HISTORY OF COOKING

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors would find many foods we eat today unrecognizable, but they would likely find a meal at a restaurant such as elBulli or The Fat Duck particularly perplexing. There, foods have unexpected textures and temperatures, and meals are served not just on plates but in an array of specialized serving vessels. Dish after meticulously crafted dish arrives at the table even after diners are well beyond sated, and leftovers are discarded, not preserved for future use. Exotic fruits and vegetables are combined and transformed in ways thatpeople who view food merely as a means of subsistence would never contemplate. At these restaurants, food is about art, not nutrition.

How did we get from our hunter-gatherer origins to this era of culinary innovation? This chapter outlines this process, starting with the important role that cooking played in human evolution. When early hominids harnessed fire and learned to cook food, a series of physiological changes followed. The agricultural revolution led to another major advancement in food preparation, helping to usher in the idea of cooking to improve taste. Up to that time, cooking was primarily used to make food digestible or to remove toxins, but after the advent of agriculture, cooking became less of a pure necessity and more of an art.

Later, in many early civilizations around the world, the aristocracy played an important role in the development of cuisine. Wealthy families hired professional chefs to prepare their food, which led to vast differences between peasant fare and aristocratic food. We'll look at the cuisines that developed in some of the major world monarchies and discuss the role the nobility played in fostering this culinary advancement.

As cuisines diverged and matured around the world, tradition and innovation often came into conflict. Various culinary movements arose to upend the traditions of the time, but the innovations they introduced soon became codified as new traditions. In France, for example, chefs such as Antonin Careme and Auguste Escoffier established strict culinary rules and codes that had a profound influence on high-end cuisine as we know it in the Western world today.

In response to those strict rules, the Nouvelle cuisine movement developed in the mid-20th century. Setting out to shake up the French culinary establishment, the chefs associated with this movement largely succeeded; they helped to create a true revolution.

We will argue, however, that the ultimate culinary revolution is the one that has taken place in the past two decades. We call this the Modernist movement, and we'll look at what makes it so revolutionary and so modern. We'll examine thevarious factors that set the stage for Modernist innovations, including the revolution in industrialized food in the 1950s; Ferran Adria's amazingly creative work at e!Bulli, in Spain; Harold McGee and the advent of food science for the home chef; Heston Blumenthal's embrace of science and creativity at The Fat Duck, in England;and the advent of the sous vide method. Finally, we'll discuss where the Modernist revolution is today-and where it is headed.

ORIGINS OF COOKING

Nobody knows who the first cook was, but at some point in the distant past, early humans conquered fire and started using it to prepare food. Researchers have found what appear to be the remains of campfires made 1.5 million years ago by Homo erectus, one of the early human species. In hisintriguing book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, Harvard University anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues that cooking wasn't just a nicety; it played an essential role in human evolution. Cooking foods makes them more digestible, so the calories and some of the nutrients in them are easier to absorb. Thus, cooking allowed early humans to tap a wider variety of food sources and gain more nutrition from them.

The first cooks didn't do much to their food in the way of preparation or technique. We don't haveany recipes from prehistory, but we do have archaeological evidence of food preparation, backed up by our knowledge of how modern-day hunter-gatherers prepare their food. Meat is either roasted over a fire or boiled to make it tender; fruit is gathered and peeled; nuts are shelled. That's about it.

Necessity, rather than taste, often dictated how hunter-gatherers of the past prepared their food. Some foods had to be prepared carefully to remove toxins. Native American tribes in California developed a procedure to make acorns edible by removing their bitter tannic acid. Farther south, native peoples in Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela learned to remove the cyanide from cassava (also called manioc), a starchy root that is used today to make tapioca and is a staple crop across the tropics.

Hunter-gatherers also processed foods to preserve them. Because some hunter-gatherer societiesfaced uncertain food supplies, particularly in winter, they developed techniques such as smoking and drying to make foods last longer. They also created preparations such as pemmican (a mixture of meat, fat, and sometimes fruit) to preserve foods. Alcohol also required elaborate preparation, and societies around the world (motivated more by pleasure than by necessity) perfected means to ferment fruit or grain into alcohol.

Agriculture was invented independently at different places and times around the world, as people domesticated local plants and animals. This advance was a major turning point in human history, because farming fed people more reliably than hunting wild game and gathering wild plants did.

