Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (4 page)

The archaeological evidence is unclear, but it is reasonable to assume that ancient peoples living near geysers experimented for many
thousands of years with dipping raw foods into the swirling steam, attached to a stick or string that could be used to whip out the food once it was done. Ideally. Unless our ancestors were far more dexterous than we are, many pieces of perfectly good food would have gotten lost in the volcanic water, like chunks of bread tumbling into a fondue pot.

Still, geyser cooking has many advantages over fire cooking. It is less labor-intensive—all the work of creating a heat source is avoided. It is also gentler on the ingredients themselves. When cooking directly in the fire, it is hard to avoid the problem of charred on the outside and raw in the middle. Food bathed in hot water, on the other hand, can cook in its own good time; a few minutes more or less do not desperately matter.

Most people, however, do not live anywhere near geothermal springs. If you had only encountered cold water, what would it take for you to get the idea of heating it up to cook with? Water and fire are opposites; enemies, even. If you had spent hours getting your fire going—the wood gathering, the flint rubbing, the piling up of sticks—why would you jeopardize it all by bringing water near your precious hearth? To us, with our easily reignitable burners and electric kettles, boiling is a very prosaic activity. We are accustomed to pots. But cooking in hot water would not have seemed the obvious next step to someone who had never done it.

The first conscious acts of boiling took great invention. To make a vessel for cooking when there was none before is a feat of huge creativity. In geothermal cooking, although various bags and strings may be used, they are not essential: the earth itself containing the bubbling water becomes the cooking pot. In the absence of hot springs, however, boiling requires a container, one strong enough to withstand heat and from which the food will not leak. In the days before clay pots, what could it be?

 

B
efore the first potter fashioned the first pot, certain foods came ready to cook in their own vessels. Shellfish and various reptiles,
notably turtles, seem to have their own pottery casing. Seashells are still used as serving vessels and utensils. When you eat a steaming bowl of moules marinières, you first choose one of the mussels as a handy pair of tongs to pick out the flesh from the other mussels. Similarly, the indigenous early Yahgan people of Tierra del Fuego used mussel shells as a dripping pan, to catch the grease from a seal as it roasted.

Several anthropologists have suggested that it would have been a small step from using mussel shells in such a way to cooking in containers. Shells have often been spoken of as one stage on the route to man-made pots. But were they?

A mussel is hardly big enough to boil or fry anything in but itself. Catching drips of fat is more the action of a spoon than of a pot. Native Americans were among those who used clam shells for spoons and sharpened mussel shells as knives for carving fish; but they did not use them for pots, so far as we know. A pearly mussel pot—it’s an appealing thought—would only be large enough for dinner to feed a mouse. What, though, of larger mollusks, and reptiles? It has been said that the example of turtle cookery—as practiced by various Amazonian tribes—proves that boiling was “viable” long before the invention of pottery Cooking in a turtle shell is certainly a romantic notion. Whether anything was cooked in turtle shells except for turtles themselves is another matter.

Moving on from shells, there are some more plausible candidates for the first cooking vessels. Tough-rinded vegetable gourds of various kinds made very handy prehistoric bowls, bottles, and pots. Hollowed-out bamboo stems, used all over Asia, are another plant-based family of cooking vessels. But bamboo and gourds were only to be found in certain parts of the world. A more universal vessel, after the discovery that meat could be cooked, was the animal’s stomach, a premade container that was both waterproof and—up to a point—heatproof. Haggis, beloved of the Scots, boiled in a sheep’s stomach, is a throwback to the ancient tradition of boiling the contents of an animal’s belly in the stomach itself. In the fifth century
BC, the historian Herodotus recounted how the nomad Scythians used this technique, boiling an animal’s flesh inside its own paunch: “In this way an ox, or any other sacrificial beast, is ingeniously made to boil itself.” Ingenious is the word. The tradition of stomach cookery shows how sharp-witted humans were in finding better methods to cook their dinner, when they had no pots and pans, no Teflon nonstick griddles, no gleaming copper
batterie
de cuisine
. neatly dangling from pot hooks.

