Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (23 page)

In drawing his bright line between roasting
and boiling as the two principal modes of food preparation, Claude Lévi-Strauss
characterized them, respectively, as “exocuisine” and
“endocuisine”—that is, “outside” and “inside”
cooking. Lévi-Strauss wants us to take these terms figuratively as well as literally,
since he regarded the methods as recipes for something much bigger than a meal: Each
also tells a different story about our relationship to both nature and other people. So
cooking over fire was “outside” cooking in two senses: Not only was the
cooking done outside, in the open, with the meat exposed to the flames, but the process
itself was exposed to the larger social world—it was a public ritual conducted by men
and open to outsiders. By comparison, endo-, or inside, cooking took place within the
confines of the closed pot and, more often than not, within the private space of the
household. The interior of the cook pot itself, concave and shielding its contents from
view, symbolized the home and the family, its lid a kind of roof over a domestic space
presided over by women. Lévi-Strauss describes New World tribes where “a man never
boils anything,” and others in which boiling was associated with the strengthening
of family ties, and roasting with the
weakening of those ties, since
guests, including strangers, were often invited to partake.

Boiled food also stands at a further remove
from uncivilized nature than does roasted food, which requires nothing more than the
element of fire (and perhaps a stick) to cook the meal. In addition to a fire, boiling
depends on a cultural artifact—the pot—and the process involves not just one but two
mediations—a layer of clay and the medium of water—between food and flame. The pot also
allows for a more complete cooking of foods, which is why Aristotle rated boiling
“higher,” or more civilized, than roasting, “on the grounds that it
was more effective in destroying the rawness of meat.” (Evidently he was
unfamiliar with slow-cooked Southern barbecue.) If all cooking is a process of
transforming the stuff of nature into culture, boiling achieves a more complete
transformation of the animal being eaten by (among other things) eliminating any trace
of blood.

After the meal, the cooking implements used
to boil food are all carefully cleaned and preserved, Lévi-Strauss points out, while the
wooden frame used to barbecue meat was traditionally destroyed after the feast. Why? For
fear that the vengeful animals would use it to turn the tables and roast one of us. This
superstition speaks to the fact that roasting is more closely associated with violence
and danger, which might explain why in many cultures women—traditionally identified with
giving life rather than taking it—are prohibited from doing it. “Boiled food is
life,” Lévi-Strauss writes, “roast food death.” He reports finding
countless examples in the world’s folklore of “cauldrons of
immortality,” but not a single example of a “spit of immortality.”

Is there anyone who takes the trouble to
clean and care for a grill, or grilling implement, the way we do an old casserole or
serving spoon from our childhood? It’s not just the elements that account for the
differential survival rates of outdoor grills and cooking pots. The
former get tossed as soon as the baked-on grime becomes too thick to face; the latter
become cherished family heirlooms.

There’s not a lot I can recall of my
mother’s kitchen when I was growing up, but one image I can easily summon is of
the turquoise casserole from which she ladled out beef stews and chicken soups. Made by
Dansk, it was Scandinavian in design, sleek and thinly walled, though its unexpected
heft suggested steel beneath the aquamarine enamel. Crowning the casserole was a lid
that you lifted using a slender X-shaped handle; the handle was cleverly designed to
allow the inverted top to double as a trivet. Every chip and scratch of its bright
enamel is precisely recorded in my memory; I’m sure even today I could pick my
mother’s casserole out of a lineup of otherwise identical ones.

The captivating smells that emanated from
that pot, their never-once-broken promise of something rich and satisfying to eat,
seeped out to fill the house and lure us from our separate rooms toward the kitchen as
dinnertime approached. In our modern, all-electric 1960s kitchen, that pot with its
centripetal energies was the closest thing we had to a hearth, a warm and fragrant
synecdoche for domestic well-being.

In fact, my attempt to reconstruct that
kitchen in memory fifty years later starts from an image of the aquamarine casserole
perched on top of the stove, and gradually builds out from there, to take in the yellow
porcelain sink, the rectangular white Formica table in the corner with the curvy
Jetsons
-style chairs, the tan rotary phone on the wall, the birdcage
hanging (unwisely) next to that, and the picture window overlooking the great,
two-trunked oak tree in the front yard that loomed benevolently over the house. When it
was time for dinner, my mother would carry the casserole from the range to the table,
set it down dead center on its trivet, lift the turquoise lid, and serve us, one by one,
from the rising cloud of fragrant steam.

A comfortable old pot like that one, filled
with a thick stew still hatching bubbles from its surface, is a little like a kitchen in
miniature, an enclosed pocket of space in which a hodgepodge of cold ingredients get
transformed into the warm glow of a shared family meal. What more do you need? Like the
kitchen, the pot bears the traces of all the meals that have been cooked in it, and
there is a sense (even if it is only a superstition) in which all those past meals
somehow inform and improve the current one. A good pot holds memories.

It also holds us, or that’s the hope.
To eat from the same pot is to share something more than a meal. “To eat out of
the same cauldron” was, for the ancient Greeks, a trope for sharing the same fate:
We’re all in this together
. In the same way that the stew pot blends
a great many different ingredients together, forging them into a single memorable
flavor, it brings the family together as well. (Or at least it did, until my sisters
declared themselves vegetarians, splintering the one-pot family meals into a menu of
different entrées.) This might sound like a sentimental conceit, but compare the one-pot
dinner to the sort of meal(s) that typically emerge from the microwave: a succession of
single-serving portions, each attempting to simulate a different cuisine and hit a
different demographic, with no two of those portions ever ready to eat at the same time.
If the first gastronomic revolution unfolded under the sign of community, gathered
around the animal roasting on the fire, and the second that of the family, gathered
around the stew pot, then the third one, now well under way, seems to be consecrated to
the individual:
Have it your way
. Whereas the motto hovering over every great
pot is the same one stamped on the coins in our pocket:
E pluribus unum
.

The symbolic power of the pot—to gather
together, to harmonize—might begin in the home, but it reaches well beyond it, all the
way
into the political realm. The ancient Chinese conceived of the
well-governed state as a cauldron, specifically a three-legged one called a
ding
. In this monumental pot the skilled chef-cum-administrator deploys his
culinary skills to forge a diversity of clashing interests into a single harmonious
dish. Closer to home, the “melting pot” sought to achieve a similar result
in the social sphere, resolving the diverse flavors of our far-flung immigrant histories
into a single American stew. The common pot is always pushing against the sovereignty of
individual taste. Which might help explain why its popularity is in decline today while
the microwave’s is ascendant.

But it would be a mistake to overlook the
darker side of cooking in pots. Another Greek saying—“To boil in the same
cauldron”—suggests a less happy take on the shared destiny. There is, too, the
witch’s cauldron, also presided over by women, yet producing the very antithesis
of comfort food. Who knows
what
is cooking down there in that scary pot?
Bubbling away beneath the murky swamp of sauce might be eye of newt or tail of rat. All
pot cooking is occult in some degree, the precise identity of the ingredients hidden
from inspection, more or less illegible. “Mystery meat” is how children
refer to it, and rightly so.

Given what a classicist once called
“the Homeric horror of formlessness,” it’s no wonder that roasting is
the only kind of cooking ever described in Homer. The pot dish, lidded and turbid, has
none of the Apollonian clarity of a recognizable animal on a spit; it trades that
brightly lit, hard-edged object and its legible world for something darker, more fluid
and inchoate. What emerges from this or any other pot is not food for the eye so much as
for the nose, a primordial Dionysian soup, but evolving in reverse, decomposing forms
rather than creating them. To eat from the pot always involves at least a little leap
into unknown waters.

I don’t own a cauldron, unfortunately,
but we do own a couple of heavy-duty casseroles made from cast iron (and coated in a
blue enamel) and a red porcelain tagine, one of those Moroccan pots with stovepipe lids
that look like festive hats. Recently I bought two clay casseroles: a La Chamba handmade
in Colombia from unglazed black clay, and a wide terra-cotta casserole from Tuscany
glazed the color of winter wheat. I like to think of these new pots as future heirlooms,
provided I don’t crack or drop them before they’ve had a chance to become
venerable. Such pots might begin life as ordinary commodities, but in time the ones that
endure accumulate rich sediments of family history, until they become one of the very
least commodified objects in our possession.

The weight and thickness of these
receptacles make them ideal for slow-cooked braises and stews, as well as for soups and
beans. They warm up slowly and diffuse their heat evenly through the dish, gently
blending flavors without developing hot spots that might cause some ingredients to cook
too fast or burn. The advantage of the cast-iron casserole, by comparison, is that you
can put it directly on the flame to brown meat or sweat a soffritto. Most earthenware
pots can be used only in the oven, which means dirtying a second pot or pan to prepare
ingredients. But clay pots are the gentlest cookware there is, and the most conserving
of both heat and memory: Many cooks claim that over time they build up flavors in their
clay that will improve anything you cook in them. Earthenware pots can also be brought
to the table, where they will keep their contents piping hot as long as guests care to
linger.

The vegetables go into the cook pot first,
the mirepoix or soffritto
(and/or any other vegetables called for by
the recipe) spread out evenly across the bottom of the dish to form a nice cushion for
the larger, chunkier ingredients. You don’t want pieces of meat sitting directly
on the pot’s hot floor, where they might stick or burn, and have that much less
opportunity to mingle productively with the other ingredients. Only after the meat has
been comfortably settled on its bed of vegetables should the braising liquid be
introduced: the all-important medium that will unify the ingredients, and in time become
itself something much greater than the sum of whatever it was and everything it now
connects—sauce!

“Whatever it was” might be wine
or stock or a purée or juice or milk or beer or dashi or plain old water from the tap,
depending on the recipe and its cultural reference or the cook’s desire. But in
fact all of these liquids are really just enhanced forms of water, H
₂
O serving as what the chemists call the “continuous phase” in
which various other molecules disperse to great and flavorful effect.