Near a Thousand Tables (5 page)

As well as increasing the consumption of edible foods, cooking can work a livelier magic by making palatable what would otherwise be poisonous. Fire destroys the poisons in some potential foods. The magic which makes toxic plants comestible is particularly valuable to human beings, because poisonous food can be stored without fear of depredations by competing creatures, then detoxified for human consumption: this is the cultural advantage which made bitter manioc a staple food in ancient Amazonia and nardoo root a prized food among Australian aboriginals. Bitter manioc, the Amazonian staple, which is the usual source of tapioca, contains enough prussic acid to kill anyone who eats a meal-sized quantity, but this can be dissipated by the processes of pounding or grating, soaking and heating which are used to prepare it. How the Indians who first cultivated this plant, and came to rely on it, discovered these peculiar properties is an intriguing
but
insoluble problem
. Most harmful infestations can be neutralized by cooking. Pig meat is often infected with a worm that causes trichinosis if ingested by humans: thorough cooking makes it harmless. Salmonella bacteria are killed by brisk and thorough cooking, listeria by intense heat. Notably exceptional is the deadliest bacterium,
Clostridium botulinum.
It is unharmed by most cooking processes and survives the range of temperatures attained in all traditional cuisine, though recipes with a high acid content can arrest its development.

As soon as the effects of heat on food began to unfold before men's eyes, the future of cooking was foreshadowed* Literally or originally “focus” means “hearth.” Once fire became manageable it inevitably bound communities together, because tending the flame required division of labor and shared effort. Fire functioned as a focus, we assume, before or apart from its adaptation for cooking, because of the other functions which make people gather around it: for light and warmth, for protection from pests and predators. Cooking perfected fire's power of social magnetism by adding enhanced nourishment to these functions. It socialized eating by making it an activity practiced in a fixed place at a fixed time by a community of eaters. Formerly, it is safe to infer, there was little incentive to eat communally. Gathered foods could be consumed on the spot or secreted to be eaten at will. Though we can imagine hominids gathering around a raw carcass for communal feasting, like buzzards around a bone, eating was not necessarily a forger of community before the invention of cooking; collaborative ventures, such as the hunt and the kill and the organization of collective security, galvanized the group but fragments of beasts hunted or scavenged could be dismembered or distributed for eating apart. When fire and food combined, however, an almost irresistible focus was created for communal life. Eating became social in a unique way: communal but uncollaborative. The enhanced value cooking imparts to food elevates it above nourishment and opens up new imaginative possibilities: meals can become sacrificial sharings, love feasts, ritual acts, occasions for the magical transformations wrought by fire—one of which is the transformation of competitors into a community.

In the contemporary world, it has still been possible to recapture or reexperience a primitive sense of the power of this combination. It comes through the childhood recollections of the “peasant philosopher” of the 1930s, Gaston Bachelard:

Fire is more a social being than a natural being…. I ate the fire, I ate its gold, its odor and even its crackle, while the steaming wafer crunched between my teeth. And it is always thus, with a sort of luxurious pleasure … that the fire proves its
humanity. It not only cooks, it makes the biscuit crisp and golden. It gives material form to man's festivities. However far back you may go in time, the gastro-nomical value of food always outweighs its alimentary value, and it is in joy, not in pain, that man has found his spirit…. From the teeth of the chain the black cauldron hung. The three-legged pot stood over the hot ashes. My grandmother would puff up her cheeks and blow through a steel pipe to reawaken the sleeping flame. Everything would be cooking at the same time: the potatoes for the pigs, the choice potatoes for the family. For me there would be a fresh egg cooking
under the ashes
.

