COOKING 101

The oldest and most essential of the arts and crafts, cookery involves a variety of primary techniques that include the application of dry heat, immersion in or contact with heated liquids or fats, curing, smoking, and pickling. Secondary cookery techniques range from the simplest kitchen chores to the elaborate decoration of ceremonial pastries. Cookery must be divided into two classes, perhaps best defined by the French, who distinguish between cuisine bourgeois (“home cooking”) and haute cuisine—cookery conceived as an aesthetic pursuit. In theory, the distinction is based on the differences between practical cooking skills and refined artistry. In practice, however, the distinction has always been somewhat vague and has become increasingly so in recent years, as home cooks—better informed, equipped, and supplied than in the past.

Origins

Cookery originated sometime between the onset of fire making and the beginning, eons later, of the Neolithic period. Until they learned to make and control fire, early humans ate their food raw, subsisting mostly on wild fruits, nuts, insects, fish, and game. Before the development of pottery vessels some 7000 to 12,000 years ago, food was cooked by roasting it over or toasting it beside open fires, or by wrapping it in leaves or husks, to be pit-steamed over embers. The development of pottery made possible such relatively sophisticated cooking methods as boiling, stewing, braising, frying, and, perhaps, a primitive form of baking. These techniques, in combination with the domestication of animals for their meat and milk and the cultivation of edible plants, opened the way to what ultimately became modern cookery.

Food in the New World

In the western hemisphere cookery has evolved largely according to the ethnic background of the settlers, as modified by their immediate requirements and the available produce in the regions they settled. Thus, in Canada, native foodstuffs have been adapted to a need, in a harsh climate, for high caloric intake and are cooked according to French and English tastes. In the United States food has been and still is cooked according to the styles of successive waves of immigrants—with English, German, Dutch, Creole, and African influences predominant until recently. In Latin America, native cookery has been influenced, in varying degrees, by the methods of Spain, Portugal, and Africa.

 Literature

The literature of cookery (as opposed to the older literature of gastronomy) dates from Confucian times in the East, and from the 1st century AD in the West, when the first known cookbook was written, perhaps by the Roman voluptuary Marcus Gavius Apicius (14-37). The earliest surviving cookbook in English is The Forme of Cury (Forms of Cookery, c. 1390). With the invention of printing, cookbooks began to proliferate. The ever-increasing number of works on cookery includes the landmark works of Carême and Escoffier, as well as—in the U.S. today—such frequently revised classic cookbooks as the Fannie Farmer Cookbook and The Joy of Cooking, and the books, television programs, and newspaper columns of such widely respected experts as Julia Child, Craig Claiborne, and James Beard.