tastes have evolved; cooking styles have increased tenfold, as well as the contamination between gastronomic cultures. Therefore, if for us a dish can be intolerably spicy, thus lacking balance, for an Asian or a South American it could represent the norm.
It is certainly very difficult to define balance for a dish, but is it really true that a dish must be balanced in order to be good? Because it often happens that while looking for balance among ingredients, taste is lost and the result is a perfect dish with no personality, which is what really distinguishes the work of a chef from that of his/her colleague. It is even more complicated to define the concept of harmony, because when eating a dish each one of us perceives different notes according to our culture, habits and most of all personal tastes; so what can be perfectly harmonious for me is maybe totally lacking in harmony for the diner sitting in front of me.
How do you resolve this issue? It’s easy to say, there is no single solution. But this is the beauty of a world where change reigns, and it is just thanks to it that novelties are born, doomed to settle in the tradition that is nothing but innovation made institution.
