Stephane Douay and Benoist Simmat and Montana Kane (translator). The Incredible Story of Cooking: From Prehistory to today, 500,000 years of adventure. NBM Publishing, 2024. ISBN 9781681123417. https://nbmpub.com/products/the-incredible-story-of-cooking
One of the simplest, yet most complex of basic needs, is food. We need it to survive, but in this era of food on demand in the industrialized world, we have come to take it for granted unless it is not to our taste, or even expected taste. Through the development of food preparation, Douay and Simmat take us into the history of cooking. While such a momentous undertaking may seem impossible, the creators give the reader a good overview of how we have come to develop our collective culinary skills.
As with any historical text, sourcing of information is important, and this book does go into a variety of sources from centuries of written material. It also relies on information from academics, cultural anthropologists, and historical accounts to give us an interaction of food and the development of society as a whole.
The book is divided into nine general chapters, with a final chapter centered on recipes for dishes made during historical times, as previously referenced in the book. The first chapter covers the most time, from various proto humans through to the last ice age of approximately 9000 years ago. This chapter goes into detail as to the types of food eaten, mostly through gathering of what could be foraged while watching what other animals ate to determine what was edible versus poisonous. Many of the anecdotes on the developments of cooking are illustrated by humorous interactions of random characters and give the stories a human quality.
The first chapter also emphasizes the importance of preservation, such as lacto-fermentation as well as that of cold storage and other methods for preservation of foods. The domestication of grains allowed for the later concepts of farming. These concepts allowed people to sustain themselves for longer periods of time and therefore settle into one area. This in turn allowed societies to work on permanent structures, develop written language and even preserve history. Some of the basic diets from this era have come back into vogue, as is referenced later in the last chapter about food sustainability and diet.
The middle chapters deal with the rise of ancient civilizations such as Sumer, Egypt, Greece and Rome, and how their dietary habits influenced the rest of the world. The authors state the creation of alcoholic beverages was important, but did not address the issue of why water was not used (due to contaminants). This may be simply thought to be common knowledge, clean water is something taken so much for granted in the Western World, that the recent widespread development of it often is unstated in historical settings.
The link between food and trade is also explored in the middle chapters. The idea of Chinese cuisine, going along the “silk road” towards the West, where concepts such as pasta were altered to suit needs and adapt to local grains was important. This migration of spices, foods and preparation methods is often understated except when it leads to crises, such as the South American potato being introduced in Europe, only to be dismissed as an unfit food item for any but animals or the poor.
Douay does a nice job of explaining the traditional aspects of kitchen duties in the ancient world through the present day. He highlights the idea of the importance of food as haute cuisine to diplomacy and status. He also explains the development of the modern restaurant concept, gastronomy (an ancient Greek word, revitalized by the French in the later 1800s) and the idea of standardization of food preparation.
The final chapters deal with food preservation in terms of cans and the creation of the food industry. For this section, Douay notes the industrialization of the meat packing industry in Cincinnati and Chicago, to the phases of “pure foods” promoted such as Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Graham Crackers (p. 190). Inevitably, any discussion of modern food leads to American fast food and its impact on the global scale as well as that of general nutrition.
The last part of the book glosses over more recent trends in terms of food security and availability. More could have been written on these more present trends. One “new” trend is that of getting protein through the consumption of insects to reduce the land needed for cattle; however, the idea of eating insects existed in many ancient cultures. The new food movement recipe on page 214 for sustainable soup, using scraps of food, actually is what needed to be done for most of human history until very recently. Lastly, newer movements in cooking, such as the “slow food movement” are discussed as moves towards the future.
One of the few areas where I would have liked to see a bit more information is for spices and their use in southern climates. It seems counterintuitive, but the idea that spicy food makes one sweat, and hence cool off, is not addressed aside from a quick reference. Overall, the book is one that will give a basic overview of the culinary world, and it is an interesting one. The recipes are ones that are also interesting but may or may not be practical in a current setting.
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