Archive for March 26th, 2010

- “The beasts have memory, judgment and all the faculties and passions of our mind, in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook.”

This quip by the eighteenth-century Scottish biographer James Boswell defines the essence of humanity in a way his contemporaries would have found humorous but also thought provoking. It is neither an immortal soul, reason, nor powers of abstraction that separate us from animals but the simple ability to use fire to transform our daily fare into something more palatable and nutritious.

THE ORIGINS OF COOKING

ancient cookery

We are nothing more than cooking animals. Archaeological evidence bears this out; it is our distant Neanderthal relatives, whose sites offer the earliest incontrovertible evidence of cooking. From those distant times down to the present, the food we eat and how it is prepared has become the decisive factor in the survival of both individuals and whole civilizations, so what better way to approach the subject of history than through the bubbling cauldron?

Growing and preparing food has also been the occupation of the vast majority of men and women who ever lived. To understand ourselves, we should naturally begin with the food that constitutes the fabric of our existence. Yet every culture arrives at different solutions, uses different crops and cooking methods, and invents what amount to unique cuisines. These are to some extent predetermined by geography, technology, and a certain amount of luck. Nonetheless every cuisine is a practical and artistic expression of the culture that created it. It embodies the values and aspirations of each society, its world outlook as well as its history.

Cooking is full of questions that science can help answer — questions you might not have even thought about asking but that can make you a better cook.

When two not-so-friendly-with-each-other liquid joins together

when eggs become mayonnaise

In the simplest terms, an emulsion is a stable mixture of two liquids—such as oil and water—that normally separate from each other. Emulsions can be temporary (measured in seconds or minutes), semi permanent (hours), or relatively permanent (days, months, and sometimes years).

Mayonnaise is the best known and most widely consumed emulsified sauce. Basically, it is an emulsion comprising oil, egg yolks, and either lemon juice or vinegar. Related sauces include chantilly (mayonnaise mixed with whipped cream), gribiche (a piquant mayonnaise made with hard-boiled yolks), and rémoulade (mayonnaise plus chopped pickles, mustard, and other flavoring agents).

Hollandaise is the most celebrated emulsified sauce. It is an emulsion consisting of butter, egg yolks, and lemon juice combined with a little water, salt, and cayenne pepper.  Well-known derivatives include béarnaise (hollandaise enlivened with shallots, tarragon, and vinegar),choron (flavored with tomato), maltese (infused with orange), and mousseline (combined with whipped cream). Other world-renowned emulsified sauces include beurre blanc and sabayon (zabaglione).

Sauces are not the only emulsions. Whole milk, for example, is one, too. If milk fresh from the cow is left to stand, the emulsion breaks down and the cream (butterfat) rises to the top. Homogenization, a process that creates a relatively stable emulsion, prevents this separation.