Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (19 page)

But wherever we go, we have to do a lot of
chopping to get there. On the plus side, chopping leaves you plenty of time for
reflection, and one of the things I’ve been thinking about while doing it is,
appropriately enough, the “drudgery” of everyday cooking. Curiously, you
never hear that word around the grill. When men cook outdoors over a fire, it’s
usually a special occasion, so by definition cannot be “drudgery.” Grill
work itself is less prosaic, too: less detailed (no recipe needed) but also more social,
more public, more like performance.
Fire! Smoke! Animals!—This is
drama, drudgery’s antithesis, and about as far from dicing and mincing, from the
fine work of fingers, as a cook can get. Indeed, the only time the grill man or pit
master deploys a knife is at the very end of his show, to carve or chop the animal, and
that qualifies as ceremony.

There’s nothing ceremonial about
chopping vegetables on a kitchen counter, slowly sautéing them in a pan, adding a
liquid, and then tending the covered pot for hours. For one thing, there’s nothing
to
look
at. (And please don’t even try, since a watched pot never boils.)
For another, this sort of cooking takes places indoors, in the prosy confines of a
kitchen. No, this is real work.

So why would you—why would anyone?—do it if
you didn’t have to? When you could go out or order in or pull “a home meal
replacement” from the freezer and nuke it in the microwave? This is of course
precisely what more and more people
are
doing today instead of cooking. Cooking
is no longer obligatory, and that marks a shift in human history, one whose full
implications we’re just beginning to reckon. No one
has
to chop onions
anymore, not even the poor. Corporations are more than happy to chop them for us, and
often at bargain rates. In many ways this has been a blessing, especially for women, who
in most cultures for most of history have chopped most of the onions. Today, the typical
American spends a mere twenty-seven minutes a day on food preparation, and another four
minutes cleaning up. That’s less than half the time spent cooking and cleaning up
in 1965, when I was a boy. Somewhat more than half of the evening meals an American eats
today are still “cooked at home,” according to the market researchers. That
sounds like a lot, until you discover
that the meaning of the verb
“to cook” has been defined radically downward in the last few years.

I learned this from a veteran food-industry
market researcher named Harry Balzer, a blunt Chicagoan with whom I’ve now spent
several illuminating, if discouraging, hours discussing the future of cooking. Balzer
has been studying American eating habits for more than thirty years; the NPD Group, the
market-research firm he’s worked for since 1978, collects data from a pool of two
thousand food diaries to track American eating habits. A few years ago, Balzer noticed
that the definition of cooking held by his respondents had grown so broad as to be
meaningless.

“People call things
‘cooking’ today that would roll their grandmother in her grave,” he
explained. “Like heating up a can of food or microwaving a frozen pizza.” So
the firm decided to tighten up, at least slightly, the definition of what it means to
cook, in order to capture what was really going on in American kitchens. To cook
“from scratch,” they decreed, means to prepare a main dish that requires
some “assembly of ingredients.” So microwaving a pizza does not count as
cooking, though washing a head of lettuce and pouring bottled dressing over it does.
Under this generous dispensation (no chopping required), you’re also cooking when
you spread mayonnaise on a slice of bread and pile on some cold cuts or a hamburger
patty. (Home or away, a sandwich is today the most popular meal in America.) At least by
Harry Balzer’s none-too-exacting standards, we Americans are still cooking up a
storm: 58 percent of our evening meals qualify, though even that figure has been falling
steadily since the 1980s.

Like most people who study consumer
behavior, Balzer has developed a somewhat cynical view of human nature, which his
research suggests is ever driven by the quest to save time or money or, if
possible, both. He puts it less delicately: “Face it:
We’re basically cheap and lazy.” Over the course of several conversations, I
kept asking him what his research had to say about the prevalence of the activity I
referred to as “real scratch cooking”—the kind of cooking that begins with
chopping onions. But he wouldn’t even touch the term. Why? Apparently the activity
has become so rarefied as to elude his tools of measurement.

“Here’s an analogy,”
Balzer offered. “A hundred years ago, chicken for dinner meant going out and
catching, killing, plucking, and gutting a chicken. Do you know anybody who still does
that? It would be considered crazy! Well, that’s exactly how cooking will seem to
your grandchildren. Like sewing, or darning socks—something people used to do when they
had no other choice. Get over it!”

Maybe we should get over it. But before we
do, it’s worth considering for a moment how even something as tedious as chopping
onions gets, paradoxically, more interesting, and more problematic, as soon as doing it
is no longer obligatory. When cooking is optional, a person can elect not to do it, a
choice that may reflect one’s values or simply a desire to use the time in some
other way. Yet for the person who believes home cooking still has
some
value,
its new status as optional sets up a conflict—between competing desires—that may never
have surfaced when cooking was simply what had to be done if the family was to eat. As
soon as we have choices about how to spend our time, time is suddenly in much shorter
supply, and it becomes that much harder to
be
in the kitchen, in either the
literal or the Buddhist sense. Shortcuts suddenly seem more attractive. (
I can buy a
bottle of chopped garlic, or a bag of prechopped mirepoix!
) Because you could
be doing something else, something more pressing or simply more fun. This is certainly
how I’ve usually felt when chopping onions.

