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

[shadesofmauve]

A lot of interesting delicacies where once pauper food. French peasants couldn't afford actual meat, but they could pluck 'wall fruit' (snails) for free.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Well, soul food came about as an attempt to make the scraps and lousy garbage food given to slaves palatable. And on a less oppressive note, Japanese food seems to consist a lot of taking whatever was lying around and trying to make it edible becasue there's not a lot of agriculture you can do in Japan.