Near a Thousand Tables (4 page)

Cooking in some cultures becomes a metaphor for the transformations of life: Californian tribes, for instance, used to put women who had just given birth and pubescent girls into ovens dug in the ground, covered with mats and
hot stones
. In others food dressing becomes a sacred ritual, which not only crafts society but also nourishes heaven with sacrificial emissions of smoke and steam. Amazonian peoples who see “culinary operations as mediatory activities between heaven and earth, life and death,
nature and society
” generalize a notion which most societies apply to at least some acts of cooking.

The normal Japanese term for a meal—gohanmono—literally means “
honorable cooked rice
.” This reflects not only the ubiquitous and essential place of the rice staple in Japan but also the social nature—indeed, status—of feeding. Life is measured in ritual meals. At a child's birth, parents receive gifts of red rice or rice with red beans from family and neighbors; at a first birthday, they distribute fragments of a rice cake the child has stepped over. A new home is erected with a sacrifice of two fish and inaugurated with a meal for neighbors. Wedding guests take food gifts home from the reception—rice cakes on which cranes or turtles are depicted or fish paste molded into the same shapes, as talismans for longevity. Other meals mark communion with the dead,
and their anniversaries
.

In Hindu society, “the rules concerning food are extremely important for marking and maintaining social boundaries and distinctions. Castes rank themselves in terms of purity, and this is reflected in the kinds of food which may or may not be shared with other castes…. Raw food can be transferred between all castes, whereas cooked foods cannot, since they may affect the purity status of the castes concerned.” Cooked foods are divided between further classifications. Those cooked in water are distinguished from those fried in clarified butter: the latter can be exchanged between a wider range of groups than the former. Apart from the rules determining what foods may be shared or exchanged, eating habits
and dietary prescriptions are peculiar to groups of certain status. Vegetarianism, for instance, is proper to the highest and “purest” castes, “while meat-eating and alcohol-consumption are associated with less pure status. Certain untouchable castes are marked most obviously by the
eating of beef
.” The Tharu, the third rank in Dang, Nepal, will not exchange food with lower castes or feed them in their houses, but will eat pork and rats. The complexity of Fijian taboos has made them popular with anthropologists as objects of study. In Fiji, when particular kinds of groups eat together, they are confined to mutually complementary foods. In the presence of warriors, chiefs eat the captured pigs, but not fish or coconuts, which are reserved
to the warriors
.

Today, in cultures that think of themselves as modern, most of the food we speak of as raw comes elaborately prepared to the table. It is important to specify “food we speak of as raw” because rawness is a culturally constructed, or at least culturally modified, concept. Though we commonly eat many fruits and some vegetables with minimal preparation, we take their rawness for granted because it is culturally normal. No one speaks of raw apples or raw lettuce. Only if the food in question is normally cooked, but acceptable raw, do we specify raw carrots or raw onions or whatever. When meat and fish are served raw in the West, their rawness is so exceptional that it takes on extra connotations of subversion and risk, of barbarism and primitivism. The Chinese traditionally classified barbarian tribes into “raw” and “cooked” according to the degree of civilization they saw in them; and a similar mental classification of the world comes easily in the West, where literary tradition has long equated lust for raw flesh with savagery, blood-thirst and the rage of gastric impatience.

The classic “raw” meat dish of Western cuisine is steak tartare. The name alludes to the ferocious medieval reputation of the Mongols, also known, from the particular name of one group of Mongol tribes, as Tatars. The word reminded medieval ethnographers of Tartarus, the classical hell, and made it seem especially appropriate to
demonize these enemies
. The dish as it is known today, however, is a focus of civilized overcompensation. The meat is ground into soft, curling, vermicular twists of bright flesh. As if to make up for its rawness, its preparation is usually turned into a table-side restaurant ritual, when the waiter ceremoniously folds in, one by one, flavor-stretching ingredients which might include seasoning, fresh herbs, spring onions and onion shoots, capers, bits of anchovy, pickled peppercorns, olives and egg. Vodka is an unorthodox but immeasurably improving addition. The other raw meat and fish dishes licensed by civilization are equally removed from nature—their nakedness heavily dressed, their savagery sanitized by elaboration. “Raw” ham is heavily cured and smoked. Carpaccio is sliced with
courtly finesse into delicate slivers and no one thinks of eating it until it has been drizzled with olive oil and bedecked with pepper and Parmesan. Gravlax, though no longer buried, is layered with salt, dill and pepper and basted with its own must for several days before it is ready to eat. “If our remote ancestors ate all their meat raw,” wrote Brillat-Savarin in a work of 1826, which is still the gourmet's bible and the gourmand's apologia, “we have not entirely lost the habit ourselves. The most delicate palate will respond very well to Arles and Bologna sausages, smoked Hamburg beef, anchovies, freshly salted herrings, and such other things, which have never been subjected to fire, but which stimulate the appetite
for all that
.”

