reading notes from Cooked (present in the foam library https://www.zotero.org/groups/foam_library/items/itemKey/4MP2FF5D )

• dough and bread
• category food

Above all else, what I found in the kitchen is that cooking connects. (p. 18, italics by the reader)

Specialization is undeniably a powerful social and economic force. And yet it is also debilitating. It breeds helplessness, dependence, and ignorance and, eventually, it undermines any sense of responsibility. (…) it obscures the lines of connection, and therefore responsibility, between our everyday acts and their real-world consequences. (…) Perhaps what most commends cooking to me is that it offers a powerful corrective to this way of being in the world - a corrective that is still available to all of us.

In a world where so few of us are obliged to cook at all anymore, to choose to do so is to lodge a protest against specialization - against the total rationalization of life. Against the infiltration of commercial interests into every last cranny of our lives. (…) Cooking has the power to transform more than plants and animals: it transforms us, too, from mere consumers into producers.

FIRE the control of fire

According to Levi-Strauss the distinction between “the raw” and “the cooked” has served many cultures as the great trope for the difference between animals and people. (…) Cooking transforms nature and, by doing so, elevates us above that state, making us human.

The braise or boil, since it cooks meat all the way through, achieves a more complete transcendence of the animal, and perhaps the animal in us, than does grilling over a fire, which leaves its object partly or entirely intact, and ofen leaves a trace of blood - a visible reminder, in other words, that this is a formerliy living creature we're feasting on.

But I suspect that , as much as anything else, grilling meat over a fire today commemorates the transformative power of cooking itself, which never appears so bright or explicit as when wood and fire and flesh are brought togehter under that aromatic empire of smoke.

Cooking, even though it may start by breaking things down, is the opposite of entropy, erecting complex new molecular structures from simpler forms.

Yet however arbitrary such prohibitions may be, they retain the power to knit us together, help forge a collective identity: We are the people who don't eat pork. (…) forms of social glue

Compared with the contemporary chef, the pit masters present themselves less as artists than as prietsts (…) They're allowed to boast, because they don't stand for themselves so much as for an ideal or, better yet, a tribe - the community defined by their style of barbecue.

The microwave is as antisocial as the cook fire is communal.

WATER

That is (…) how economists seem to view the question of work and leisure: as antithetical terms that neatly line up with the equally antithetical categories of production and consumption. (…) As a political matter, is home cooking today a reactionary or a progressive way to spend one's time?

With a modicum of technique and a little more time in the kitchen, the most flavorful food can be made from the humblest of ingredients. This enduring formula suggests that learning one's way around the kitchen - knowing what to do with the gnarly cut, the mirepoix, and the humble pot - might still be a good recipe for eating delicious food without spending much to make it. These are skills that confer a measure of independence.

(…) salt - the only mineral we deliberately eat - (…) Most of the salt we eat comes from the processed foods (…) “So, if you don't eat a lot of processed foods, you don't need to worry about it. Which means: Don't ever be afraid of salt!” (…) salt brings out the intrinsic flavors of many foods and can improve their texture and appearance.

Historically, cooking in pots with water comes much later than cooking with fire, since it awaited the development of watertight and fireproof containers in which to do it. (…) The cook pot is a kind of second human stomach, an external organ of digestion that allows us to consume plants that would otherwise be inedible or require elaborate processing. (…) the pot, by domesticating the element of water, helped us to leave behind hunting and to settle down.

(…) roasting and boiling (…) “exocuisine” and “endocuisine” (Lévi-Strauss) (…) “outside” and “inside” cooking (…)

If the first gatronomic revolution unfolded under the sign of community, gathered around the animal roasting on the fire, and the second that of the family, gathered around the stew pot, then the third one, now well under way, seems to be consecrated to the individual: Have it your way.