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

[beccastareyes]

Cheese is both delicious and something that makes you wonder who the hell came up with it. Something like paneer at least sounds less gross than most cheese-making processes* (and I say that as someone who loves her cheese), but that's not even a Western cheese.

Baking is especially amazing, because of all the chemistry and the way the ingredients interact. So is cooking meat, for that matter.

* From what I understand (from Wikipedia), you sour hot milk with vinegar, drain off the liquid, cool it, and then put it under something heavy. No bacteria, digestive enzymes or molds involved.

[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."

[bkwrrm-tx.livejournal.com]

I love, love, love cheese of all types and tastes. I grew up making home-made cottage cheese and have gotten to where I can make my own paneer (http://thepauperedchef.com/2009/11/how-to-make-paneer.html#more-5024) and ricotta.

I'm convinced that whoever first thought eating a giant sea cockroach (aka lobsters) was either very very hungry or certifiably insane.

[glaikery.livejournal.com]

This post: it makes me very happy. Essentially, all I have to say is yes, but this is worthy of saying. I really never appreciated cooking properly until this past year - it's amazing.

Cheese is also both disgusting and utterly wonderful at once, which is really quite a feat for a food. (I love cheese. I never thought of it phrased quite that way, but I think it is the right way to think about it. I imagine a Douglas Adams!description of tea, except for cheese...)

"I dare you to eat that": without a doubt, yes (though I don't expect it to become a worldwide delicacy, there is peanut butter batter that tastes damn good with hoisin sauce. No...really). And cooking with other people, especially someone else of a similarly experimental mind - is so much fun.

Awesome, awesome.

[luinmir.livejournal.com]

When I visited a game reserve in South Africa, we had our meals outside on a little veranda. They brought all the usual things - sugar for tea and coffee, butter for bread, et cetera. But the butter and sugar specifically were in heavy stone containers with heavy stone lids. They did that because if the butter and sugar were in lighter containers, the vervet monkeys would sneak in, steal both items, take them down next to the river, mix the two together, and then eat it. So, the desire to mix things to make it better seems to go back to pre-human primates at least - the monkeys - at least those specific monkeys in South Africa - clearly know that the fat and the sweet are much tastier (and probably easier to consume) when combined.

[viizou.livejournal.com]

I completely relate. I spend a lot of time in the kitchen, and I'm still amazed by so many things. Especially bread. Who the hell thought to mix yeast with water and flower and let it rise? How did they know it would rise?

If you look at the history of food, you find that a lot of specific recipes came to be through mistakes. Like the Bakewell Tart, where the cook misunderstood the instructions and put jam inside the tart instead of over it. Or potato puffs, which are basically chips gone wrong (deliciously wrong). But the origins of the basic recipe concept (such as the concept of the pie itself) remains a mystery.

[biomekanic.livejournal.com]

Stuff like almonds amaze me. Wild almonds are poisonous, all teh almonds we eat are descended from one mutant tree that didn't kill someone.

Who kept going around and tasting these things?!?


As far as gross goes, I'm pretty open minded and will try things. But some stuff just tastes nasty. Uni, aka sea urchin roe is just foul. It's the flavor left behind when happiness dies.

[sphynxle.livejournal.com]

I'm fairly certain certain cuisines and foods were brought about by a few different things: "Dude, I'm starving, and hey! we could cook that rat!" and people like my husband. "You're just going to DISCARD THOSE COW BALLS?! Fuck you, we can eat that! Hell, I bet it'll be good!"

I love watching the back stories on how some common dishes came to be. LIke some of the things they cook in China and Japan - soups that are made from bones, skins, and anything that was left over from the meat. To discard anything was considered taboo.

And I agree. Cheese really is a gross, gross thing when you discover how it was made xD Same with any dairy item, really. I mean, look at yougart! "well, this has curdled and SMELLS disgusting . . eh, I'll eat it anyway!"

[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.