Cookery

I

Introduction

Cookery, preparation of food for consumption. The oldest and most essential of the arts and crafts, cookery involves a variety of primary techniques that include the application of dry heat, immersion in or contact with heated liquids or fats, curing, smoking, and pickling. Secondary cookery techniques range from the simplest kitchen chores to the elaborate decoration of ceremonial pastries. See also Food Processing and Preservation.

Cookery must be divided into two classes, perhaps best defined by the French, who distinguish between cuisine bourgeois (“home cooking”) and haute cuisine—cookery conceived as an aesthetic pursuit. In theory, the distinction is based on the differences between practical cooking skills and refined artistry. In practice, however, the distinction has always been somewhat vague and has become increasingly so in recent years, as home cooks—better informed, equipped, and supplied than in the past—emulate the work of professional chefs.

II

Origins of Cookery

Cookery originated sometime between the onset of fire making and the beginning, eons later, of the Neolithic period, also known as the Stone Age. Until they learned to make and control fire, early humans ate their food raw, subsisting mostly on wild fruits, nuts, insects, fish, and game. Before the development of pottery vessels some 7,000 to 12,000 years ago, food was cooked by roasting it over or toasting it beside open fires, or by wrapping it in leaves or husks, to be pit-steamed over embers. The development of pottery made possible such relatively sophisticated cooking methods as boiling, stewing, braising, frying, and, perhaps, a primitive form of baking. These techniques, in combination with the domestication of animals for their meat and milk and the cultivation of edible plants, opened the way to what ultimately became modern cookery.

III

Cookery in Antiquity

By the time of the earliest settled communities, cookery had become more than merely a means of survival; people had begun to concern themselves with flavor and quality, rather than simply quantity. By the standards of the great 19th-century French gastronome Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (who declared, “Beasts feed; man eats; only the man of intellect knows how to eat”), the craft of cookery was evolving into an art. The peoples of the Indus Valley, for example, are known to have ground spices, and their Chinese contemporaries preferred tender young pigs to meatier but tougher older animals. By early Babylonian times the succulent fungi called truffles were being rooted from the ground for the delectation of those who could afford them, and the tough meat of old oxen was deemed fit only for dog food. Forty kinds of breads and pastries were available to upper-class Egyptians by the 12th century bc. Nine hundred years later the Athenians had already stolen a march on frugal modern restaurateurs by inventing the hors d’oeuvre trolley, which, according to one 3rd-century BC complaint, “seems to offer variety but is nothing at all to satisfy the belly.”

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Throughout much of its history, indeed, cookery of classical Greece was far more concerned with the belly than the palate. As a result of disastrously poor soil conservation, olives and grapes grew in abundance, but meat was scarce, and domestically grown staple grains almost nonexistent. Except during the later period of Athenian greatness, rich and poor alike subsisted largely on a monotonous diet of imported grain eaten for the most part in the form of oil-bound pastes. Meat rarely was eaten, except during ritual feasts, when it was prepared as simply as a steak at a modern backyard barbecue. With the emergence of Athens as the preeminent city of classical antiquity, however, Greek cookery for the wealthy, prepared by slaves, took on pretensions to what would eventually be called haute cuisine. See also Ancient Greece.

It remained for the Romans to elevate cookery to the status of high art and to make elaborate dining a major preoccupation of civilized life. Unlike the slave cooks of Greece, the hired chefs of imperial Rome commanded salaries that the Roman historian Livy termed “prohibitive,” and their employers literally spent fortunes on single meals. No foodstuff was too costly or too esoteric for the upper-class Roman table, and the known world was scoured for such exotic items as flamingo tongues, peacock brains, oysters from Britain, hams from Gaul, and ostriches from North Africa. To satisfy this gastronomic lust a sophisticated culinary technology was developed, and even in the restricted space of town houses kitchens were furnished with large grills, vast preparation tables, and complex masonry cookstoves; these stoves contained a number of separate ovens, each with its specific function. See also Ancient Rome.

Although the 19th-century French master chef Marie Antoine Carême denounced it as “essentially barbaric,” classical Roman cookery might easily have evolved into something much like Carême’s cuisine had not the Roman Empire broken up. With the barbarian sweep across Europe in the 5th century ad, the progress of Western cookery came to a virtual standstill and was not revitalized until the Renaissance.

IV

The Great Cuisines

By general consent the three major styles of modern cookery are the Chinese, Italian, and French. Of these, the oldest, purest, and perhaps most sophisticated is the Chinese, which is built on concepts defined by Confucius. The character of Chinese cookery has been shaped by the character of China itself. In a land chronically overpopulated and fuel-poor, a people concerned with good eating had to use ingredients and develop techniques unknown or ignored elsewhere. In essence, Chinese cookery is quick cookery. To prepare meals using small quantities of flimsy, fast-burning fuel, the Chinese developed the wok, a round-bottomed utensil that circulates heat quickly and evenly while enabling its user to keep its contents in constant motion. With the wok, and using ingredients hacked into small, thin morsels, the Chinese cook exposes the maximum amount of food surface to heat in the shortest possible time, often simultaneously preparing a sauce in the same wok. Chinese cookery is typified by lightness, freshness, variety, and the calculated interplay of contrasting textures, flavors, colors, and aromas. Its influence is evident to varying degrees in the cookery of Japan and in areas from Hawaii to the western end of the Malay Archipelago.

Italian cookery, too, was shaped to a considerable degree by fuel shortages, in this case the result of early deforestation. In northern Europe in the Middle Ages, large roasts were cooked on spits, and stews, soups, and sauces were prepared in cauldrons. Although not unknown in Italy, these slower methods have not played conspicuous roles in a land where beef is relatively scarce but fish are plentiful and where pale meats, in any case, are preferred to red. Like the Chinese, Italian cookery is essentially quick cookery, with thin cuts of meat exposed to heat for periods of short duration, and with such relatively bland grains as pasta (wheat), polenta (corn), and risotto (rice) dependent on sauces and garnishes for interest. Based primarily on that of the Greeks, Etruscans, and Saracens, Italian cookery was refined to a high degree by the early Renaissance, when it produced the first truly modern European cuisine.

Although today it sets the standard for all other Western cuisines, French cookery was heavy, monotonous, and overspiced until the arrival in France (1533) of the Italian-born queen Catherine de Médicis; with her came a small army of Florentine cooks, bakers, and confectioners, an assortment of advanced kitchen gear, and a variety of delicacies then unknown to the French. In the following century François Pierre de La Varenne, a great chef trained in the French court, wrought a culinary revolution by developing the first true French sauces. La Varenne was followed by a long line of French master chefs, who in their times revolutionized cooking procedures: Marie Antoine Carême, the founder of la cuisine classique; Auguste Escoffier, who modernized, codifed, and publicized French cookery; and, in the present era, a band of young innovators who have based their nouvelle cuisine in large part on Oriental traditions 2,000 or more years old, developing a new cooking style characterized by lightness, purity, and simple, undisguised flavors.