Ingenious imaginations were needed to cross the practical and conceptual gap that separates domestication of fire from the invention of cooking. In some climates fire can be quickly drilled. In some places, if suitable flints and kindling are to hand, it can be struck with reasonable reliability. In very remote antiquity, however, most societies did not enjoy ideal conditions for making fire. It had to be garnered and preserved, in the style of the sacred flame which even in modern societies we sometimes keep alight in memory of our honored dead or in celebration of our “Olympic ideal.” For most of the past, in most places, it was easier and more reliable to keep fire alight and to carry it around than to kindle it at need. Some peoples have lost or perhaps never had the techniques for igniting it—or maybe they simply think of fire as too sacred to make themselves. This is said to be why some tribes in Tasmania, the Andaman Islands and New Guinea travel to beg fire from their neighbors, if it is extinguished, without trying to start it by means of their own. In the Easter light ceremony, with which vigil mass begins, in darkness, in Catholic and Orthodox churches, Christian tradition preserves an ancient memory of how serious it can be when a society loses fire and rekindles it from scratch.

Even if you can get fire when you want it, it is not easy to
apply it to cooking
. Charred in the naked flame or suspended in the smoke or baked in the embers of a fire, some foods cook satisfactorily. This is a convenient method if the fire is being kept alight anyway for another purpose: as a watchfire, say, or for warmth or to keep predators or demons at bay. Though impossible where no solid fuel is used, and inconvenient even in the best-equipped high-tech modern kitchen, this is a kind of cooking capable of achieving dishes of great sophistication. Archestratus of Gela recommended bonito wrapped in fig leaves with a pinch of marjoram, consigned to the embers until the leaves
blacken and smoke
. Charring seems simple, but can be made versatile by the use of pastes and marinades to coat foods
before they are consigned to the flame, or by basting with well-chosen liquors or sauces. If this was the first form of cookery, it remains one of the most appetizing and surely one of the most widely practiced. An unbroken tradition unites the suburban barbecue or campfire weenie roasts with one of the most famous feasts in Western literature: the banquet with which Nestor the charioteer honored Athene in the
Odyssey.

The axe cut through the tendons of the heifer's neck and it collapsed. At this, the women raised their celebratory cry…. When the dark blood had gushed out and life had left the heifer's body, they swiftly dismembered the carcass, cut out the thigh bones in the usual way, wrapped them in folds of fat and laid raw meat above them. The venerable King burnt these on the firewood, sprinkling red wine over the flames, while the young men gathered round with five-pronged forks in their hands. When the thighs were burnt up and they had tasted the inner parts, they carved the rest into small pieces, pierced them with skewers and held the sharp ends to the fire till
all was roasted
.

Yet this—which can be surmised as the most primitive technology of cooking—has obvious disadvantages. It permits only a limited culinary repertoire. It cannot cope with foods which require slow cooking. It requires carcasses to be butchered raw, with unnecessary expenditure of energy; and it consumes large amounts of fuel. It has unmistakable connotations of savagery, especially if the meat is only given rudimentary butchering before the roasting. An Italian visitor to the pampa in 1910 was struck by the “utterly primitive” way the gauchos cooked their meat in the hide “so that it conserves its bloody juices” and ate it with razors while seated
on tree trunks
.

The early cook's solution was the invention of the hot-stone griddle: using fire to heat stones, and hot stones to
cook food on
. This is particularly effective for foods that come naturally wrapped by coatings which retain moisture while being permeated by heat—mollusks by their shells, for instance, or some kinds of fruits or wild grains by thick or densely fibrous husks. Alternatively, food can be leaf-wrapped, as for ember cookery. In this style of cookery, the stones can be piled in order to envelop the food in heat, though this does not mean that hot stones have the same result as embers: if they press on the food, their weight affects it. If cavities are created to avoid this, they form air pockets and the effect of all-around heat is diminished. The time-honored ways of getting around these problems are to use suitable leaves, grasses, turf or animal pelts as upper layers of insulation. It is not hard for a traveler imbued with a modest spirit of adventure to find this style
of cooking today. A few years ago in the Cook Islands, Hugo Dunn-Meynell sampled leaf-wrapped parcels of manioc, breadfruit, taro, octopus, sweet potatoes, suckling pig, parrot fish and chicken marinated in guava juice, on pumice stones heated over pits of coconut husks. Some families used pits over a century and a half old. The husks were lit by rubbing banana wood
sticks together
.

