Near a Thousand Tables (6 page)

Because of the perishable nature of basketware, it is impossible to date the origins of cookery in manufactured pots. A simpler option, however, was called into use earlier: filling skins, tripes, cauls or stomachs of animals for cooking in. The skin is of limited usefulness as a sealant in most species and is frequently
more valuable if it is stripped off the carcass before cooking and tanned for garments, pouches and awnings. The internal organs, however, are nature's cooking vessels—reliably impermeable and elastic enough, in most quadrupeds, to contain all the other edible parts of the animal and more. Because they can be filled with water, they can function as boilers and—if, say, a small intestine is packed and placed inside a large one—they make serviceable bains-marie, as long as the cook has some method of shielding them from damage by excessive direct heat. Nowadays, surviving traces of this early style of cookery can be found even in the most sophisticated cuisines. The best sausages are still stuffed in strips and tubes of innards. No respectable blood pudding comes packed in anything but a length of intestine. In many popular sweet puddings nowadays a muslin cloth (to hold the contents together while cooking) does duty for the outer casing which a stomach or bladder formerly supplied. Bag puddings are a way of using offal (or, in cognate dishes, blood), which would perish quickly if left uncooked. For this reason, they occur frequently in the cookery of transhumant herders. Haggis, the “chieftain o' the puddin' race,” is an example easily attainable today wherever the Scots diaspora has reached. The recipe does not really evoke a very primitive age because it calls for a large admixture of oatmeal, which is a sedentary cultivator's food. But the other ingredients—chopped lungs, liver, heart—are typical. In purer herdsmen's food, blood and fat might fill the cavities which in the haggis are stuffed with oatmeal.

Nomad lives would be encumbered by
batteries de cuisine
and it is therefore among nomads that one should expect to find enduring examples of the use of innards as cooking pots. At least, manufactured pots have never entirely replaced their primitive predecessors in nomadic cuisines, although even nomads seem to appreciate metal vessels, provided they can be made easily transportable: culinary variety is, within limits, a form of luxury almost universally esteemed and, in any event, a pot is a convenient container to cook a stuffed gut or stomach in. Turkic peoples have a curious range of cookware. The qazan, which literally means “hollowed-out thing,” is a capacious tin vessel with built-in feet designed to be easily lashed to a horse. The Turks also consider it indispensable to carry a rack for steaming dumplings over an open fire. Their former use of shields as cooking trays is perpetuated in the broad, shieldlike shallow dish known as a saj. The spear can be a toasting fork. In some cultures, it is tempting to imagine the brochette evolving from the use of sticks as skewers. In most of the Eurasian steppe there are no trees and sticks are rare and precious. The shish kebab—the universal gift of Central Asian cuisine—is more likely to have been cooked in antiquity
on a dagger
.

At their most solemn feasts, however, most peoples tend to eat their most traditional foods and among the steppeland nomads this means reverting to cooking in skins and stomachs and guts, Sharon Hudgins is the author of the most vivid modern accounts of steppeland dining experiences. She was served with a sheep's head in its skin, wool intact, at a Buriat banquet in 1994. Her husband was exempted from need to sing a sheep's head song—the relic of the propitiatory ritual which seems inseparable from solemn meals in most traditions. Libations were poured and scraps of fat flung into fire. Toasts, which the Buriats like to make in grain spirit imported from their sedentary neighbors, were accompanied by songs. The next course was a sheep's stomach filled with cow's milk, sheep's blood, garlic and spring onions, tied with intestines.

All the Buriats around the table waited expectantly for me to take the first bite. But I didn't know where to begin. Finally our hostess leaned over and sliced the top off the stomach. The contents had not been fully cooked and blood oozed out onto my plate. She took a large spoon, scraped out some of the semi-coagulated mass, and handed the spoonful to me…. The other guests waited for me to make the next move. And suddenly it occurred to me: pass the dish around. That's exactly
what they wanted
.

