Cooks and Kitchens

Humans ability to harness FIRE is the first act of domestication, which exerted and continues to exert a profound influence on our anatomy, society, and the earth itself. 

The Origins of Fire Use and Cooking

• marks human beings as distinct from other species
• fire is so important to humans that most societies have "fire origin myths" explaining the often supernatural ways that fire was given, discovered or conquered by the ancestors.
• celebrate the liberation of fire for human use and the consequent enjoyment of cooked food as a profoundly cultural act
• Fire is given cosmological significance (fire gods, sacred fires (Ayurveda and yoga, and puja- Hindu)
• about 200,000 we see in the archaeological record evidence of reused "hearths"
• fire was harnessed earlier by nomadic peoples in all likelihood

• fires are often tended by settled communities, and so they become a profoundly social activity (tending, with new skills, responsibilities, and cooperation within the group
• Practical aspects of cooking
• safer to consume (kills parasites and neutralizes toxins)
• serves as an external predigestion (easier)
• softer (easily chewed and digested by infants and elderly)- leads to early weaning
• nutrients more easily absorbed
• Sensory advantages
• releases sugars and adds further taste to foods
• adds additional flavoring ingredients in the process of cooking
• Cooking odors stimulate
• appetite
• evokes memories of previous meals
• texturally
• chopping, processing and cooking change the texture of food
• socially
• involves cooperation to acquire ingredients, feul, and equipment; to tend the fire, and finally to share food
• builds social relationships through this cooperation and sharing

Cooking Techniques

• Three broad categories of cooking techniques
• Physical Change
• grating, grinding, milling, pounding, peeling, copping, slicing
• squeezing juices, pressing oil, separating eggs
• churning milk
• rendering fat
• combining or mixing ingredients, whipping, stirring, beating
• Water Content Change
• adding or removing water
• marinating, soaking, adding liquid, curing in brines or acids (preserve food)-add
• salting, smoking, drying (preserve for storage)
• freezing (expands the water)
• Chemical Change
• the use of heat or fermentation
• yeasts, molds, bacteria (slows spoiling and adds flavors)
• produces breads, cultured dairy, cheeses, brewed spirits, sauces (soy, etc)
• direct and indirect heat application
• direct: grilling, charring, roasting
• indirect: baking
• Two media of application
• water and oil- boiling, steaming, poaching, frying, searing

Cooking and Food Getting Strategies

• Mobility, ingredients, storage capabilities, time constraints and equipment all influence cooking techniques and are all tied to food getting strategies
• Hunters and gatherers
• immediate return (smaller)
• impromptu fires and the use of charcoal and earthen ovens
• men's roles: butchering and cooking larger game at the kill site and bringing the cooked meat back to camp for distribution. Cooking for special feasts. 
• women's roles (and children): build fires, enjoy cooked small game immediately consumed, food processing, heart of their daily lives- an ongoing process which promotes sociability
• Delayed return (larger-more food)
• daily processing and cooking is a vital activity
• larger range of traditional technique that store and preserve surplus- drying, smoking, boiling, pulping
• women: ongoing processing of foods for storage, and everyday eating valued for its aesthetics
• cooking and eating are seen as highly prestigious social and political acts
• Pastoralists
• due to the demands of mobility have produced techniques which reduced cooking times and equipment
• longer term stays may entail brewing fermented beverages and soring grains for later use
• utilize dung for fires in the absence of wood
• Women du almost all cooking work: Dairy processing: milk, butter, cheese, kefir, yogurt, porridge, roasting fish
• men: distance themselves from engaging in domestic tasks. Will cook meat (rare)

• Horticulturalists
• Sedentary life entails tending gardens and led to more elaborate cooking techniques
• Men: share status foods to gain social advantage. shared on a wide social scale.
• Women: cooked food shared among close family

• Industrial agriculturalists
• Shopping for food and household storage have become priorities
• Wage work demands dramatically reduce the time spent cooking foods
• cooking is more of a private activity within the household, more technologically supported, but still demanding embodied knowledge
• each culture has its own culinary aesthetics and taste which require specialized techniques
• cooking often seen as a chore with no time allocated for it 
• lessened the value of embodied knowledge and skills of home cooks

The Contextual Meanings of Food and Cooking

The act of cooking is surrounded by cultural meanings which are based on cosmologies- ideological constructions.

• Exemplify the control of nature by culture (Levi-Strauss)

                                                            

Natural foods in the diagram above become cultural foods through cooking or they will remain natural foods through rotting. This distinction between NATURE and CULTURE became a foundational opposition (binary pair) that formed human binary cognitive structures -- that we universally think in oppositions, which structuralism saw as fundamental to forming human culture. (imposed model- seen as universal) Modern anthropological interpretations prefer emic perspectives where each culture ascribes unique meanings to cooking and cuisines. 