Farming wasn't easy in those early days. Although farming worked well when the crops came in, a crop failure meant famine and death. Overreliance on one or a handful of crops also resulted in malnutrition when those crops lackedthe necessary vitamins or nutrients. As the archaeological record clearly shows, early societies that relied on agriculture had many health problems, including starvation and vitamin deficiency.Gradually, however, agricultural societies improved their farming skills, increased their productivity, and decreased the risk of famine.Farming became more productive than hunting and gathering.

Yet agriculture also made the diet boring. Whereas hunter-gatherers relied on a wide variety of plants and animals, which changed with the seasons, farmers were more restricted in the crops they could plant and thus ate the same foods over and over. This motivated people to come up with ways to make their diets more interesting and palatable. A new reason for cooking was born: improving the taste and variety of food.

Agriculture also enabled the development of civilization. For the most part, hunter-gatherers could not stay in one place very long, nor could they live together in large numbers. Agriculture changed that. Farm fields needed to be tended, so farmers had to stay put. Agriculturalists needed permanent buildings for homes and other uses. In re sponse, cities and towns sprang up.

Because agriculture freed at least some of society from the task of providing food, people began to spend time doing other things. Visual arts existed before civilization, as cave paintings and petroglyphs show. So did music. But each of these art form s got an enormous boost from the advent of civilization, as did writing, religion, and politics. In societies nurtured and supported by farmed food, all aspects of human culture flourished, including cooking. Culinary customs were born. Traditional cooking had begun.

Peasants, Chefs, and Kings

In most traditional human societies, the task of daily food preparation fell primarily to women-mothers and grandmothers-and both men and women were heavily involved in food procurement. Civilization allowed more people to specialize in other occupations, and this trend eventually produced a class of professional chefs, whose main job was cooking for others. Tomb paintings, sculptures, and archaeological remains from more than 5,000 years ago clearly show that ancient Egypt already had many different food-related jobs, including butchery, baking, brewing, and winemaking. All of these professions had their own shops and facilities, often with multiple employees working in well-organized kitchens.

Culinary professionals generally cooked quite differently from the mothers and grandmothers who were cooking only for themselves and their families. Baking leavened bread, for example, was largely a professional activity, because ovens were expensive to own and operate. It took a lot of fuel to heat the earth, clay, or brick interior of an oven, and once you did, it would be wasteful to cook only one loaf of bread. Anyone who could afford to own and operate a large oven was either a professional or someone who could afford to employ one. Most people couldn't, so they bought or bartered for their bread.

Flat breads, in contrast, could be cooked simply in a pan or even on a flat rock. Cultures all over the world invented various forms of flatbread-from the tortilla in Mexico to the chapati in India to lejse in Norway. Because flat breads didn't require an oven or any elaborate preparation, they were typically made at home as part of peasant cuisine.

The professionalization of baking, brewing, and winemaking occurred for three reasons: capital equipment was expensive; increasingly complicated food products required skill and expertise to prepare; and there was a growing number of affiuent customers. Rich people wanted to employ chefs and culinary artisans both for their practical uses and as status symbols. People willing to pay more for a better meal created a ready market for new recipes and techniques.

In early civilizations, wealth was synonymous with political or religious power, so the primary employers of professional chefs were kings, aristocrats,or priests. Much the same phenomenon occurred in the arts. Painters produced commissioned works for the king or the high priest; jewelers made the king's crown and the queen's jewels; architects designed the palace and temples.

This divide between professional chefs cooking for the wealthy and peasants cooking for themselves drove the development of many cuisines. Each side influenced the other. Professional chefs sought to do things differently than the masses, to create a distinct culinary experience for their elite clientele. Common people sought to adopt some of the finer things in life by copying the dishes served at royal tables.

Countries with a long history of a large and stable aristocracy or ruling class developed the most complex, highly refined, and elaborate cuisines. These were the people who could employ professional chefs-and use food as a form of one-upmanship.

France is perhaps the best example. Despite having a vibrant regional peasant cuisine, France has been dominated by aristocratic food for centuries. Early on, French nobles and other members of the ruling class used dinners as status symbols. Most of the early French chefs, such as La Varenne and Antonin Careme, climbed the career ladder by trading up to ever more powerful and wealthy patrons.