Irrationally, some meals made by stuffing intestines still command a certain prestige in Western gastronomy, whereas puddings cooked in stomachs are now regarded as food unfit for gourmets—rustic dishes which betray primitive origins. In some versions of andouilles and andouillettes, a pig's large intestine is stuffed mainly with chopped bits of the small intestine, without sacrifice of cachet. Boudins blancs are tidbits of great delicacy. A gourmet might relish a melting morcilla but think a goat's paunch gross, such as the roasted one stuffed with blood and fat with which Odysseus was rewarded for his prowess
in wrestling
.

Lévi-Strauss was right to suppose that boiling “requires the use of a receptacle, a
cultural object
,” since a skin or tripe used as a boiler has really been transformed into an artifact by human imagination, and a boiling pit is a substantial contrivance, which has to be dug and lined. But by the same standard the spit or the skewer, and even the kindled fire, are cultural objects, too, and roasting or grilling must be classed as “cultural” or “civilized” no less than other methods. In the transition to culture, or the early “civilizing process,” a bigger step than boiling was therefore taken by frying: this required manufactured vessels, because, although you can use innards as boilers, you cannot use them as fry pans. The sequence of evidence begins with the first earthenware shards. In Japan, the oldest
examples which recognizably belonged to pots date from the eleventh millennium
B.C.,
in Africa and the Middle East from about three thousand years later. In Greece and Southeast Asia they date
from c 6,000
B.C.
This technical advance made the modern
batterie de cuisine
essentially complete. When cooks had earthenware pots, which were resistant to fire and impenetrable by water, they could add frying to the repertoire of roasting, boiling and grilling. We like to congratulate ourselves on the accelerating pace of modern technological change; but since the invention of earthenware, nothing else we have devised to cook with has had such an enriching effect, and none, until the microwave, opened up the possibility of any genuinely new method of cooking. In the meantime, we have acquired tools and gadgets which made culinary processes easier, without extending their range.

Cooking has done individuals and societies so much good that it seems unsurprising that the cooking revolution has been sustained to our own days. Yet no practice is so beneficent as to disarm distrust. Cooking today is condemned by critics; and its socializing effects are said to be under threat from technological change.

The end of cooking has been tearfully predicted and ardently desired. What might loosely be called the anti-cooking movement is now more than a hundred years old: it started among feminists and socialists, who wanted to liberate women from the kitchen and replace the family with a wider community. Charlotte Perkins Gilman wanted to make cookery “scientific,” as she said: in effect, this meant eliminating it from most people's lives, secluding it from the sights and sounds and smells of the larder and the range and confining them to kitchenless apartments, while professionals in meal-making factories saw to it that energy levels were maintained for a world of work. “It is impossible,” she wrote, “that half the world, acting as amateur cooks for the other half, can attain any high degree of scientific accuracy
or technical skill
.” As well as from progressive critics, cooking came under attack from primitivist prejudices. Gandhi despised it. He tried fruits and nuts, goat's milk and dates, in a search for a satisfactory diet which could be eaten without it. Underlying his preferences, perhaps, was the same kind of brahminical vanity which made Professor Godbole, in
A Passage to India,
affect indifference to all food, of which he ate copiously but abstractedly, encountering it “as if by accident.” Today, the prejudice in favor of what is “natural”—and therefore supposedly precultural—makes raw food attractive to modern urbanites repelled by our overcontrived lifeways, seeking readmission to Eden. Civilization seems ossified and one way of transcending its limitations is to reach for the recovery of the
raw. Romantic primitivism allies with ecological anxiety. The new soul food favored by many middle-class African-Americans dumps the fat-rich dishes of Dixie tradition—collard greens suppurating with pork fat, pigs' feet with black-eyed peas and the like—in favor of raw or marinated vegetables. The fashion for crudités in smart restaurants and for repulsive “salad bars” in popular eateries, where dog-eared leaves and sad shreds of salad vegetables lie exposed to contamination, are evidence of how far the taste for raw refreshment now reaches.

