The Mystery in the Kitchen: Culinary Creativity

The purpose of this project was to explore the ways in which culinary creativity fits a modified version of Wallas's classic 1926 Wallas , G. ( 1926 ). The arts of thought . New York : Harcourt, Brace and World . [Google Scholar] model of the creative process. In order to analyze the process through which chefs create a specific culinary work (specific dish), the researchers used a qualitative research method. Seventeen award-winning culinary artists from around the world were interviewed, and it was shown how the interview data fit the general categories of Wallas's 4-phase culinary creativity model—preparing the idea, idea incubation, idea development, and evaluation of the product—which the researchers refined via Finke, Ward, and Smith's 1992 Finke , R. A. , Ward , T. B. , & Smith , S. M. ( 1992 ). Creative cognition Theory, research, and applications . London : Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press . [Google Scholar] Geneplore model, with its cyclic cognitive subprocesses. What is presumably the most original part of this contribution, then, are not the conceptual categories themselves but the actual interview-based data—the feelings, thoughts, and reflections of top-level international chefs—and the ways in which they seem to fit the categories of a modified 4-phase creative-process model.