Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (22 page)

The other task I usually tried to get done
before Samin arrived on Sunday was to salt the meat we were planning to cook, an
operation she regarded as absolutely critical and urged me to tackle early and in a
spirit of shocking extravagance. “Use at least three times as much salt as you
think you should,” she advised. (A second authority I consulted employed the same
formulation, but upped the factor to five.) Like many chefs, Samin believes that knowing
how to salt food properly is the very essence of cooking, and that amateurs like me
approach the saltbox far too timorously.

Before we learned to cook food in pots,
humans never had to think about adding salt to their food. Animal flesh contains all the
salt our bodies need, and roasting meat preserves most of the salt in it. It was only
with the advent of agriculture, when people began relying on a diet of grain and other
plants, and took to boiling much of their food (leaching the salt from it in the
process), that deficiencies of sodium became a problem. This is when salt—the only
mineral we deliberately eat—became a precious commodity. Yet in a modern diet completely
saturated with sodium, deficiencies are not exactly a problem, so why would we want to
salt meat at all, let alone so extravagantly?

Samin prefaced her defense of the practice
by pointing out that the salt we add to our food represents a tiny fraction of the salt
people get from their diet. Most of the salt we eat comes from processed foods, which
account for 80 percent of the typical American’s daily intake of
sodium. “So, if you don’t eat a lot of processed foods, you don’t
need to worry about it. Which means: Don’t ever be afraid of salt!”

Judiciously applied, Samin explained, salt
brings out the intrinsic flavors of many foods and can improve their texture and
appearance. But it is not only the amount of salt that matters; the timing of its
application is important, too. Some dishes (like meat) should get salted early, some in
the middle of the cooking process, some only immediately before serving, and still
others at every step along the way. In the case of meat that will be stewed or braised,
you can’t salt too soon or too liberally. At least one day before cooking was
good; two or three days were even better.

But doesn’t salting dry out a piece of
meat? Yes, it can,
if
you don’t salt it far enough in advance. Initially,
salt draws moisture out of the cells of muscles, which is why, if you haven’t
salted your meat well in advance of cooking it, you’re probably better off not
doing it at all. But as the salt draws water out of the meat, a kind of osmotic vacuum
forms in the cells. Once the salt has been diluted by the water it has attracted to it,
this salty liquid is drawn back into the cells (along with any spices or other
flavorings present in it), greatly improving the meat’s flavor. Put simply,
salting early helps meat later absorb flavors, including but not limited to the flavor
of salt.

It took me awhile, but eventually I got
comfortable salting meat to Samin’s ultraliberal specifications.
“Sprinkling” does not do justice to the practice she taught me, though
“pouring it on” might be putting matters a bit too strongly. She taught me
how to pick up quantities of kosher salt by dipping all five fingers into the box like a
crane and then, with a rhythmic rubbing together of thumb against fingers (a bit like
sowing tiny seeds), I found I could spread a nice, even layer of salt all over a piece
of meat, making sure to coat any crevices and cavities. Sowing this much salt felt all
wrong, I have to admit, and yet,
when I discovered the meat
didn’t come out tasting particularly salty, I succumbed. Now I, too, am a proud,
indulgent liberal with the salt.

The last important step before putting the
ingredients of a braise or stew into the pot is to brown the meat in a little fat. This
is done for two reasons: to add another layer of flavor to the dish by incorporating the
hundreds of tasty compounds created by the Maillard reaction and caramelization, and to
make the dish more appealing to look at, browned meat being more attractive than gray.
Without browning, Samin explained, both the flavor and color of the meat would be
paler.

The problem is that meat won’t ever
brown in a liquid that consists mostly of water. In order for the Maillard reaction to
take place, meat needs to reach a higher temperature—250˚F at least—than water can ever
attain, since water can never exceed the boiling point—212˚F. To caramelize the sugars
in meat requires an even higher temperature, in excess of 330˚F. Because oil can reach
these temperatures that water can’t, the best way to brown meat is in a pan with a
little fat. (Browning can be accomplished in a hot oven, too, and often is in
restaurants, but at some risk of drying out the meat.)

Many recipes recommend patting dry the
exterior of the meat to promote better browning. Some are particular as to what kind of
fat to brown meat in: Julia Child liked to use bacon fat, which adds another layer of
flavor to a dish. Sometimes, Samin and I would brown the meat while the mirepoix or
soffritto cooked in another pan; other times, we’d brown the meat first, leaving
us a pan coated with flavored fat and browned bits of meat in which to cook, and enrich,
the mirepoix.

A few of Samin’s tips for browning: Big
chunks of meat are better than small; bone in is better than out. Use just enough oil to
coat the pan and conduct heat evenly; too much, and you’ll be frying the meat, too
little, you’re apt to scorch it over patches of dry, naked pan. Cast iron is best.
Watch carefully to prevent any blackening, which can render the whole dish bitter. But
brown every surface you can reach, the sides included. Take your time to do it
thoroughly. And stop as soon as the color is “toasty beautiful.”

In short, another straightforward kitchen
procedure improved by patience and presence.

Whether we were browning a duck leg or a
lamb neck or a shoulder of pork, this was the point when the kitchen would begin to fill
with the complex and captivating aromas of the browning reactions: savory and meaty, but
also earthy, floral, and sweet, the precise mix and balance of them all depending on the
type of meat being browned. Outwardly, browning looks like a fairly simple operation,
but at the molecular level it adds a great deal of complexity to the dish, hundreds of
new compounds and, taken together, a whole other layer of flavors. And there was yet
another layer still to add: After we removed the browned meat from the pan, we would
deglaze it with a little wine, boiling off the alcohol while freeing up the browned bits
stuck on the bottom of the pan with a spatula. This liquid would end up in the braise,
too, adding “one more little layer of deliciousness”—this on top of the
mirepoix layer and the Maillard layer we had already laid down. I was beginning to
understand what Samin meant when she talked about “building” the flavor of a
simple dish by extracting the deepest, furthest, richest flavors from even the humblest
of ingredients. And that’s before we put anything into the pot.