The popularity of raw food does not mean that cooking is going to stop. But it may be unrecognizably changed by other pressures. Cooking was a precious invention because of the way it forged community. Contemporary eating habits threaten to unpick this achievement. Food on the fly feeds the values of hustle, nourishes the anomie of postindustrial society. People eat while they are doing other things, with eyes averted from company. They are on the streets, hurrying between appointments or sauntering between pleasures. They are at their desks, with their gazes riven to the computer monitor. They are at lectures and seminars, looking at the whiteboard or the screen. Before they left home in the morning they did not share breakfast with the rest of their household, either because modern working hours are staggered or because leisure for breakfast has been crowded out of the daily routine. When they get home in the evening, there may be no meal to share—or if there is, there may be a shortage of sharers. Sandwich shops can be sociable: the old-fashioned kind, where you waited in a potentially companionable queue before ordering your sandwich from the person who made it, buzzed, at a low level, with dialogue and encounters; but the big market in the industrialized West today is for impersonal sandwiches, grabbed ready-made from refrigerated shelves and bolted down in isolation.

The loneliness of the fast food eater is uncivilizing. Food is being desocialized. In the microwave household, home cooking looks doomed. Family life must fragment if people stop having shared meals, for as Carlyle once said, “If the soul is a kind of stomach, what is spiritual communion but an eating together?” The microwave should not be underestimated as a device with the power to change society. Its rise has been startlingly rapid. In 1989, fewer than 20 percent of French respondents to a survey had microwaves and defrosters at home; a year later the figure had risen to nearly a quarter; by 1995 it was
over half
. I suspect that some, at least, of the alarm this trend arouses is justified. Technically, of course, microwave technology is just one form of cooking; it uses electromagnetic rays to penetrate the food instead of the infrared radiation generated by fire. It is the first innovation since the frying pan genuinely to have opened up a new cooking method: to food lovers, its arrival ought to have been an auspicious occasion but it cannot
fairly be said that the results have been very exciting. Most microwaved dishes look unappetizing because electromagnetic radiation cannot brown food on the outside. The texture of what is served is boring because the process cannot deliver crisp effects or, indeed, any great variety of texture. In most kitchens, the device is used only to heat up a réchauffé: this may work well for the relatively limited range of dishes which benefit from reheating, such as curries and casseroles, but most dishes on reheating acquire a tired appearance and a distinctive flavor—slightly earthy, slightly acrid.

Despite these deficiencies, people like microwave ovens for two reasons, neither of them good. First, for “convenience”: it is a quick, clean way to heat up precooked, prepacked meals. In partial consequence, the fastest growing market in the modern West is for boring, overprocessed pap. Of course, this is not entirely the microwave's fault, for the irresistibility of pap is as marked in food literature as in food. Readers who could have Brillat-Savarin settle for the Williams-Sonoma catalogue. The microwave oven is part of what might be called pap culture. Ready-prepared meals in various forms have tended to be demanded, throughout history, in highly urbanized societies. The rise of the microwave is a consequence as well as a cause of their renewed popularity today (see below, pp. 216-22), The second great virtue of the microwave in its admirers' eyes is that it is liberating. Eaters can choose to heat up whatever ready-mades are to hand—which in modern Western cities means that a huge choice is on offer. No reference to community of taste needs to be made. No matriarch or paterfamilias has an opportunity to arbitrate for a family. No one in a household has to defer to anyone else. Moreover, no two people need to eat at the same time or table. This new way of cooking is staggeringly counterrevolutionary. It reverses the cooking revolution, which made eating sociable, and returns us, in this respect, to a presocial phase of evolution.

Food nourishes: the cooking revolution extended this effect by increasing the range of edible foods and easing digestion. Food gives pleasure, which cooking can enhance. It forges society, especially when cooking provides focus and structure. After the invention of cooking the next great revolution was the discovery that food has other virtues and vices: it can encode meanings. It can do the eater good of kinds which transcend sustenance and evils which are worse than poison. It not only maintains life but also enhances it and sometimes degrades it. It can change the eater for the better or worse. It has spiritual and metaphysical, moral and transmutative effects. Curiously, perhaps, the people who best exemplify this discovery—and who therefore introduce the next chapter—are cannibals.