• Modern Theories (sociolinguistic)
• Based on the ability of language to express meaning about every aspect of culture
• Each cooking technique is valued for the unique change it brings to food. 
• Relies on an analysis of cooking vocabulary
• Specialists use more terms to describe their techniques and techniques are broken down into more and more specialized levels, differentiated by sources of heat, cooking times, types of utensils used, ingredients and desired outcomes.
• looking at vocabulary can bring insight into:
• who cooks
• where one cooks
• what one cooks with
• what one cooks
• what the food should look like (aesthetics)
• The important features of culinary traditions

Cooking and Gender

In all food getting strategies both men and women contribute to the acquisition of ingredients. Women however more frequently are tasked with preparing and cooking every day meals.

There has been an ideology created that it was natural for women to cook as part of their domestic responsibility towards the family

• men are seen as naturally cooking in public context
• BBQ as an example of the power of ideology
• associated with camping and the wild west (macho)
• masculinity- could cook with the big tongs and fork without risking it
• also associaed with "meat"- men's food
• women become the makers of side dishes
• Marriage allowed men and women to cook and eat together. Single men would have to cook for themselves, but married men had the time to cook publically and share their food to gain prestige-sharing meat.
• The more surplus is produced in a subsistence strategy, the more the more distant production is from consumption, the more women's cooking becomes invisible, taken for granted and its significance obscured
• this coincides with the greater dichotomy between the privacy of domestic life and the primacy of the public sphere as the site of social life

Men's Conspicuous Cooking and Public Cuisine

• Men's public cooking involves ingredients that are accorded higher value while the techniques and flavors are elaborations of womens domestic cooking
• these ingredients are regarded as wealth, status symbols, are hunted, grown, or traded as part of men's productive activities.
• In agricultural societies, public cooking was often associated with religious entities
• priest-cum-cook
• redistribution of food through feasting
• created a high public/low private status distinction within cuisines
• social stsus differences within society reflect the quality and quantity of food one consumes
• The commodification of cooking
• the demand for large kitchens to produce greater quantities of food using more specialized equipment and greater technical skill from cooks
• writing of cookbooks and the codificatioon of cooking techniques established cooking as a formal and largely male occupation
• written culinary traditions are given prestige (male-public-work), whereas oral traditions can fade into obscurity (women-domestic)

Celebrity Chefs and the Shaping of National Cuisines

France was the place where modern cuisines emerged-transforming the cook into the specialist chef, the rise of restaurants, cookbooks, and gastronomic discourse within the wider society.

• Specialized cooks in France worked in the elite's kitchens, but after the French Revolution, the aristocracy was dismantled, and cooks went to look for other wage labor. 
• They sought work in public commercial kitchens where they invented dishes, refined techniques and equipment, while maintaining French culinary style to serve the needs of their paying customers.
• Carême- worked to raise the profile of French cooking and move it to an art form, capable of garnering social prestige (he was a food influencer of his time)
• Escoffer- increased the efficiency of the commercial kitchen by establishing ranks (chef at the top) and creating an assembly line of lesser chefs by the late 19th century
• substituted fancier ingredients for domestic dishes
• creating a variety of basic sauces
• women could not break in to this occupation once it afforded prestige
• Celebrity chefs are created
• social legacy: the rise of "foodies" - people who take food as as status enhancement 
• supermarkets in prestige neighborhoods follow the foodie trendsand who, like chefs, will source the finest ingredients and follow the latest trends in recipes, techniques, flavors, and dishes.

Domestic Kitchens: Gender and Home Cooking

women have struggled with the desire to gain power and prestige in the public sphere and meet gendered domestic demands.

• cooking becomes recast as a chore and is devalued and seen as unenjoyable
• increase in the market for convenience food products
• Kitchen equipment becomes more elaborated and geared toward efficiency
• "The Cult of Domesticity"- makes the kitchen a shrine, the most important room in the house and the center of social life.
• "Home" becomes sentimentalized as a refuge for men to escape the demands of their public lives. 
• work in the home became recast as idyllic- even though women worked outside the home- and devalued even further. 
• Invention of "home economics"
• revolutionize kitchen equipment 1930s
• temperature control stove
• refrigeration - diet changes can be seen in the size of refrigerator and freezer
• kitchen preparation triangle (storage/fridge. sink/preparation, cooking/oven)
• start of kitchen design
• pass on this "onerous" task to time saving devices (cooking devalued)
• Industrial Cuisine becomes most popular choice 1950s
• prepacked time saving cooking (some prep required to assuage guilt by women)
• cake mixes are now "homemade"
• microwave recipes
• Julia Child was instrumental in turning the kitchen into a place for primary socializing
• celebrity Chef- brought the "joy" back to cooking for some
• added open kitchen design, fireplaces, TVs and sit around counters
• multi-purpose cooking, eating, and socializing rooms
• cooking became something that was worthwhile for pleasure, an intentional creative act which could gain one prestige and admiration
• Locavorism: its ascendency marks the re valuing of cooking as a past time rather than a necessity
• eat fresh, seasonal, sustainable, and ethically produced ingredients becomes a valued choice but not a necessity