In 1822, a German art historian and
gastronome by the name of Baron Karl Friedrich von Rumohr published a book called
The Essence of Cookery
that, among other things, sought to elevate the
prestige of the humble stockpot, and see it for the revolutionary development in human
history that it was. “Enough of the fire,” the Baron declared.
“Innumerable natural products were rendered edible by the invention of the cooking
pot,” he wrote, a method of cooking he deemed more highly evolved and richer in
possibilities than cooking over a fire. “Man had finally learned the arts of
boiling and stewing and was now able to combine animal products with the nutritious and
aromatic products of the plant kingdom, creating a new end product. For the first time,
it was possible for the art of cookery to be developed in all directions.”

Perhaps because a German is bound to have
less credibility on matters of gastronomy than a Frenchman, Rumohr is not nearly so well
known or widely read today as his more flamboyant contemporary, Jean-Anthelme
Brillat-Savarin. But in some ways
The Essence of Cookery
holds up better than
The Physiology of Taste
, in which much of the science and history is pure
fancy. Compared with Brillat-Savarin, Baron Rumohr has his feet firmly planted on the
ground, or, rather, on the floor of the everyday domestic kitchen, a place where water
commands as much respect as fire. In fact, his definition of cooking includes it:
“To develop, with the aid of heat, water and salt, the
nutritional, refreshing, and delectable qualities of those natural substances which
are suitable for the nourishment or restoration of mankind.” Rumohr’s aim in
writing
The
Essence of Cookery
was to return cooking, which he felt had fallen into a
“state of over-refinement and exaggeration,” back to basics, and nothing
symbolized straightforward, honest cooking better than the stockpot.

Historically, cooking in pots with water
comes much later than cooking with fire, since it awaited the development of watertight
and fireproof containers in which to do it. Exactly when these appeared, however, is
uncertain. Some archaeologists put the advent of ceramic pottery as early as twenty
thousand years ago in Asia. Cooking pots show up in many places around the world,
including the Nile River delta, the Levant, and Central America, between ten thousand
and seven thousand years ago. All of these dates fall hundreds of thousands of years
after humankind domesticated fire, and it is generally agreed that the practice of
cooking in pots didn’t become widespread until the Neolithic era, when humans
settled into patterns of life organized around agriculture. The technologies of
agriculture and clay pottery—both of which make different uses of earth and fire—turn
out to be closely linked.

Yet there is reason to believe that food was
being boiled even before the invention of cooking pots. In numerous ancient sites around
the world, archaeologists have dug up burned stones and fired clay balls the purpose of
which was for many years a mystery. In the 1990s, a young Native American archaeologist
named Sonya Atalay was working in a ninety-five-hundred-year-old site called Çatalhöyük,
one of the earliest known urban centers in Turkey, when she found thousands of round
fist-sized fired-clay balls. Stumped, she brought a couple of the balls to an elder in
her tribe, the Ojibwa, hoping he could identify them. He took one look and told her:
“You don’t need a Ph.D. to know that these are cooking stones.”

Archaeologists believe the stones were heated
in a fire and then dropped into an animal skin or watertight basket that had been filled
with water. The hot cooking balls allowed the cook to bring water to a boil without
having to expose its container to the direct heat of a fire. This method, which is still
employed today by some indigenous tribes, allowed people to soften seeds, grains, and
nuts and render many toxic or bitter plant foods edible long before there were pots.

Boiling water vastly expanded the horizons
of edibility for our species, especially in the world of plants. All kinds of formerly
inedible seeds, tubers, legumes, and nuts could now be rendered soft and safe—and
therefore the exclusive nutritional property of
Homo sapiens
. In time, boiling
stones gave way to clay pots, a transition Atalay has documented at Çatalhöyük. The
invention of fired, watertight pots, which made boiling food safer and easier,
represented a second gastronomic revolution, the first having been the control of fire
for cooking. All this revolution lacked is its own Prometheus, though perhaps that is as
it should be for a method of cooking generally thought of as more domestic than
heroic.

But without the cook pot, just how far would
agriculture have gotten? Many of the important crops humankind has domesticated require
boiling (or at least soaking) for us to be able to eat them, especially the legumes and
the grains. The cook pot is a kind of second human stomach, an external organ of
digestion that allows us to consume plants that would otherwise be inedible or require
elaborate processing. These auxiliary clay stomachs made it possible for humans to
thrive on a diet of stored dry seeds, which in turn led to the accumulation of wealth,
the division of labor, and the rise of civilization. These developments are usually
credited to the rise of agriculture, and rightly so, but they depended as much on the
cook pot as on the plow.

Cooking food in pots also helped expand the
human population,
by allowing for earlier weaning of children (thereby
increasing fertility) and a longer life span, since both the very young and the very old
could now be fed soft foods and nutritious soups out of the pot, no teeth required. (So
pots functioned as external mouths as well.) In all these ways, the pot, by
domesticating the element of water, helped us to leave behind hunting and to settle
down. According to the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, the invention of the cook pot
(and its offshoot, the frying pan) is the last innovation in the history of cooking
until the advent in our own time of the microwave oven.