No method was as ingenious as the technology of hot-stone cookery practiced across the globe, starting at least 30,000 years ago. After thousands of years of direct-fire roasting, people finally figured out a more
indirect
way of using heat to cook things in steam or water. It has been said that this transformation in how food could be cooked was the greatest technological innovation in food preparation until modern times.

 

T
his is how to make a pit oven. First, dig a large hole in the ground and line it with stones to make it roughly waterproof. Then, fill the pit with water. You could skip this stage if you dug the pit below the water table, in which case it would fill up automatically. (In Ireland, there are thousands of traces of hot-rock troughs cut into the watery peat bog.) Next, take some more stones—preferably, large river cobblestones—and heat them to a very high temperature in a fire. Cooking rocks were heated as hot as 932°F, hotter than a pizza oven. Transport the stones to the pit, using tools such as wooden tongs to avoid burning your hands, and drop them in the water. When enough stones have been added, the water will start to “seethe” or boil and food can be added, topped with an insulating lid of turf, leaves, animal skins, or earth. As the temperature of the water drops, continue to add more hot rocks to keep the boiling constant until the meal is cooked.

There were many variations on stone cookery. Sometimes the stones were heated up inside the pit itself instead of in a separate fire; there would be two adjacent sections, one for the water, one for
the fire and the rocks. Sometimes the food was steamed instead of boiled. Root vegetables or pieces of meat could be wrapped in leaves and layered up in the pit with the hot stones without added water, in which case the earth pit was more like an oven than a boiler.

Hot-rock cookery is still practiced in the clambakes of New England, in which sweet clams, just harvested, are cooked right there on the beach, layered up in a pit of hot stones, driftwood, and seaweed, which keep the clams juicy. The method is also used in the Hawaiian luau, in which a pig is covered in banana or taro leaves and buried in a hot pit (an
imu
) for the best part of a day, then unearthed with great ceremony and jubilation. In the Old World, however, rock boiling did not live long after the beginnings of pottery.

It is easy to assume, therefore, that cooking with stones is simply an inferior technology, compared to boiling something in a pot. But is it? It is certainly an inconvenient and roundabout way of making a hot meal. Pit boiling would be a hopeless method for doing the kind of boiling most of us do routinely: pasta, potatoes, or rice would get lost in the mud, and it would be an absurdly inefficient way of boiling things like eggs or asparagus spears, which only take a few minutes.

Hot-stone cooking was a superb technology, however, for many of the uses to which it was actually put by cooks of the past. It was great for cooking foods in bulk, as the example of the luau pig demonstrates. The other notable thing about pit-stone cookery was that it made it possible to eat numerous wild plants that would otherwise have been more or less inedible. The types of foods traditionally cooked in the slow, moist heat of a pit oven tended to be bulbs and tuberous roots rich in inulin, a carbohydrate that cannot be digested by the human stomach (it is present in Jerusalem artichokes, hence their notorious flatulent effects). Hot-stone cookery transformed these plants through hydrolysis, a process liberating the digestible fructose from the carbohydrate. In some cases, these plants needed to be cooked for as long as sixty hours for the hydrolysis to occur. A pleasant side effect was that the long, moist cooking made unpromising wild bulbs taste fantastically sweet.

Some people were so attached to earth ovens and pit boiling that they did not see pots as superior or even necessary. The Polynesians of the early Christian era—the people who traveled to the eastern Pacific islands in the first millennium AD, arriving in Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island from Samoa and Tonga—present the fascinating spectacle of people who had known pots for a thousand years, only to abandon them. From around 800 BC, Polynesians made a range of pottery, typically earthenware fired at low heat, tempered with shell or sand. Yet when they arrived in the Marquesas Islands, around 100 AD, they abruptly gave up pottery making and chose to cook once again without pots. Why?

