Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. By Michael Pollan. The Penguin Press, NY. 2013. Appendices. Selected Sources. Index. Hard Cover, Sewn and Glued, 469 pages, 1.7 pounds.
Discovered at Eureka Springs Carnegie Library; purchased at Alibris.com.
Dear Michael,
First of all I just want to say thanks for writing this book. I know I’m writing a little late but I hope you’ll forgive me for waiting seven years. I found the book on the sale rack at our local library, and having enjoyed some of your other books, including The Omnivore’s Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind, I had high expectations for this book as well. I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, once I finished the book I promptly turned to the first page and began reading it again, this time to deglaze all the scrumptious info into my cooking habits.
What I really enjoy about this book, and your writing style in general, is how you intersperse personal experience with researched facts. For this book, you intermix visits to cooks with the historical facts about the four elements.
Fire, Water, Air, and Earth.
What an interesting way to chop up our human history of food preparation by using the four elements of ancient philosophy. As someone who loves both food and history, I appreciate how you braise each topic with just the right ingredients of experience, facts and time to create a nicely jelled story.
I have loved history from an early age, and to see you cite one of my favorite books in the first section on Fire, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham, helped me feel comfortable sitting by your hearth. Wrangham’s book brought together a number of interrelated facts about human physiology, evolution, diet, and culture to create a strong hypothesis about the role of fire in human history.
You delineate his research very nicely, and how you incorporate it into the first section on cooking with Fire, in your usual effortless conveyance of facts, is refreshing. Wrangham’s work deserves more attention. While I absorbed your chapter on Fire, I have to be realistic and accept the fact that I won’t be digging a hole in my apartment’s front yard anytime soon to do a real barbecue; so I bought a tailgate grill that fits on my deck. Even though I’m only grilling, I have a much greater appreciation for what is happening to the meat on that grill, and even why I’m grilling it, thanks to the diligent distillation of your research.
But the chapter that really struck me is your second one on cooking with Water, more specifically braising. I applied the lessons learned and just finished a lamb shoulder steak for dinner that I braised based solely on this chapter. Now understand, I have centered my life around food for much of my adult life, so I picked up on your descriptions and suggestions really quickly; but, you write with such skill and clarity that anyone could learn your pointers about cooking with Fire, Water, Air, and Earth and apply them.
I grew up in a family that ate well, with plenty of food available. We had no microwave in the 60’s and 70’s, we weren’t allowed soda, we were restricted in how much sugar we could eat, and we always sat down to eat dinner together as a family, which was no small task for 7 people.
As an adult, I learned about factory farming when 20, and by 24 I achieved my goal of becoming vegetarian. I played with eating diets of raw food, dairy-free, instinctual eating, and even one based on the rainbow. None stuck to my ribs as long as my 20 years of being vegetarian. In the meanwhile, I worked on a truck farm and orchard for seven years, and now work in a natural foods store, being in this field for nearly 20 years. Several friends are chefs or aspire to chef-level cooking skills and some grow their own food. I helped start a non-profit designed to teach elementary age students about healthy eating.
In short, I know a thing or two about food, and I relish well-prepared, tasty, high-quality food everyday.
I’ve been eating meat again now for about 10 years, so your chapter on cooking with Fire really opened my eyes —a transplanted northerner—to the mysterious Southern tradition of barbecuing, and its distinction from grilling. But your chapter on cooking with Water opened my eyes to even more properties of meat, and how water can be such a critical element for transforming molecules, transferring tastes, and tantalizing nostrils.
So tonight, I cooked a lamb braise. Oh, I cannot believe how the meat just fell off the bone, how the fat had been largely rendered into the dish, how layered the flavors were. I followed your basic outline, which I love by the way:
“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 boil, for a long time” p. 133
I looked at two cook books I use as resources: Joy of Cooking and America’s Test Kitchen The Cook’s Illustrated Cookbook. Then I looked online, found a combo of ingredients and spices that looked enticing, and like a good mirepoix, I mixed all the different ideas into one delicious slowly-braised recipe.
I let the onions and celery sauté for 30 minutes, letting them slightly brown at the end for a little of the Maillard reaction you talk about for one layer of flavor, but mostly I let them simmer into sweet translucence, as your chef-teacher suggests.
I browned the lamb steak for three minutes on each side, then deglazed the pan with a red wine-based stock and simmered the whole thing for three hours in a very low oven. As I said previously, the meat just fell off the bones and tasted this side of heaven.
When I was in college I played with Air also, baking my own bread. The scent of baking bread is out of this world. Thank you for spending time on sourdough starters; this topic always inspires the more I learn. I appreciate how you talk about the element of Air in bread baking, and how you talk about yeast as the supplier of that air. One thing I wished you had addressed more is the—yes—factory farming of yeasts. Just like CAFOs (Confined Animal Feedlot Operations), modern day yeasts are grown at accelerated rates in confining conditions with as little food as possible. In other words, today’s mass-produced yeasts are as much a victim of our modern food production as are many of our sorry furred companions, as you talk about in the chapter on Fire.
Then there’s Earth. Interesting take on it, to suggest the connection between fungi and bacteria with Earth. But yes, you’re right, fermenting is a type of cooking, and is in fact often employed by burying the foodstuff in the ground, such as kimchi.
In fact, I’m reading Sally Fallon Morell’s book, Nourishing Diets, and she belabors over and over, in chapter after chapter, how aboriginal peoples from the Arctic to the tip of Argentina, from Africa to the Pacific Oceania, have used fermentation as a critical component of their food preparation. It appears, as you note, that fermentation transforms foods’ textures, chemicals, edibility, flavor, nutrition, and more…maybe similar to water in braising?
Michael, you’re a good writer. I like how you come full circle from your introduction to your concluding remarks, how you relate the theme of transformation throughout the book, and how you relate cooking so strongly to the very root of our culture. This human culture, so dependent on fire, on cooked food, on communal cooking and eating, on love. Thank you for writing this book.
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