By the same token, though, the not-cook
option—for which we have food manufacturers and fast-food restaurants to thank—means
that people can also, for the first time, choose to cook purely for
the pleasure of doing it. A form of “work” can now be approached as a
“leisure activity.” But this is not a choice Harry Balzer is willing to take
very seriously, either because he thinks we’re just too lazy to enjoy doing any
unnecessary work, or because he is, finally, in the business of helping food companies
profit from the decline of everyday home cooking. Or it could simply be that he
subscribes to the general view in a modern specialized consumer culture that
“leisure activities” should involve consumption, whereas any activity
involving production is leisure’s opposite: work. Put another way, a leisure
activity is one you can’t conceive of paying someone else to do for you. (Watching
television, for example, or reading a book, or doing the crossword puzzle.) Everything
else—everything that the market has figured out a way to do for us—becomes a species of
work, something that any rational actor would presumably outsource just as soon as he or
she could afford to.

This at least is how economists seem to view
the question of work and leisure: as antithetical terms that neatly line up with the
equally antithetical categories of production and consumption. But perhaps that view
says more about them, and consumer capitalism, than it does about us. For one of the
most interesting things about cooking today—optional cooking—is how it confounds the
rigid categories of work and leisure, of production and consumption. The Buddhists are
probably right about chopping onions: It’s all a matter of how you choose to see
and experience it, as a chore to resist or a kind of path—a practice, even. Depending on
the context, the very same activity can have diametrically opposed meanings. Is cooking
a form of oppression, as many feminists argued (with some justification, I might add) in
the 1960s? Back in the 1970s, KFC ran billboards depicting a family-sized bucket of
fried chicken under the slogan “Women’s Liberation.” And so perhaps it
was, and still is for many women even now, and
especially when both
partners work at jobs outside the house. Yet even with those demands, today there are
more and more people, men and women both, who view home cooking—and even raising and
killing chickens!—as a means of liberation from the influence, on our lives and culture,
of corporations like KFC. Which raises an interesting question: As a political matter,
is home cooking today a reactionary or a progressive way to spend one’s time?

At the moment, it’s all up for grabs.
Which is one reason I was curious to spend some time in the kitchen learning how to cook
the very kinds of dishes that throw these sorts of questions into sharp relief.
“Grandma cooking,” as it’s sometimes called: the formerly mundane (now
“special”) dishes that are cooked in pots and, more often than not, begin
with onions and take considerably more than twenty minutes to put on the table. I
seriously doubted I would ever get to the stage of enlightenment where, when chopping
onions, I was
just
chopping onions. (You’ll know I succeeded if the rest
of these pages are blank. Oh—guess not.) But perhaps I could at least get to a place
where I was completely at home in the kitchen, and where whatever lies on the other side
of the “end of cooking” would come into sharper focus.

Here’s the first thing I learned: In
the same way that the procedure for cooking over fire, if viewed from a sufficient
distance, can be reduced to a single basic recipe (animal plus wood fire and time), so,
it turns out, can cooking with water in pots. If you thumb through cookbooks from every
imaginable culinary tradition, the variations seem infinite, and though there
are
a million different ways to make a stew or braise or soup, the
underlying structure, or syntax, of all these dishes
is very nearly
universal. Let me propose a radically simplified version of that structure, something
that might serve as a kind of template or Ur-recipe for dishes organized around the
element of water:

Dice some aromatic plants

Sauté them in some fat

Brown piece(s) of meat (or other
featured ingredient)

Put everything in a pot

Add some water (or stock, wine, milk,
etc.)

Simmer, below the boil, for a long
time

As a practical matter, the virtue of this
sort of skeleton recipe, for me anyway, is that it makes cooking any such dish much less
daunting—and daunted is how I usually feel when confronted by a multistep recipe. But
once you get a feel for the basic theme, all the variations become much easier to
master.

Paring away the dense undergrowth of
culinary detail from a whole genre of recipes has the added virtue of helping to expose
what a particular mode of cooking—of transforming the stuff of nature into the occasion
of a meal—might have to say about us and our world. Do it often enough, and you begin to
see that cooking with fire implies a completely different narrative, about the natural
world on one side and the social world on the other, than does cooking with water.
Cooking with fire tells a story about community, and, perhaps, about where we fit in the
cosmic order of things. Like the column of smoke that rises from the pit, it’s a
story that unfolds on a vertical axis, with all sorts of heroic (or at least mock
heroic) flourishes. There’s a priest, sort of, and a ritual, too, even a kind of
altar; death is confronted, and the element of fire is brought under control.

To turn from the bright sunlight of this
Homeric world and come
into the kitchen of covered pots and simmering
liquids feels like stepping out of an epic and into a novel. So, if every recipe tells a
story, what kind of tale might cooking with the element of water have to tell?