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A History of Cooks and Cooking

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A History of Cooks and Cooking A HISTORY OF COOKS AND COOKING MICHAEL SYMONS A HISTORY OF COOKS AND COOKING PROSPECT BOOKS 2001 First published in the United Kingdom in 2001 by Prospect Books Allaleigh House, Blackawton, Totnes, Devon TQ9 7DL. First published in Australia as The Pudding that Took a Thousand Cooks, 1998, by Viking. Copyright © 1998, 2001 Michael Symons. Michael Symons asserts his right to be identified as the author of the work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1-903018-07-2 Printed in Great Britain at the Cromwell Press, Trowbridge. DEDICATION On of my fascinations writing this book has been how cooking has brought its own negations: the most indispensable people have been belittled, policy decisions have been based on money not food, cooperation has brought division. In the hope that we might share more convivially, I dedicate this book To the meal makers To the true economists To mothers of sons taken for war. CONTENTS Preface 1 To Pick one Cook 13 Part One WHAT DO COOKS DO? 2 Distributing Goodness 27 3 ‘A Good Bank Account, a Good Cook, and a Good Digestion’ 44 4 ‘An Empire of Smoke’ 67 5 What Do Cooks Do? 98 6 ‘On the Physical and Political Consequences of Sauces’ 119 7 Slices of Life 141 8 Festivals, Beauty and Love 165 Part Two SHARING AND CIVILISATION 9 ‘The Pudding That Took a Thousand People to make 191 10 Eve and Adam 216 11 The Settled Hearth 230 12 The Temple as Kitchen 244 13 Sovereign Consumers 268 14 The Sons of Mama Camous 299 15 Freedom from Cooks? 324 16 Angels Must Eat 352 Acknowledgements 360 Bibliography 361 Index 379 [7] PREFACE Between us, we have eaten an enormous number of meals. We have nibbled, gorged and hungered our way through history. Cooks have been in charge - finding, sharing and giving food meaning. We could not have survived without them. They have been everywhere, yet writers have hardly noticed. In fact, I suggest that this is the first book devoted to the essential duties and historical place of cooks. If this is, with few qualifications, the world’s first book on the world’s most important people, it implies a surprising intellectual oversight. Nearly two and a half millennia ago Plato warned against an interest in cooks, and Western scholars have largely complied. Almost without exception, they have failed to inquire into the chief occupation of at least half the people who have ever lived. Even thinkers must eat. Cookery books are so consumable that French chef Raymond Oliver compares them to wooden spoons: ‘one is astonished at the number which have disappeared’ (1967: 209). Likewise, so much dietary advice has been circulated that, almost a century and a half ago, an English author counted ‘upwards of seventeen hundred works extant on the subject ... Sufferers may study the question till they are driven mad by doubt and dyspepsia, and difference of opinions’ (Doran 1859: 16). We have devoured innumerable books on how and what to cook, and even some about certain cooks and aspects of cooking, but this abundance makes the central gap even more peculiar. There are so many texts for, and so few about, cooks. No writer has got up from a meal, so to speak, publicly in awe. Why have cooks expended so much energy? Why the neglect? Even in books where cooks could scarcely be kept out, I have been bemused that the index is more likely to refer to ‘Cook, Captain’ than to ‘Cook’ plain and simple. Not unusually, the excellent Eating in America: A history (1976) by Waverley Root and Richard de Rochemont includes three references to the navigator and none to cooks. [9] PREFACE Cookery is at once ‘sufficiently familiar to every housekeeper; and, its luxurious refinements too copiously detailed in manuals and directories’ to require enlargement, ‘were it even a topic that at all deserved consideration in a work of this nature’. This is the way ‘Cookery’ was dismissed in 1823 by the editors of the sixth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Cooks have always been in the background – both ever present and unnoticed. Their contributions have seemed too common, pervasive, trivial, unproblematic. Cooks generally have been women, and their achievements overlooked as inglorious and private. They have been restricted to the chopping-board and spice rack. But while each of the cook’s actions might be infinitesimal, the results have multiplied into civilisation. Only the vulgar would ‘see no more to a kitchen than saucepans and no more to dinner than dishes’ French food critic Grimod de La Reynière protested two centuries ago. Once made the ‘object of serious study or profound thought’, the gastronomic arts expand to ‘embrace all three realms of