Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat Read Online Free PDF Page A

has been said that the example of turtle cookery—as practiced by various Amazonian tribes—proves that boiling was “viable” long before the invention of pottery Cooking in a turtle shell is certainly a romantic notion. Whether anything was cooked in turtle shells except for turtles themselves is another matter.
    Moving on from shells, there are some more plausible candidates for the first cooking vessels. Tough-rinded vegetable gourds of various kinds made very handy prehistoric bowls, bottles, and pots. Hollowed-out bamboo stems, used all over Asia, are another plant-based family of cooking vessels. But bamboo and gourds were only to be found in certain parts of the world. A more universal vessel, after the discovery that meat could be cooked, was the animal’s stomach, a premade container that was both waterproof and—up to a point—heatproof. Haggis, beloved of the Scots, boiled in a sheep’s stomach, is a throwback to the ancient tradition of boiling the contents of an animal’s belly in the stomach itself. In the fifth century
BC, the historian Herodotus recounted how the nomad Scythians used this technique, boiling an animal’s flesh inside its own paunch: “In this way an ox, or any other sacrificial beast, is ingeniously made to boil itself.” Ingenious is the word. The tradition of stomach cookery shows how sharp-witted humans were in finding better methods to cook their dinner, when they had no pots and pans, no Teflon nonstick griddles, no gleaming copper batterie de cuisine . neatly dangling from pot hooks.
    No method was as ingenious as the technology of hot-stone cookery practiced across the globe, starting at least 30,000 years ago. After thousands of years of direct-fire roasting, people finally figured out a more indirect way of using heat to cook things in steam or water. It has been said that this transformation in how food could be cooked was the greatest technological innovation in food preparation until modern times.
     
    T his is how to make a pit oven. First, dig a large hole in the ground and line it with stones to make it roughly waterproof. Then, fill the pit with water. You could skip this stage if you dug the pit below the water table, in which case it would fill up automatically. (In Ireland, there are thousands of traces of hot-rock troughs cut into the watery peat bog.) Next, take some more stones—preferably, large river cobblestones—and heat them to a very high temperature in a fire. Cooking rocks were heated as hot as 932°F, hotter than a pizza oven. Transport the stones to the pit, using tools such as wooden tongs to avoid burning your hands, and drop them in the water. When enough stones have been added, the water will start to “seethe” or boil and food can be added, topped with an insulating lid of turf, leaves, animal skins, or earth. As the temperature of the water drops, continue to add more hot rocks to keep the boiling constant until the meal is cooked.
    There were many variations on stone cookery. Sometimes the stones were heated up inside the pit itself instead of in a separate fire; there would be two adjacent sections, one for the water, one for
the fire and the rocks. Sometimes the food was steamed instead of boiled. Root vegetables or pieces of meat could be wrapped in leaves and layered up in the pit with the hot stones without added water, in which case the earth pit was more like an oven than a boiler.
    Hot-rock cookery is still practiced in the clambakes of New England, in which sweet clams, just harvested, are cooked right there on the beach, layered up in a pit of hot stones, driftwood, and seaweed, which keep the clams juicy. The method is also used in the Hawaiian luau, in which a pig is covered in banana or taro leaves and buried in a hot pit (an imu ) for the best part of a day, then unearthed with great ceremony and jubilation. In the Old World, however, rock boiling did not live long after the beginnings of pottery.
    It is easy to assume,