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10. Great Transformations
- University Press of Colorado
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231 Chapter 10 GreatTransformations OntheArchaeologyofCooking KathleenD.Morrison University of Chicago The difference between the potentially edible (plants and animals) and food—a substance deemed appropriate for consumption—is very often created through the act of cooking. In India, for example, paddy from the fields, though clearly destined for human consumption, is not subject to the same kinds of social restrictions as cooked rice, not yet being classified as a food, with all its attendant power and danger . Cooking is the vital, yet archaeologically neglected process of rendering potential foodstuffs edible, accessible, and appropriate. As a discipline, we expend a great deal of energy examining what we generally call “food production,” though for the most part these studies focus on agriculture, animal husbandry, foraging, and even marketing and shopping, while eliding the transformative process of cooking itself. The cycle of food production (to maintain the common usage), distribution, and consumption is linked by the labor and life of the humans who grow, gather, process , store, cook, and eat food, most of them on a daily basis. Cooking is thus an absolutely necessary aspect of human life, a set of practices at once quotidian and ceremonial, biologically necessary and culturally elaborated. Cooking practices are distinguished by suites of technological objects and residues and, very often, spatially specialized into storerooms, shops, hearths, kitchens, ovens, and cookhouses. 232 KathleenD.Morrison Classifying food practices into a tripartite cycle of production, distribution, and consumption only ambiguously admits mediating practices such as storing, processing, and cooking. These latter are among the least well-studied aspects of the material history of human provisioning, with the last, cooking, perhaps the least studied to date. This volume, however, begins to remedy this lack, bringing together an array of studies that focus attention on the critical yet, as the editors note, often menial act of cooking. These papers draw on many of the critical lines of evidence available from the archaeological record—plant and animal remains, artifacts, structures, and spaces—to make arguments about the social, technological , and spatial dimensions of cooking in the past. Eating to LivE: BioLogiCaL BasELinEs and thE FunCtions oF Cooking It is important to never lose sight of the basic biological necessities involved in cooking and its associated activities (food processing, of which cooking is surely a part, and storage, which affects the mode of cooking possible and is in turn partly determined by the intended culinary use for the stored product). If we consider that cooking, among other activities, actually makes a potentially edible object into food, then we cannot survive without cooking.* If we may classify washing , peeling, cutting, and assembling raw foods as cooking—in making salads, for example—then it is clear that cooking need not necessarily involve heat, though very often it does. Cooking can break down compounds and fibers, making food more digestible and palatable. Tarble de Scaramelli and Scaramelli consider the significant processing involved in the case of manioc, in which the “bitter” varieties contain dangerous toxins that must be removed by laborious grating and pressing of the pulp. Similarly, Graff discusses the possibility of specialized cooking pots devoted to the preparation of bitter vetch. Though few staples other than manioc and acorns are actually dangerous prior to processing, the digestibility of all of the staple carbohydrates favored by agriculturalists, from grains to root crops to sago, is significantly enhanced by cooking. The preparation of nixtamal discussed by Rodríguez-Alegría, involved soaking maize in water with lime or ash, heating and soaking overnight, and then grinding. This process, he notes, softens the fibers of the maize and releases its * Tarble de Scaramelli and Scaramelli note, for example, that ritual chanting by men neutralizes the dangers of meat, thus making it eligible for consumption. Singing, then, might be considered a step in the chain of food processing, as being itself a form of cooking. [44.221.83.121] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:12 GMT) 233 Great Transformations niacin, which can help prevent pellagra. Similarly, while the consumption of raw (though generally not unprocessed, having been subject to butchering, skinning, slicing, and/or grinding) meat is by no means unknown, for the most part, meat is cooked before consumption, a process that reduces the risk from meat-borne pathogens. The process of rendering bone grease, too, as Manne points out, enables people not only to release solid fats that otherwise remain trapped within the bone but also to denaturize enzymes that might cause spoilage, enhancing storability (cf...