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.
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.
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ORIGINS OF COOKERY Cookery originated sometime between the onset of fire
making and the beginning, eons later, of the Neolithic period. 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 7000 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.
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."
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.
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 cook stoves; these
stoves contained a number of separate ovens, each with its specific
function.
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.
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: 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
2000 or more years old, developing a new cooking style characterized by
lightness, purity, and simple, undisguised flavors.
FOOD IN THE NEW WORLD In the western hemisphere cookery has evolved
largely according to the ethnic background of the settlers, as modified
by their immediate requirements and the available produce in the regions
they settled. Thus, in Canada, native foodstuffs have been adapted to a
need, in a harsh climate, for high caloric intake and are cooked
according to French and English tastes. In the United States food has
been and still is cooked according to the styles of successive waves of
immigrants-with English, German, Dutch, Creole, and African influences
predominant until recently. In Latin America, native cookery has been
influenced, in varying degrees, by the methods of Spain, Portugal, and
Africa.
VICOOKING METHODS Heat-activated cooking methods take five basic forms.
Food may be immersed in liquids such as water, stock, or wine (boiling,
poaching, stewing); immersed in fat or oil (frying); exposed to vapor
(steaming and, to some extent, braising); exposed to dry heat (roasting,
baking, broiling); and subjected to contact with hot fats (sautéing).
With minor modifications, all five methods are applicable to any type of
food not eaten raw, but certain treatments traditionally are rarely used
to prepare particular foods. Deep-fat frying, for example, is not
generally thought the ideal method for preparing steaks or chops.
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Boiled foods usually are immersed in flavored or unflavored liquids for
longer periods of time than poached foods, and the cooking liquid
usually takes the form of a thickened sauce when foods are stewed. The
chief difference between frying and sautéing (Chinese wok cookery is an
example of the latter) is that frying produces a crisp surface, sealing
natural moisture inside the food, whereas in the sauté process, natural
juices usually mingle with the pan fat, coating the food with a light
sauce. As opposed to steaming, which does not place foods in direct
contact with liquids, braising is accomplished by first browning food in
fat and then placing it in direct contact with a small amount of liquid
within an airtight pan. Originally, roasted foods were exposed to the
action of open fires or live coals, but in contemporary cookery roasting
is synonymous with baking-that is, cooking by dry heat in a closed oven.
Broiling, whether in an oven or over an open fire or coals, exposes
meats to the direct action of more intense heat, which sears their
surfaces quickly to seal in their juices.
COOKING EQUIPMENT Essential modern kitchen equipment includes the
following: a stove, or range; sink; work surface; various knives, pots
and pans; such utensils as spatulas, whisks, specialized spoons, and
rolling pins; and a more highly specialized array of gear for producing
pastries and other baked goods. In recent years such sophisticated
equipment as blenders, food processors, and microwave ovens have become
common. Although such tools do save considerable preparation and cooking
time, none of them has improved on the results to be achieved by more
traditional techniques.
COOKERY LITERATURE The literature of cookery (as opposed to the older
literature of gastronomy) dates from Confucian times in the East, and
from the 1st century AD in the West, when the first known cookbook was
written, perhaps by the Roman voluptuary Marcus Gavius Apicius (14-37).
The earliest surviving cookbook in English is The Forme of Cury (Forms
of Cookery, c. 1390). With the invention of printing, cookbooks began to
proliferate. The ever-increasing number of works on cookery includes the
landmark works of Carême and Escoffier, as well as-in the U.S.
today-such frequently revised classic cookbooks as the Fannie Farmer
Cookbook and The Joy of Cooking, and the books, television programs, and
newspaper columns of such widely respected experts as Julia Child, Craig
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