nature, and the four corners of the globe, all moral considerations and all social relationships’ (1987: 185-6). That’s more like it; but he and other gastronomic thinkers, such as Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, have tended to pay more attention to enjoying than to preparing dinners. Virtually every archaeological dig, every diary, every streetscape tells the cooks’ tale. We do not lack evidence, and can appropriate much scholarship. But no one has tried to pull all this together. Since the nineteenth century, we have become so hyperspecialised that we scarcely know any longer how to place cooks within the great scheme of things. As evidence of consequent conceptual sloppiness, we slip unthinkingly from ‘cooking’ as heating food (the dictionary meaning) to something much, much more. Unmindful of culinary history, let alone the basic physics, we blur the distinction between ‘roasting’ and ‘baking’. English even lacks a collective noun for the heat source - cooking fire, brazier, stove, oven and so forth. If ‘we are what we eat’, cooks have not just made our meals, but have also made us. They have shaped our social networks, our [10] PREFACE technologies, arts and religions. Cooks deserve to have their story told often and well. We need to invent ways to think about them, and to revise our views about ourselves in their light. Having to traverse the entire globe and its peoples since the first cook picked up her stone ‘knife’, a book truly commensurate with the place of cooks in human history would be massive. I offer an introductory essay, a faint sketch of awesome consequences. In quest of cooks, we initially enter the kitchen of just one Sydney chef, Phillip Searle (Chapter One). The book then relates how certain novelists have portrayed women cooks (Chapter Two) and finds the gastronomic tradition often appreciative (Chapter Three). Having traced the development of the cooking-fire (Chapter Four), existing assumptions about what cooks do are examined (Chapter Five). I then set out my own suggestions, which centre on cooks as sharers. This explains why cooks specialise in sauces (Chapter Six), why their key tool is the knife (Chapter Seven) and how they are behind festivals, beauty and love (Chapter Eight). Much flows from the sharing of food, not the least the possibility of sharing tasks. Then, increasing culinary specialisation gives shape to history. In exploring this, the second part of the book summarises a case for cooks as builders of civilisation (Chapter Nine). It takes up some ideas about the emergence of human beings (Chapter Ten), the settling down with crops and livestock (Chapter Eleven) and the rise of temple civilisations (Chapter Twelve). Magnificent banquets are the centrepieces of empires (Chapter Thirteen); professional cooks have long fed cities (Chapter Fourteen); industrialisation brings both liberation and alienation (Chapter Fifteen); and the tour concludes at a banquet orchestrated by the chef we met at the opening (Chapter Sixteen). This has been no instant project. I learned just how much our eating says about ourselves when writing a gastronomic history of modern Australia, One Continuous Picnic (1982). The puzzle of the historic prejudice against food intellectualism then led me to complete a PhD in the sociology of cuisine (1991), followed by a study of present-day eating, The Shared Table (1993). With cooking [11] PREFACE partner Jennifer Hillier, I ran the Uraidla Aristologist Restaurant in the Adelaide Hills for fifteen years. Mainly, since an early age I have been a keen diner. In an obscure footnote to his journal for 15 August 1773, the literary biographer James Boswell defines the human as the ‘Cooking Animal’. It is not tool-making that separates us from the rest of nature, he writes. It is not memory, judgement and all the faculties and passions of our minds that make us unique. But ‘no beast is a cook’ (1924: 179 n.1). This book honours Boswell’s intuition. It sets out to explain ourselves and our world through cooks. It finds civilisation to be a culinary creation. [12] CHAPTER THREE ‘A Good Bank Account, a Good Cook, and a Good Digestion’ group of well-to-do gourmands surrender to a well-cooked dinner, chewing, chatting and comparing notes. It could be at Aa mansion, club or eating-house at any time over the past few thousand years. Eventually, as it surely must, the conversation comes around to the meal – the source of the ingredients, the execution of recipes and, even if shielded by steward and waiters, the cook(s). The plan in this chapter is to check out such dinner-table appreciation of cooks as has been committed to paper – here we borrow the privileged diners’ stance on specialist cooks, who, like the diners, were typically male.
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