In contemporary civilization, at least until recently, the likeliest context in which to reexperience hot-stone cuisine has been the clambake. In New England in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, these were genuine communal or civic undertakings, perpetuating practices which early colonists learned from Indians. The town outing enacted in Rodgers and Hammerstein's
Carousel,
where “that sure was a real good clambake” and the revelers “sure had a real good time,” captures the romance, ingenuous or innocent, with which traditional clambakes are remembered. So does the intent, intense concentration with which clambake eaters bend to their task in Winslow Homer's painting. The clams had to be dug from the sand while the fire was made of driftwood and seaweed to heat the stones. Because the clamshells open with heat, the upper insulators had to be impermeable: otherwise the clams' natural juices would evaporate with unpalatable effects.

A refinement of great importance in the history of hot-stone cookery was the cooking pit. This innovation took ingenuity to devise, but no tools except a digging implement to fashion. A dry pit could be heated
with stone
s to make an oven. A pit dug below the water table, heated by the same means, made a boiler or poacher. This represented an innovation of enormous importance—unequaled by any subsequent technical innovation in the history of cooking until our own day: it facilitated boiling, a new method of cooking or, at least, one which previously could only be approximated by using a tripe or skin filled with water, suspended over the fire, as a cooking pot. Late but representative examples were discovered in Ireland at Ballyvourney, County Cork, in 1952, where the water table was high enough to keep water from seeping away. In the second millennium
B.C.,
a trough had been opened in a peat bog and lined with timber. Nearby an oven had been made in piled-up dry soil by scooping out a cavity and lining it with stone. There are at least four thousand similar sites in
Ireland alone
. Experiments conducted on the spot showed that large joints cooked satisfactorily in a few hours if hot stones were regularly replaced under a turf lid. About seventy gallons of water can be brought to boiling point in about half an hour by this method. In clay soil, the inner lining of the pit would tend to bake into earthenware, making the sides watertight enough for water to be poured into pits in which it did not occur naturally. Alternatively, the inside of any pit could be smeared with clay and fired to hardness.

Pit-cooked food is not easily obtained in the modern Western world, except by experiment in the field (or, occasionally, at a traditional open pit barbecue in the American Southwest). In his cowboy days, which extended into the early decades of this century, James H. Cook considered it a treat to enjoy a hog's head “Indian style”: buried among live coals for several hours in a pit two and a half feet deep. It “came from the hole resembling a lump of charcoal, but the flavor appealed greatly to such epicures of the brush country as
usually feasted on it
.” Cooking pits are still favored by traditional cooks in rural locations in much of the Pacific and parts of the Indian Ocean. It must be admitted, however, that civilization tends to crowd them out. Their great disadvantage is that for all but a few small or simple dishes which demand little heat, it is necessary, even for dry cookery, to kindle fire outside the pit and heat it by transferring hot stones. Nevertheless, an effect similar or identical to that of pit cookery can be procured by using the clay oven usually called “tandoor,” or by some such name, in India and the Middle East. Tandoori cuisine is surely a development from pit cookery. In essence, the tandoor is a cooking pit, elevated above ground. Fire is kindled inside it: the aperture at the top has to be broad enough to keep the fire supplied with oxygen but narrow enough to be conveniently sealed with a heavy lid without much temperature loss once the fire has been allowed to die down. While the structure heats up, dough can be slapped onto the outer walls to make flat bread. After the fire dies, the heat-retaining properties of the oven can be used to bake meat, fish and vegetables or to stew casseroles.

All these technologies—of cooking with embers, naked flames and heated stones, in pits or over open fires—certainly predated specialized cookware. Though shells may have made good stock pots, in antiquity, there are few places in the world with shells large enough for economical cooking. Only those of turtles and similar creatures can have preempted the manufactured pot. Yet pots—even those hewn from wood—must be supposed to have been relatively late inventions in the history of humankind; those of clay or metal, of course, arose later still. Weaving fronds or grasses is a simpler technology to master and if the right kinds of plants are available can produce entirely watertight vessels, such as are still in use among peoples of Northwest America. A frequently asserted explanation for the invention of earthenware pottery in remote antiquity is that wicker vessels were smeared with clay as insulation to enable them to be suspended over fire.