France is especially interesting because it achieved renown for its cooking very early. La Varenne's bookLe Cuisinier François, published in 1651, was translated into English in 1653. Titled The French Cook, the English edition included the following preface, which took the form of a dedication to a wealthy patron (as was customary at the time):

"TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE

John, Earl of Tannet

My very good Lord. Of all Cookes in the World the French are esteem' d the best, and of all Cookes that ever France bred up, this may very well challenge the first place, as the neatest and compleatest that ever attend the French Court and Armies. I have taught him to speak English, to the end that he may be able to wait in your Lordships Kitchin; and furth your Table with several! Sauces ofhaut goust, & with dainty ragousts, and sweet meats, as yet hardly known in this Land."

Besides the quaint punctuation and spelling, this preface clearly lays out what would be the story for the next three centuries: France had a reputation for having the world's best chefs.

Chinese food is another example of an aristocratically driven cuisine. The enormous variety of Chinese dishes stems from the imperial court, which governed China for more than 1,000 years (under one dynasty or another). The same sort of thing occurred with the Moghul rulers of northern India and with the kings of Thailand. In each country, the monarchy and its cadre of bureaucrats and aristocrats supported full-time, professional chefs, who created a rich and varied cuisine.

England also had an elaborate monarchy, which ruled for a thousand years, but the geography made the development of a sophisticated cuisine difficult. Plant and animal diversity is a direct result of climate: a cold climate leads to relatively low diversity, providing less varied ingredients for a chef to work with.

As a result, far northern (or in the Southern Hemisphere, far southern) cuisines do not have the variety of dishes that equatorial regions produce. The Viking kings of Scandinavia and the tsars of Russia had well-established courts and ruled for centuries, but like England, they did not have elaborate cuisines (and, like the English, they imported their share of French chefs).

Sweeping views of history, like the patterns in cuisine discussed here, are always simplifications of a more complicated situation, so there are exceptions. Spain fits the theory only up to a point. It has a Mediterranean climate and had a long-standing monarchy and aristocracy that accumulated enormous wealth by exploiting the New World. Yet traditional Spanish cuisine owes more to farm and peasant life than to that of the great Spanish court. That is less true in Andalusia, where cuisine from the Islamic courtsmade a lasting contribution.

There are many wonderful traditional German foods, but most come from the peasant table, such as the numerous varieties of hearty sausages and hams. One reason may be that Germany never had a long-standing aristocracy of sufficient scale. Germany was not unified as a country until the late 19th century. Before that time, the region was carved into pieces ruled by various European empires or complex confederations of countries such as Prussia, Bohemia, Swabia, and Bavaria. Germany also suffered from its northern location, which limited the diversity of indigenous fruits, vegetables, and herbs.

Italy provides an even better example of how political fragmentation can affect cuisine. Blessed by a favorable climate, the region produces a full range of fruits and vegetables, which is ideal for culinary diversity.

Italy would not be unified as a country until 1870. In the interim, the region was a patchwork of duchies, principalities, city-states, republics, and territories controlled by foreign monarchs. There was no permanent or centralized Italian monarchy, and thus no royal court for which chefs could create new dishes.

Italy did have one permanent fixture, the Papacy, and some distinctive foods were developed for its religious feasts and celebrations. But this was not the same sort of imperial haute cuisine found in France or China.

Italy was the birthplace of the Renaissance and played a central role in the creation of modern Western civilization. Yet Italy has always sought legitimacy for its food in its peasant origins. Some experts argue that Italy's great cities-such as Rome, Milan, and Florence-have been the centers of its culinary innovation, but the culinary tradition within Italy tends to be rooted in the countryside. Although professional chefs and city dwellers have made many contributions to thecuisine, the heart of modern Italian cooking is still considered to be in the nation's fertile land and the people who farm it.

At an earlier point in history, the Italians did have a central political authority-when ancient Romans ruled their empire. The Roman Empire had a fully developed imperial cuisine that drew on foods from all over the known world. Roman food preparations have been passed down in the ancient cookbook Apicius. The cook who compiled this book wrote for other professional chefs, and he described a rich and varied cuisine. Many of the recipes call for imported spices and show considerable sophistication.

But from a culinary perspective, Roman is not the same as Italian. Virtually none of the dishes mentioned in Apicius a re recognizable as the Italian cooking we know today.

One of the key Roman condiments and seasonings was garum, a fermented fish sauce similar to Asian fish sauce and thought to be a very early predecessor of Worcestershire sauce. The Romans added their fish sauce to everything, including desserts, but it doesn't appear in today's Italian recipes at all.

