Making strawberry jam, and other things i will think about when i’m a famous chef
tessa vanderhart, staff
One to two million years ago, my greatest grandmother plucked meat from the semi-burnt carcass of an animal that had inadvertently come into contact with fire, be it through lightning, forest fire, or divine intervention.
Because that first cooked meat was probably found by my grandmother — women were gatherers, men hunters at the time — cooking became an integral part of the development of female humans.
Richard Wrangham, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University, theorizes that women’s control over the food source due to cooking coincided with a 60 per cent increase in the size of females, as well as drastic changes in brain size and features — significant enough that, soon after the first discovery of cooked foods, the first homo erectus remains have been found.
The first preparation of canned food occurred approximately one to two million years later, around 1793, when Nicholas Appert began work on a system that would soon be paid for by the French army.
In between, civilizations flourished, and specialization of roles ruled the day. Hunting societies became farming ones; farming societies became towns; towns became cities, city-states, empires. Plato argued that the evolution of the division of labour serves to increase the diversity and quality of food: in a workers’ city, vegetables and cheese are luxuries; in the Republic, warriors are to eat only roast meat, and never to settle for boiled meat or fish.
By the time canning, rolled around, specialization was inevitable — (For further clarification on this point, I invite you to read Tim Harford’s column “The Logic of Life” on Slate.com.) — even today, one full-time wage-earner makes much more than twice what two part-time wage-earners do. So it made sense for women to stay home and cook, as they’d been doing since that very first fire.
But evolution has run its course. And today, consumption is so specialized that it is sexless: no one cooks, except chefs, except grandmas, except the rich.
Most compellingly, according to Wei-Bin Zhang’s Economic Growth Theory, an increase in leisure time will increase human capital, particularly if work time is fixed and education time is non-zero. Further, it was demonstrated that “an increase in leisure time increases the wage rate and the levels of consumption, savings and output. We see that more playing may strengthen individuals’ health and mentality and benefit the long-term economic performance.”
What the fuck kind of world do we live in where we need econometrics to explain that playing is good?!
One of my happiest memories as a small child is of picking strawberries at my great-aunt’s farm. It was always a hot summer day, and I would race up and down the rows, past my mom and Amma, eating two berries for everyone that made it in to my bucket. Then we would go back to Amma’s where I would sit and eat more berries — maybe with ice cream — and watch the berries be made into jam, and a cake baked to serve for dessert, followed by the washing of dishes, the supper preparations. A whole day of food.
Like any other real skill, cooking cannot be unlearned. It is primal. A cook doesn’t need recipes, just perhaps a jotted note on a piece of napkin: black bean sauce, 327 — whatever that means.
Cooking — as opposed to baking, which is a science — is an art, if not a culture. Before there was the thrill of fire, there was the thrill of discovery: which foods taste good, which foods need to be processed, which foods are poisonous, what is the antidote?
Today, the best foods are slow: growing fresh mint on the windowsill for months, hoping it will bear flavour; simmering soups and reheating and heating once more to finish off the leftovers, the flavours getting better each time, mixing together, evolving.
Japanese culture has one more flavour than we do, savoury, umami. “Pleasing to the taste and smell,” according to Merriam-Webster. I am addicted. I am spending my time thinking of how to incorporate this into canned beans, and not thinking about editorials. I am thinking about how much better it would be if I could cook, cook all day, and not write editorials. I am thinking that would drive me over the edge, give me super-human taste abilities, allow me to patent and spread the word and make billions of people full and happy, only to have my life’s work plagiarized by some famous person’s wife.
The saddest thing in the world is eating tinned (as opposed to canned) beans. Eating canned beans may well indicate that you are a six-foot-tall vegetarian, or a mountain-climber, or a depressed bachelor, or all three — the point is, that there is more than just sustenance in food, and for a culture all but stripped of its spirituality, the essence of the soft, moist, canned tomato is integral.
This weekend, I will be doing some home canning. If you wish to share, please bring an empty jar or a recipe to the Manitoban office, and pick it up, filled, on Monday. Happy canning.
