And Don't Get Me Started On Cacao

[bloodyrosemccoy]

MY SISTER: Dinner was nice, but what about dessert? Anything good?

MOM: There’s cake mix in the pantry! You could make cookies or brownies or cake!

AMELIA: And if you cook the cake mix with a Super Shroom Shake you’ll get Shroom Cake, and it’ll restore 30 of your HP!

MY BROTHER: Dammit, you’re playing Super Paper Mario again.


I don’t know why, but I love the hell out of the stupid cooking feature of that game. I can’t really put my finger on it, but I think it distills one of my cherished beliefs: that cooking is MAGIC.

Okay, not quite, but something even better—a testament to human creativity. I mean, I can sort of understand how someone may have figured out that if you get the food hot for a while it becomes tasty and less likely to kill you from the inside, but on a larger scale, it’s baffling. Which one of us little monkeys figured out how to combine the food? How did they figure out how eggs relate to flour and water and oven heat? Who came up with flour? And what in god’s name led to the invention of cheese?* Was it deliberate trial (and error), or just some lucky accident?** And who thought their discovery was good enough to share it around to the point where it became common place?

There’s always a little of that going through my head when I crush some garlic or whip a cake mix or make some banana nut bread. Taking something necessary for survival and adding so many bells and whistles denotes a brilliance almost staggers me at times—as with so many of the things we humans do. It’s commonplace and everyday, but it’s amazing all the same.


*I firmly believe that my love of cheese renders any right I thought I had to point at other cultures and say that they eat WEIRD or GROSS food invalid. There is nothing more disgusting than cheese. I tried describing it to my host family in Kaloleni and they were with me as far as “Well, you start with some milk,” but after that they assumed decidedly Do Not Want expressions. Can you blame them?

**While discussing the origins of leavened bread, ironychan once theorized that a lot of great breakthroughs in cooking were probably precipitated by the words, “I dare you to eat that.”

Comments

[cougarfang.livejournal.com]

Both of these are going to be off the top of my head, but: cheese may have first been created when desert nomads carried milk in animal stomachs (camel milk in camel stomachs, I guess?) which caused the milk to mix with the stomach enzymes (rennet) and curdled the milk, and they were probably like, eh, it's still edible! And subsequent generations elevated it into an art, or something.

Similarly, sushi was originally not meant to have rice in it - fish were preserved in fermented rice, and when it was time to eat the fish you'd throw away the rice because, duh, it's spoiled. And then someone came up with the bright idea of adding vinegar to the rice, because it was the sourness of the rice that kept the fish safe from microbes, and then once you had sour vinegar you didn't really need to spoil the rice, and so you could eat the fish and the rice at the same time - and if you wrap the whole thing in seaweed, it's so much less messy to eat! So it became kind of like finger food for the Japanese ("like hot dogs", was the analogy in the article I'd read this in) till they elevated that into a fine art.

Re: breakthroughs> Also, if you observe the more interesting bits of Chinese cuisine, it can also originate in "dude, we're starving, anything looks edible."

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

*grin* You're right--"I gotta eat SOMETHING" is definitely another reason for cooking breakthroughs.