The Romans also used lovage extensively, along with cumin and coriander. These flavors are rarely (if ever) encountered in contemporary Italian cuisine. Meanwhile, basil, which is a staple seasoning in Italian cooking today, is mentioned only once in Apicius.

Among the most sought-after Roman seasonings was laserpicium, or laser, the extract of a plant that the Romans loved so much, they ate it to extinction. Losing laser was a blow to Roman cuisine on the order of what would happen to French cooking if black truffies became extinct.

Garlic is only rarely called for in Apicius, and when it is, the quantity is minuscule-often not enough to taste. Imagine Italian food without garlic or basil; now imagine it loaded with lovage, cumin, coriander, and fish sauce. Ancient Roman cuisine clearly did not have the same flavor profile as the Italian food of today. The amazing conclusion is that ancient Roman cuisine was utterly different from what we think of as Italian cuisine today.

The fall of the Roman Empire in about 500 A.D. ushered in the Middle Ages, a 1,000-year period during which many vestiges of Roman culture, including recipes, were obliterated. Italian food as a concept disappeared and was replaced by a pan-European medieval cuisine that had little to do with the previous Roman cuisine. Medieval European cuisine as a whole seems to have had little regional variability-the Italian cookbooks of the era contain recipes that are virtually indistinguishable from those of France, England, and other European countries.

Medieval cuisine was highly flavored with imported spices, particularly pepper, cinnamon, ginger, and saffron. The love of imported spices was shared with ancient Roman cuisine, but the spices, dishes, and flavor profiles were entirely different.

An analysis of an early English cookbook found that fully 40% of the savory dishes contained large amounts of cinnamon. Ginger was the second most popular spice in savory dishes. This food bears little resemblance to European cuisine today. Only a few rare dishes hint at the highly spiced past: gingerbread, for example, or the cardamom laced breads of Scandinavia. The flavor profile of European food in the Middle Ages was in many ways closer to the spice-oriented profile we associate with Indian or Thai food today. Ultimately, the medieval cuisine disappeared as various regions developed their own culinary traditions.

Similarly, contemporary Greek food is mainly of recent peasant origins, although it reflects some Turkish influences from the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Greece for centuries. The cuisine today bears few similarities with the delicate, often sophisticated cooking of ancient Greece.

In antiquity, the seafaring Greeks learned from neighboring civilizations and brought home new flavors, such as lemons from the Middle East, especially during the exploits of Alexander the Great. Greeks took their culinary expertise with them to Rome, where Greek cooks introduced composed dishes to the Romans and the rest of Europe.

Early Greek traders settled in southern France 2,500 years ago, founding Massalia (now Marseilles) and introducing wine to the region that would later produce Côtes-du-Rhône vintages, according to a recent Cambridge University study.

The chief record of early Greek food and drink remains fragments from lost literature, which have survived only in quotations recorded in later works such as the comedies of Aristophanes. What may be the world's first gourmet travel book, Life of Luxury, is a mock epic poem written about 330 B.C. It is preserved in excerpts quoted in Athenaeus's Philosophers at Dinner, from 200 A.D. The poet who wrote it, Archestratos of Gela, Sicily, toured the cosmopolitan ancient Greek world from the Black Sea to southern Italy, recording the cuisine. He favored fish dishes prepared simply with light seasoning such as fresh thyme and olive oil, or with cheese sauces and pungent herbs such as silphium. Garos (fermented fish sauce) or herb pickles were balanced with honey.

Sicily was also home to the ancient Greek colony of Sybaris, known for its elaborate food and entertainment-source of the word "sybaritic" today. The colony held cooking contests and crowned the winning mageiros (cook). Sybaris even had a law protecting culinary inventions: "And if any caterer or cook invented any peculiar and excellent dish, no other artist was allowed to make this for a year; but he alone who invented it was entitled to all the profit to be derived from the manufacture of it for that time."

In contrast, the mainland Greek city-state of Sparta had a strict military culture marked by frugality and the avoidance of luxury-source of the word spartan. The most prevalent dish, for example, was black broth, a thin soup of pork, pig's blood, and vinegar. A Sybarite writer noted, "Naturally the Spartans are the bravest men in the world. Anyone in his senses would rather die 10,000 times than take his share of such a sorry diet."