Sushi, which is now a
de rigueur
fashion accessory in the West, genuinely involves raw fish which is only very lightly dressed, if at all, with vinegar and ginger; but the main component of the dish is cooked rice. Sashimi is a reversion to a more dramatic state of rawness, but is nonetheless prepared with great elaboration. The slices of fish must be of translucent slimness, shaved with a well-tempered blade, and the presentation must be unstintingly elegant—so that the raw state of the food actually heightens the eater's sense of participation in the civilizing process. The garnishes must be chopped, teased and shredded in an ample variety of fashions and an array of nicely contrived sauces must be served. Danes like raw egg yolk as a garnish or sauce, but even this comes separated from its white. At the “endless raw meat banquets” to which Laurens van der Post was treated in Ethiopia, preparation was minimal but the formality of the proceedings was elaborate. “The raw meat was passed, bleeding and lukewarm from the living animal, from one guest to another. Each man would take the edge of the meat firmly between his teeth and then, slicing upwards with a sharp knife, would cut off a mouthful for himself—in the process narrowly missing taking the skin
off his nose
.” The slices were not eaten undressed but dipped in berebere, a sauce so spicy that it “gives the impression of being hot enough to cook the meat”; it can also transform a stew into a mixture “so fierce that it practically
makes the ears bleed
.” Occasionally a slice of meat would be passed over a man's shoulder to the women and children who stood in silence behind the diners. All these foods are raw only according to a very narrow definition. They are so changed from the state of nature—whatever that is—as to be unrecognizable, presumably, to the hominid ancestors we imagine for ourselves, who supposedly ate anything edible that came to hand. After the invention of cooking, in most of the world, it seems, even the raw became rarefied.

In most cultures, the origins of cooking are traced to a divine gift, Promethean fire, or to the luck of a culture hero. Fire is a secret betrayed by a defector from Olympus. In ancient Persia it was elicited from the heart of rock by a hunter's misdirected missile. For the Dakota Indians it was struck from the earth
by the claws of a jaguar-god. For the Aztecs, the first fire was the sun, kindled by the gods in the primeval darkness. To the Cook Islands, it was brought by Maui after his descent into the bowels of the earth. An Australian aboriginal found it secreted in the penis of a totemic animal, while for another tribe it was an invention of women, who cooked with it during the men's absence on the hunt and hid it
inside their vulvae
. “Everybody has his own Prometheus” and so does
almost every culture
.

The real origins of the domestication of
fire are unknown
. All theories about it seem to have been sparked like struck flint by some sudden illumination. None occurred more memorably or endured more tenaciously than that of the “father of modern paleontology,” Abbé Henri Breuil. In 1930, a young protégé of Breuil's was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit anthropologist who, in his turn, would become one of the most powerful figures in the intellectual history of the century. Teilhard was working in China, combining scientific and missionary work in the best Jesuit tradition, excavating the cave dwelling of “Peking Man”—a hominid who lived half a million years ago, supposedly before tool making and fire kindling. He showed Breuil a stag's antler and asked his opinion of it. “When still fresh,” Breuil replied, “it was exposed to fire. And it was worked with a crude stone implement, probably not of flint, some sort of primitive chopping tool.”

“But that's impossible,” Teilhard replied. “It comes from Chou Kou-tien.”

“I don't care where it comes from,” insisted his mentor. “It was fashioned by a man and that man knew the
use of fire
.” As with all other theories about the date of the domestication of fire, doubts have accumulated in recent years. Breuil, however, erected on the piles of ashes excavated at Chou Kou-tien a seductive but fanciful reconstruction of hominid sophistication. In his imaginary portrait of life there, a woman makes flints, while “a Pekin Man is cutting a deer antler” and a couple nearby are making fire. The man first produces a spark by friction while the woman holds out a tuft of dry grass and leaves to catch it. “She will then carry it to the hearth which is between them surrounded by small pebbles. Behind them another fire burns brightly cooking a joint of
wild boar
.” In reality, there is no evidence either of flint manufacture or of the kindling of fire for hundreds of thousands of years after the date of the relevant remains.

