Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (3 page)

But there may be another reason cooking has
not received its proper due. In a recent book called
The Taste for
Civilization
, Janet A. Flammang, a feminist scholar and political scientist who has
argued eloquently for the social and political importance of “food work,”
suggests the problem may have something to do with food itself, which by its very nature
falls on the wrong side—the feminine side—of the mind-body dualism in Western
culture.

“Food is apprehended through the
senses of touch, smell, and taste,” she points out, “which rank lower on the
hierarchy of senses than sight and hearing, which are typically thought to give rise to
knowledge. In most of philosophy, religion, and literature, food is associated with
body, animal, female, and appetite—things civilized men have sought to overcome with
knowledge and reason.”

Very much to their loss.

The premise of this book is that
cooking—defined broadly enough to take in the whole spectrum of techniques people have
devised for transforming the raw stuff of nature into nutritious and appealing things
for us to eat and drink—is one of the most interesting and worthwhile things we humans
do. This is not something I fully appreciated before I set out to learn how to cook. But
after three years spent working under a succession of gifted teachers to master four of
the key transformations we call cooking—grilling with fire, cooking
with liquid, baking bread, and fermenting all sorts of things—I came away with a very
different body of knowledge from the one I went looking for. Yes, by the end of my
education I got pretty good at making a few things—I’m especially proud of my
bread and some of my braises. But I also learned things about the natural world (and our
implication in it) that I don’t think I could have learned any other way. I
learned far more than I ever expected to about the nature of work, the meaning of
health, about tradition and ritual, self-reliance and community, the rhythms of everyday
life, and the supreme satisfaction of producing something I previously could only have
imagined consuming, doing it outside of the cash economy for no other reason but
love.

This book is the story of my education in
the kitchen—but also in the bakery, the dairy, the brewery, and the restaurant kitchen,
some of the places where much of our culture’s cooking now takes place.
Cooked
is divided into four parts, one for each of the great
transformations of nature into the culture we call cooking. Each of these, I was
surprised and pleased to discover, corresponds to, and depends upon, one of the
classical elements: Fire, Water, Air, and Earth.

Why this should be so I am not entirely
sure. But for thousands of years and in many different cultures, these elements have
been regarded as the four irreducible, indestructible ingredients that make up the
natural world. Certainly they still loom large in our imagination. The fact that modern
science has dismissed the classical elements, reducing them to still more elemental
substances and forces—water to molecules of hydrogen and oxygen; fire to a process of
rapid oxidation, etc.—hasn’t really changed our lived experience of nature or the
way we imagine it. Science may have replaced the big four with a periodic table of 118
elements, and then reduced each of those to ever-tinier particles, but our senses and
our dreams have yet to get the news.

To learn to cook is to put yourself on intimate
terms with the laws of physics and chemistry, as well as the facts of biology and
microbiology. Yet, beginning with fire, I found that the older, prescientific elements
figure largely—hugely, in fact—in apprehending the main transformations that comprise
cooking, each in its own way. Each element proposes a different set of techniques for
transforming nature, but also a different stance toward the world, a different kind of
work, and a different mood.

Fire being the first element (in cooking
anyway), I began my education with it, exploring the most basic and earliest kind of
cookery: meat, on the grill. My quest to learn the art of cooking with fire took me a
long way from my backyard grill, to the barbecue pits and pit masters of eastern North
Carolina, where cooking meat still means a whole pig roasted very slowly over a
smoldering wood fire. It was here, training under an accomplished and flamboyant pit
master, that I got acquainted with cooking’s primary colors—animal, wood, fire,
time—and found a clearly marked path deep into the prehistory of cooking: what first
drove our protohuman ancestors to gather around the cook fire, and how that experience
transformed them. Killing and cooking a large animal has never been anything but an
emotionally freighted and spiritually charged endeavor. Rituals of sacrifice have
attended this sort of cooking from the beginning, and I found their echoes reverberating
even today, in twenty-first-century barbecue. Then as now, the mood in fire cooking is
heroic, masculine, theatrical, boastful, unironic, and faintly (sometimes not so
faintly) ridiculous.

It is in fact everything that cooking with
water, the subject of part II, is not. Historically, cooking with water comes after
cooking with fire, since it awaited the invention of pots to cook in, an artifact of
human culture only about ten thousand years old. Now cooking moves indoors, into the
domestic realm, and in this chapter I delve into everyday home cookery, its techniques
and satisfactions as well
as its discontents. Befitting its subject,
this section takes the shape of a single long recipe, unfolding step by step the age-old
techniques that grandmothers developed for teasing delicious food from the most ordinary
of ingredients: some aromatic plants, a little fat, a few scraps of meat, a long
afternoon around the house. Here, too, I apprenticed myself to a flamboyant professional
character, but she and I did most of our cooking at home in my kitchen, and often as a
family—home and family being very much the subject of this section.

Part III takes up the element of air, which
is all that distinguishes an exuberantly leavened loaf of bread from a sad gruel of
pulverized grain. By figuring out how to coax air into our food, we elevate it and
ourselves, transcending, and vastly improving, what nature gives us in a handful of
grass seed. The story of Western civilization is pretty much the story of bread, which
is arguably the first important “food processing” technology. (The
counterargument comes from the brewers of beer, who may have gotten there first.) This
section, which takes place in several different bakeries across the country (including a
Wonder Bread plant), follows two personal quests: to bake a perfect, maximally airy and
wholesome loaf of bread, and to pinpoint the precise historical moment that cooking took
its fatefully wrong turn: when civilization began processing food in such a way as to
make it less nutritious rather than more.

Different as they are, these first three
modes of cooking all depend on heat. Not so the fourth. Like the earth itself, the
various arts of fermentation rely instead on biology to transform organic matter from
one state to a more interesting and nutritious other state. Here I encountered the most
amazing alchemies of all: strong, allusive flavors and powerful intoxicants created for
us by fungi and bacteria—many of them the denizens of the soil—as they go about their
invisible work of creative destruction. This section falls into three chapters, covering
the fermentation of vegetables (into sauerkraut, kimchi, pickles of
all kinds); milk (into cheese); and alcohol (into mead and beer). Along the way, a
succession of “fermentos” tutored me in the techniques of artfully managing
rot, the folly of the modern war against bacteria, the erotics of disgust, and the
somewhat upside-down notion that, while we were fermenting alcohol, alcohol has been
fermenting us.

I have been fortunate in both the talent and
the generosity of the teachers who agreed to take me in—the cooks, bakers, brewers,
picklers, and cheese makers who shared their time and techniques and recipes. This cast
of characters turned out to be a lot more masculine than I would have expected, and a
reader might conclude that I have indulged in some unfortunate typecasting. But as soon
as I opted to apprentice myself to professional rather than amateur cooks—in the hopes
of acquiring the most rigorous training I could get—it was probably inevitable that
certain stereotypes would be reinforced. It turns out that barbecue pit masters are
almost exclusively men, as are brewers and bakers (except for pastry chefs), and a
remarkable number of cheese makers are women. In learning to cook traditional pot
dishes, I chose to work with a female chef, and if by doing so I underscored the cliché
that home cooking is woman’s work, that was sort of the idea: I wanted to delve
into that very question. We can hope that all the gender stereotypes surrounding food
and cooking will soon be thrown up for grabs, but to assume that has already happened
would be to kid ourselves.

Taken as a whole, this is a
“how-to” book, but of a very particular kind. Each section circles around a
single elemental recipe—for barbecue, for a braise, for bread, and for a small handful
of fermented
items—and by the end of it, you should be well enough
equipped to make it. (The recipes are spelled out more concisely in appendix I, in case
you do want to try any of them.) Though all the cooking I describe can be done in a home
kitchen, only a portion of the book deals directly with the kind of work most people
regard as “home cooking.” Several of the recipes here are for things most
readers will probably never make themselves—beer, for example, or cheese, or even bread.
Though I hope that they will. Because I discovered there was much to learn from
attempting, even if only just once, these more ambitious and time-consuming forms of
cookery, knowledge that might not at first seem terribly useful but in fact changes
everything about one’s relationship to food and what is possible in the kitchen.
Let me try to explain.

At bottom cooking is not a single process
but, rather, comprises a small set of technologies, some of the most important humans
have yet devised. They changed us first as a species, and then at the level of the
group, the family, and the individual. These technologies range from the controlled used
of fire to the manipulation of specific microorganisms to transform grain into bread or
alcohol all the way to the microwave oven—the last major innovation. So cooking is
really a continuum of processes, from simple to complex, and
Cooked
is, among
other things, a natural and social history of these transformations, both the ones that
are still part of our everyday lives and the ones that are not. Today, we’re apt
to think of making cheese or brewing beer as “extreme” forms of cookery,
only because so few of us have ever attempted them, but of course at one time all these
transformations took place in the household and everyone had at least a rudimentary
knowledge of how to perform them. Nowadays, only a small handful of cooking’s
technologies seem within the reach of our competence. This represents not only a loss of
knowledge, but a loss of a
kind of power, too. And it is entirely
possible that, within another generation, cooking a meal from scratch will seem as
exotic and ambitious—as “extreme”—as most of us today regard brewing beer or
baking a loaf of bread or putting up a crock of sauerkraut.

When that happens—when we no longer have any
direct personal knowledge of how these wonderful creations are made—food will have
become completely abstracted from its various contexts: from the labor of human hands,
from the natural world of plants and animals, from imagination and culture and
community. Indeed, food is already well on its way into that ether of abstraction,
toward becoming mere fuel or pure image. So how might we begin to bring it back to
earth?

My wager in
Cooked
is that the best
way to recover the reality of food, to return it to its proper place in ours lives, is
by attempting to master the physical processes by which it has traditionally been made.
The good news is that this is still within our reach, no matter how limited our skills
in the kitchen. My own apprenticeship necessitated a journey far beyond my own kitchen
(and comfort zone), to some of the farther reaches of cookery, in the hopes of
confronting the essential facts of the matter, and discovering exactly what it is about
these transformations that helped make us who we are. But perhaps my happiest discovery
was that the wonders of cooking, even its most ambitious manifestations, rely on a magic
that remains accessible to all of us, at home.

I should add that the journey has been great
fun, probably the most fun I’ve ever had while still ostensibly
“working.” What is more gratifying, after all, than discovering you can
actually make something delicious (or intoxicating) that you simply assumed you’d
always have to buy in the marketplace? Or finding yourself in that sweet spot where the
frontier between work and play disappears in
a cloud of bread flour or
fragrant steam rising from a boiling kettle of wort?