In general, the ancient Greeks valued their chefs. Consider this passage about Demetrius of Phalerum, a diplomat who governed Athens in the early 4th century B.c.: "He bought Moschion, the most skillful of all the cooks and confectioners of that age. And he had such vast quantities of food prepared for him every day, that, as he gave Moschion what was left each day, he (Moschion) in two years purchased three detached houses in the city." That' s the kind of success any chef today would like to have. It's made all the more poignant by the word " bought"; Moschion, like many cooks of his era, was a slave. Unfortunately,the recipes of Moschion, the legally protected dishes of Sybaris, and even the bad black broth of Sparta have all vanished.

That is a sad fact of culinary history. One of the great losses to human culture is that the food of many empires did not survive. Homer records many feasts in the Iliad and Odyssey, but frustratingly without recipes. Egyptian cooks in the pharaohs' courts did not record their recipes. Yet Egypt invented foie gras! What other delicacies did it have? We may never know. When civilizations die or disperse, their cooking often dies with them. Some peasant dishes may survive, but the refined dishes of the upper classes usually don't.

Among the most significant losses in the history of gastronomy is the disappearance of ancient North and South American recipes, including those of the Aztec, Incan, Mayan, and Mound Builder civilizations.

Mayan cuisine relied heavily on chocolate, domesticated 3,000 years ago in what is now Honduras. Au Cacao, or Lord Chocolate, a king who ruled the Mayan city-state ofTikal, was named after the prized ingredient. The Mayan word for cacao, kakawa, means "god food," and the cacao tree was considered sacred (as was the maize plant).

The Mayans also had a rich culture that produced an elaborate society centered on great stone cities. They made many major discoveries in mathematics and astronomy. It seems likely that a group of people who worshipped chocolate and named their kings after it probably cared enough about food to have a distinctive cuisine with some pretty good recipes.

But we'll never know. The Mayan civilization began to decline in 900 A.D., some 600 years before the Spanish conquistadors arrived. A large number of Mayan books, which might have included a Mayan equivalent of Apicius, were confiscated and burned by Bishop Diego de Landa in 1562. Today, only three survive, none of which mentions cooking. The peasant cuisine in the area that has survived seems unlikely to represent the full range of aristocratic Mayan cuisine.

The story of Aztec cuisine is similar. In this case, we have one eyewitness report from Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a conquistador who accompanied Hernando Cortes. Diaz was present at a dinner served to Motecuhzoma, the Aztec emperor:

For his meals his cooks had more than 30 styles of dishes made according to their fashion and usage; and they put them on small low clay braziers so they would not get cold. They cooked more than 300 dishes of the food that Motecuhzoma was going toeat, and more than a thousand more for themen of the guard.

No one knows what delicacies would have been served in this 30-course tasting menu.

Other civilizations, such as the Inca of Peru and the Mound Builder culture of Cahokia, in the central United States, likely had many great recipes as well, but the efforts of their professional chefs are lost to history.

**********

LASER

Laser, a seasoning used in ancient Greece and Rome, was one of the first "it" ingredients. Extracted from silphion, one of the wild giant fen nels known as silphium, laser was a resinous juice used extensively in ancient Mediterranean cuisines, primarily in sauces. References to the ingredient were peppered throughout the first Roman cookbook, Apicius. People also ate silphium stalks, roots, and leaves, whose flavor may have been similar to that of parsley or celery. Farmers were supposedly unsuccessful in their attempts to grow silphium , so it became a rare and expensive commodity-literally worth its weight in silver.

Why was the seasoning so sought after? In addition to being a versatile culinary ingredient, laser was used for medicinal purposes (primarily as a digestive aid) and possibly as a contraceptive. Some scholars believe that its birth-control properties were the real reason for its popularity. In any event, silphium became extinct around the 1st century A. D., probably due to overharvesting or overgrazing.

Its closest living relative is asafetida, a far more pungent (even foul-smelling) plant that is used as a condiment in parts of South America and India. The Romans also used it, but they complained that it was vastly inferior to laser. "The Cyrenaic kind [laser], even if one just tastes it, at once arouses a humour throughout the body and has a very healthy aroma, so that it is not noticed on the breath, or only a little; but the Median [asafetida] is weaker in power and has a nastier smell," wrote Pedanius Dioscorides, a Greek pharmacist and botanist practicing in Rome in the 1st century A.D.

By Nathan Myhrvold with Chris Young and Maxime Bilet in "Modernist Cuisine (The Art and Science of Cooking)", The Cooking Lab., USA, 2011, excerpts pp. 5-13. Digitalized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

Share this post