Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

 

COOKED
A Natural History of Transformation

INTRODUCTION: WHY COOK?

PART I:
FIRE –
CREATURES OF THE FLAME

I. Ayden, North Carolina

II. Cambridge, Massachusetts

III. Intermission: A Pig’s Perspective

IV. Raleigh, North Carolina

V. Wilson, North Carolina

VI. Manhattan, Nyc

VII. Berkeley, California

VIII. Coda: Axpe, Spain

PART II:
WATER –
A RECIPE IN SEVEN STEPS

I. Step One: Finely Dice Some Onions

II. Step Two: Sauté Onions and Other Aromatic
Vegetables

III. Step Three: Salt the Meat; then Brown it

IV. Step Four: Place all the Ingredients in a Covered Pot

V. Step Five: Pour the Braising Liquid over the
Ingredients

VI. Step Six: Simmer, Below the Boil, for a Long Time

VII. Step Seven: Remove Pot from Oven. If Necessary, Skim Fat
and Reduce Liquid. Bring to the Table and Serve.

PART III:
AIR –
THE EDUCATION OF AN AMATEUR BAKER

I. A Great White Loaf

II. Thinking Like a Seed

III. Coda: Meet Your Wheat

PART IV:
EARTH –
FERMENTATION’S COLD FIRE

Ferment I. Vegetable

Ferment II. Animal

Ferment III. Alcohol

AFTERWORD: HAND TASTE

APPENDIX I:
Four Recipes

1. Fire

2. Water

3. Air

4. Earth

APPENDIX II:
A Short Shelf of Books on Cooking

Selected Sources

Acknowledgments

FOR JUDITH AND ISAAC
AND FOR WENDELL BERRY

At a certain point in the late middle of my
life I made the unexpected but happy discovery that the answer to several of the
questions that most occupied me was in fact one and the same.

Cook.

Some of these questions were personal. For
example, what was the single most important thing we could do as a family to improve our
health and general well-being? And what would be a good way to better connect to my
teenage son? (As it turned out, this involved not only ordinary cooking but also the
specialized form of it known as brewing.) Other questions were slightly more political
in nature. For years I had been trying to determine (because I am often asked) what is
the most important thing an ordinary person can do to help reform the American food
system, to make it healthier and more sustainable? Another related question is, how can
people living in a highly specialized consumer economy reduce their sense of dependence
and achieve
a greater degree of self-sufficiency? And then there were
the more philosophical questions, the ones I’ve been chewing on since I first
started writing books. How, in our everyday lives, can we acquire a deeper understanding
of the natural world and our species’ peculiar role in it? You can always go to
the woods to confront such questions, but I discovered that even more interesting
answers could be had simply by going to the kitchen.

I would not, as I said, ever have expected
it. Cooking has always been a part of my life, but more like the furniture than an
object of scrutiny, much less a passion. I counted myself lucky to have a parent—my
mother—who loved to cook and almost every night made us a delicious meal. By the time I
had a place of my own, I could find my way around a kitchen well enough, the result of
nothing more purposeful than all those hours spent hanging around the kitchen while my
mother fixed dinner. And though once I had my own place I cooked whenever I had the
time, I seldom
made
time for cooking or gave it much consideration. My kitchen
skills, such as they were, were pretty much frozen in place by the time I turned thirty.
Truth be told, my most successful dishes leaned heavily on the cooking of others, as
when I drizzled my incredible sage-butter sauce over store-bought ravioli. Every now and
then I’d look at a cookbook or clip a recipe from the newspaper to add a new dish
to my tiny repertoire, or I’d buy a new kitchen gadget, though most of these
eventually ended up in a closet.

In retrospect, the mildness of my interest
in cooking surprises me, since my interest in every other link of the food chain had
been so keen. I’ve been a gardener since I was eight, growing mostly vegetables,
and I’ve always enjoyed being on farms and writing about agriculture. I’ve
also written a fair amount about the opposite end of the food chain—the eating end, I
mean, and the implications of our eating for our health. But to the middle links of the
food chain, where
the stuff of nature gets transformed into the things
we eat and drink, I hadn’t really given much thought.

Until, that is, I began trying to unpack a
curious paradox I had noticed while watching television, which was simply this: How is
it that at the precise historical moment when Americans were abandoning the kitchen,
handing over the preparation of most of our meals to the food industry, we began
spending so much of our time thinking about food and watching other people cook it on
television? The less cooking we were doing in our own lives, it seemed, the more that
food and its vicarious preparation transfixed us.

Our culture seems to be of at least two
minds on this subject. Survey research confirms we’re cooking less and buying more
prepared meals every year. The amount of time spent preparing meals in American
households has fallen by half since the mid-sixties, when I was watching my mom fix
dinner, to a scant twenty-seven minutes a day. (Americans spend less time cooking than
people in any other nation, but the general downward trend is global.) And yet at the
same time we’re
talking
about cooking more—and watching cooking, and
reading about cooking, and going to restaurants designed so that we can watch the work
performed live. We live in an age when professional cooks are household names, some of
them as famous as athletes or movie stars. The very same activity that many people
regard as a form of drudgery has somehow been elevated to a popular spectator sport.
When you consider that twenty-seven minutes is less time than it takes to watch a single
episode of
Top Chef
or
The Next Food Network Star
, you realize that
there are now millions of people who spend more time watching food being cooked on
television than they spend actually cooking it themselves. I don’t need to point
out that the food you watch being cooked on television is not food you get to eat.

This is peculiar. After all, we’re not
watching shows or reading books about sewing or darning socks or changing the oil in our
car,
three other domestic chores that we have been only too happy to
outsource—and then promptly drop from conscious awareness. But cooking somehow feels
different. The work, or the process, retains an emotional or psychological power we
can’t quite shake, or don’t want to. And in fact it was after a long bout of
watching cooking programs on television that I began to wonder if this activity I had
always taken for granted might be worth taking a little more seriously.

I developed a few theories to explain what I
came to think of as the Cooking Paradox. The first and most obvious is that watching
other people cook is not exactly a new behavior for us humans. Even when
“everyone” still cooked, there were plenty of us who mainly watched: men for
the most part, and children. Most of us have happy memories of watching our mothers in
the kitchen, performing feats that sometimes looked very much like sorcery and typically
resulted in something tasty to eat. In ancient Greece, the word for “cook,”
“butcher,” and “priest” was the same—
mageiros
—and the
word shares an etymological root with “magic.” I would watch, rapt, when my
mother conjured her most magical dishes, like the tightly wrapped packages of fried
chicken Kiev that, when cut open with a sharp knife, liberated a pool of melted butter
and an aromatic gust of herbs. But watching an everyday pan of eggs get scrambled was
nearly as riveting a spectacle, as the slimy yellow goop suddenly leapt into the form of
savory gold nuggets. Even the most ordinary dish follows a satisfying arc of
transformation, magically becoming something more than the sum of its ordinary parts.
And in almost every dish, you can find, besides the culinary ingredients, the
ingredients of a story: a beginning, a middle, and an end.