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

therefore, that cooking with stones is simply an inferior technology, compared to boiling something in a pot. But is it? It is certainly an inconvenient and roundabout way of making a hot meal. Pit boiling would be a hopeless method for doing the kind of boiling most of us do routinely: pasta, potatoes, or rice would get lost in the mud, and it would be an absurdly inefficient way of boiling things like eggs or asparagus spears, which only take a few minutes.
    Hot-stone cooking was a superb technology, however, for many of the uses to which it was actually put by cooks of the past. It was great for cooking foods in bulk, as the example of the luau pig demonstrates. The other notable thing about pit-stone cookery was that it made it possible to eat numerous wild plants that would otherwise have been more or less inedible. The types of foods traditionally cooked in the slow, moist heat of a pit oven tended to be bulbs and tuberous roots rich in inulin, a carbohydrate that cannot be digested by the human stomach (it is present in Jerusalem artichokes, hence their notorious flatulent effects). Hot-stone cookery transformed these plants through hydrolysis, a process liberating the digestible fructose from the carbohydrate. In some cases, these plants needed to be cooked for as long as sixty hours for the hydrolysis to occur. A pleasant side effect was that the long, moist cooking made unpromising wild bulbs taste fantastically sweet.

    Some people were so attached to earth ovens and pit boiling that they did not see pots as superior or even necessary. The Polynesians of the early Christian era—the people who traveled to the eastern Pacific islands in the first millennium AD, arriving in Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island from Samoa and Tonga—present the fascinating spectacle of people who had known pots for a thousand years, only to abandon them. From around 800 BC, Polynesians made a range of pottery, typically earthenware fired at low heat, tempered with shell or sand. Yet when they arrived in the Marquesas Islands, around 100 AD, they abruptly gave up pottery making and chose to cook once again without pots. Why?
    The hypothesis used to be that the reason Polynesians stopped making pots was that their new island homes lacked clay. But this was not so; clay was present on the islands, albeit in rather remote high places. Thirty years ago, the New Zealand anthropologist Helen M. Leach suggested a radical new explanation for the Polynesian conundrum : they cooked without pots because they did not see the need for them. It might have been different if they had been rice eaters. But the Polynesian diet was rich in starchy vegetables such as yams, taro, sweet potato, and breadfruit, all of which cooked better with hot stones than in pots.
    So, yes, it is possible to boil without pots. The Polynesian rejection of pottery is a useful reminder that even the most basic-seeming of kitchen technologies are not universally adopted. Some cooks refuse to have a frying pan in the house (as if its very presence might cause you to consume unhealthy amounts of fat); raw foodists reject the use of fire; and there is probably someone, somewhere, who chooses to cook without knives; certainly, there are children’s cookbooks that advocate the use of scissors instead. I myself am the opposite of a Polynesian. I view pots and pans as essential kitchen furniture, unassuming household gods. Few moments in the day are happier than when I sling a pot on the stove, knowing that supper will soon be bubbling away, filling the house with good scents. I can’t imagine living without them.

     
    O nce pots were embedded as a technology, we developed strong feelings about them. Pottery is deeply personal. Even now, we describe pots as having human characteristics. Pots may have lips and mouths, necks and shoulders, bellies and bottoms. The Dowayo people of Cameroon in Africa have special forms of pottery for different people (a child’s bowl would look