The hypothesis used to be that the reason Polynesians stopped making pots was that their new island homes lacked clay. But this was not so; clay was present on the islands, albeit in rather remote high places. Thirty years ago, the New Zealand anthropologist Helen M. Leach suggested a radical new explanation for the Polynesian conundrum : they cooked without pots because they did not see the need for them. It might have been different if they had been rice eaters. But the Polynesian diet was rich in starchy vegetables such as yams, taro, sweet potato, and breadfruit, all of which cooked better with hot stones than in pots.

So, yes, it is possible to boil without pots. The Polynesian rejection of pottery is a useful reminder that even the most basic-seeming of kitchen technologies are not universally adopted. Some cooks refuse to have a frying pan in the house (as if its very presence might cause you to consume unhealthy amounts of fat); raw foodists reject the use of fire; and there is probably someone, somewhere, who chooses to cook without knives; certainly, there are children’s cookbooks that advocate the use of scissors instead. I myself am the opposite of a Polynesian. I view pots and pans as essential kitchen furniture, unassuming household gods. Few moments in the day are happier than when I sling a pot on the stove, knowing that supper will soon be bubbling away, filling the house with good scents. I can’t imagine living without them.

 

O
nce pots were embedded as a technology, we developed strong feelings about them. Pottery is deeply personal. Even now, we describe pots as having human characteristics. Pots may have lips and mouths, necks and shoulders, bellies and bottoms. The Dowayo people of Cameroon in Africa have special forms of pottery for different people (a child’s bowl would look different from one belonging to a widow), and there are taboos against eating from another person’s designated food pot.

Many of us cling to particular vessels, fetishizing over this mug or that plate. I do not care what fork I eat with, or if anyone else has eaten with it before me (so long as it is reasonably clean). Pottery is different. I used to have a large mug with all the American presidents on it that my husband brought back from a trip to Washington. It was what I drank my early morning tea out of. The tea didn’t taste the same from any other mug; it was a crucial part of the morning ritual. Gradually, the faces of the presidents faded and it was hard to distinguish Chester Arthur from Grover Cleveland. I loved it all the more. If I saw someone else drinking from it, I secretly felt that they were walking on my grave. Eventually, the mug smashed in the dishwasher, which was a relief in a way. I didn’t replace it.

Fragments or shards of ceramics are often the most durable traces left by a civilization, offering our best window on the values of those who used them. Archaeologists therefore like to name people after the pots they left behind. There are the Beaker folk of the third millennium BC, who traveled across Europe, from the Spanish Peninsula and central Germany, reaching Britain around 2000 BC. They came after the Funnelbeaker culture and the Corded Ware people. Wherever they went, the Beaker folk left traces of reddish-brown, bell-shaped clay drinking vessels. They could have been named the Flint Dagger people or the Stone Hammer people (because they also used these) but somehow pottery is more evocative of a whole culture. We know that the Beaker folk liked to be buried with a beaker at their feet, presumably for the food and drink they
would need in the afterlife. Our own culture has so much
stuff
that pottery has lost much of its former importance, but it is still one of the few universal possessions. Perhaps many hundreds of years from now, when our culture has been buried by some apocalypse or other, archaeologists will start to dig up our remains and name us the Mug community, MC for short: we were a people who liked our ceramics to be brightly colored, large enough to accommodate high volumes of comforting caffeinated drinks and above all dishwasher-proof.

The very existence of pottery marks a supremely important technological stage in the development of human culture. The potter takes sloppy, formless clay, wets it, tempers it, molds it, and fires it, and so gives it durable shape: this is a different order of creation from chipping away at rock or wood or bone. Clay pots bear the marks of human hands. There is a kind of magic to the process of pottery, and indeed, early potters often had a second role as shamans in the community. The archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, who unearthed numerous pottery shards at Jericho, dating back to 7000 BC, described the beginnings of pottery as an “industrial revolution”: