The glorious alchemy of the kitchen
The pleasures and benefits of cooking your own food
Is bacon irresistible because of the fat, the salt, the smoke? None of the above, apparently. In his new book, Cooked, Michael Pollan writes that bacon makes us happy because it’s loaded with the taste umami. In fact, it delivers a veritable tsunami of umami, the so-called fifth flavour after salty, sweet, sour and bitter. We crave umami, also plentiful in mother’s milk, because it’s an indicator of protein.
A substantial and sometimes delectable stew of anthropology, chemistry, sociology, history, polemic and culinary lore, Cooked is filled with such curious facts. Having explored the sources of food in his hugely influential bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma, California-based Pollan now turns his attention to how we, or industry, set about preparing what we eat.
A base ingredient of the impressively researched book is the provocative hypothesis, from Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham, that if our ancestors hadn’t started cooking their food millions of years ago, there would be no human culture. When they began roasting woolly mammoth over a fire instead of endlessly foraging for and ingesting raw food, their stomachs got smaller, their brains got bigger, and their time was freed up to think and create, leading to the emergence down the road of Plato and Shakespeare . . . and Iggy Pop.
But now we seem to be abandoning the kitchen, Pollan laments. Despite the rise of foodie-ism, many of us spend less time cooking than we do watching celebrity chefs on TV. In the U.S., at least, food prep is down to 27 minutes a day, a chunk of that time devoted to sticking industrially produced meals in the microwave and watching the timer.
For Pollan, cooking is a rite, almost a sacrament, which maintains our ties to nature and to each other.
Cooked falls into sections based on the old concept of the four elements: fire, water, air and earth. “Fire” is all about barbeque — specifically, the U.S. tradition of pork barbeque — and Pollan meets up with “pit masters” to learn how the alchemy through which they transform pale pink slabs of flesh into mahogany-coloured pleasure.
Pollan’s sojourn in barbeque-land, despite some lovely writing (Spanish chef Bittor Arguinzoniz is said to use fire to achieve “something more like an italicization of nature”), does go on, especially when the author is writing about the frankly dirt-simple process of North Carolina barbeque (put pig on grill above hot coals, wait many hours). And he pushes his concept of the barbeque master as a sort of priest way too hard.
The book picks up from there, however, as Cooked goes on to conjure up stews and ragouts in the “Water” section and bread in “Air.” This is where Pollan, the inquisitive, somewhat self-mocking reporter and aspiring home cook, really connects with his subject matter and the reader, teaching some essential cookery lessons in the process (must not brown onions in soffrito).
There are some memorably obsessive characters, such as acclaimed San Francisco-area bread maker Chad Robertson, who used to take his sourdough starter with him on vacation and to the movies, because he “didn’t trust anyone with it.”
The final section, “Earth,” is almost a book unto itself, an examination of how the same process of microbial decomposition that produces soil is also at work in “fermented” foods — cheese, tofu, yogurt, chocolate (yes, cocoa beans are fermen- ted), wine, sauerkraut, miso, salami, beer, kimchi and countless others. We meet a tribe of fermentation freaks who believe “live culture” is a cure-all. And we watch as Pollan makes mead and beer.
By the end of this at times unwieldy but provocative book, it’s hard not to buy Pollan’s argument that cooking is “one of the most interesting and worthwhile things we humans do.”