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

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I, too, wonder over these things. Actually, I'm not too surprised by most of it. Sure, it's complex, but that's how evolution works, you know? You don't just look at a complex structure like an eye and "OMFG, how did anyone ever come up with this?" You know it happened one little step at the time.

Same with Chocolate Cake. A bit of "this is edible" and "these two things taste better mixed together" and "hey, if you cook this goop, it's even better" and "hey, these bitter seeds actually taste yummy if you roast them with sugar" and so on.

What really baffles the hell out of me is how we ever developed ways to eat things that start out poisonous and require careful and complex preparation just to become edible. Like olives. And blowfish. I mean, seriously, how many people died before someone figured out just how to make these things nontoxic? And what level of desperation even compelled people to keep trying?

I suspect a great deal of gone-bad milk got thrown away before anyone decided that things like sour cream and cheese were edible, though.