It might be supposed that cooking ensued by inevitable extension from the domestication of fire. In the modern West the commonest myth is well represented by the imaginary account of the origins of cooking in Charles Lamb's
A Dissertation upon Roast Pig.
A swineherd accidentally immolates a litter of piglets in a conflagration he caused by carelessness, and

While he was thinking what he should say to his father, and wringing his hands over the smoking remnants of one of those untimely sufferers, an odour assailed his nostrils, unlike any scent which he had before experienced…. A premonitory moistening at the same time overflowed his nether lip. He knew not what to think. He next stooped down to feel the pig, if there were any signs of life in it. He burnt his fingers, and to cool them he applied them in his booby fashion to his mouth. Some of the crumbs of the scorched skin had come away with his fingers, and for the first time in his life (in the world's life, indeed, for before him no man had known it) he tasted—
crackling
!

“The thing took wing” until “the custom of firing houses” was superseded by the intervention of a sage, “who made a discovery that the flesh of swine, or indeed of any other animal, might be cooked (burnt, as they call it) without the necessity of consuming a whole house
to dress it
.” It is curious that Lamb traced the origins of this important technology to China, which has indeed been the world's most technically inventive country, over recorded history as a whole, but which is usually inadequately acknowledged in the West. More commonplace is Lamb's assumption that cooking must have been invented by accident. Accident has recently been rehabilitated in historical writing, because in the random world revealed by quantum physics and chaos theory, unpredictable effects indeed seem to ensue from untrackable causes. Cleopatra's nose resembles a butterfly's wing: the latter can stir up a storm; but for the former's few centimeters of adventitious elegance, there might never have been a Roman Empire. “Virtual” historians are always telling us these days that but for this or that accident the whole course of history would be different and that kingdoms are lost for the want of a nail. Really, however, accidents are only observable in the historical record if they confirm the way things are already going. The accident is our model for explaining change in “primitive” societies, which we vulgarly suppose to be static and stupid. Yet inventions are rarely, if ever, contrived by genuine accident: there is always a shaping imagination at work or a practical observer on hand.

It is possible that cooking of a sort was practiced even before fire was tamed. Many animals are attracted to the embers of naturally occurring fires, where they sift for roasted seeds and beans rendered edible by burning. Chimpanzees in the wild today can readily be observed practicing a technique which can be safely ascribed, by analogy, to
hominid foragers
. To a creature with enough brainpower and dexterity, some of the features of burnt-out woodland, such as the piles of ash and the partly burned trunks of fallen trees, might have appeared as natural ovens,
smoldering with manageable heat, in which tough-husked seeds or tough-skinned pulses, unchewable legumes and cartilaginous flesh could be processed.

The cooking revolution was the first scientific revolution: the discovery, by experiment and observations, of the biochemical changes which transmute flavor and aid digestion. It isn't called “kitchen chemistry” for nothing. Meat—despite the disfavor it draws from modern dietitians who are minatory about saturated fats—is an unbeatable source of nutrition for human bodies but it is fibrous and muscly. Cooking makes the proteins in the muscle fibers fuse, turning collagen to jelly. If direct fire is applied, as was probably the case in the earliest cooks' techniques, the surface of meat undergoes something like caramelisation as the juices are concentrated: for proteins coagulate when heated and “Maillard reaction” sets in between the amines on a protein chain and some of the natural sugars in fat. Starch has been the source of energy for most people for most of recorded history, but it is inefficient until it is cooked. Heat disintegrates it, releasing the sugar which all starch contains. At the same time, dry heat turns dextrins in starch brown, imparting the comforting look we associate with cooked food. In most cultures, for most of history, the chief alternative to dry heating is immersion in hot water: this softens muscle fibers in meat and makes carbohydrate particles swell. At about 175 degrees Fahrenheit, they break up and permeate the mixture. Sauces thicken in consequence. Heat retextures other foods so that they can be chewed or easily dissected by hand—“a primary spurt in the civilizing of eating habits, long before the introduction of chopsticks
or knives and forks
.” Because cooking makes food more digestible, you can eat more of it: fifty tons of it in a modern lifetime. The result, up to a point, is higher human efficiency. A further consequence is the opportunity of excess, with effects on society that we shall broach in due course (below, p. 101).