Cooked - A Natural History of Transformat Part 11

Braise: the sound of that lovely word itself suggests a certain slow unfolding, the final "z" sound trailing off with no hard consonant to stop it. And in fact nothing is more important to a successful braise than allowing it to take its sweet time. This period of simmering is in many ways the easiest step of the process, since it requires nothing of the cook but patience. As one wise cookbook advises when one is making a braise, "If you wonder whether it's done, it's not."

Yet most recipes try to rush the process, promising to wrap things up and get the dish on the table in a couple of hours. These days, recipes are steeped in the general sense of panic about time, and so have tried to speed everything up, the better to suit "our busy lives." In the case of braises and stews, this usually means cranking up the cooking temperature, often to 325F or 350F. Not a good idea-in fact, not really braising at all. At those temperatures, all but the fattiest meats will dry out and toughen, and the gradual transformations and meldings of flavors, the chemical reactions and synergies of taste that make so many slow-cooked foods so delicious, simply won't have a chance to unfold. Time is everything in these dishes, and in most cases, more is more. (The word "braise" comes from a "brazier," a metal cook pot sort of like a Dutch oven that, since it is heated by placing a few coals on top of and below it, never gets very hot.)

Harold McGee recommends never allowing a braise to exceed the boiling point-212F. Even at 300F, liquid in a covered pot will boil, and likely damage the meat. You want the cooking liquid merely to "smile"-hatch a tiny bubble now and then, but never boil. McGee goes so far as to suggest starting a braise at 200F with the lid off, which should bring the liquid to around 120F, scarcely warmer than a hot tub. But two hours at such a temperature "amounts to a period of accelerated aging" that tenderizes the muscle by allowing enzymes to break down the connective tissues. (It also preserves the reddish pigmentation of the meat even after it's been completely cooked-a color that the pit masters I met prized as proof of low and slow cooking.) After that, cover the pot and b.u.mp the temperature to 250F, and keep it there until the meat has reached 180F. At that point, which could take three or four hours, all the collagen will have melted into succulence, and the meat should tremble at the approach of a fork.

The first time I asked Samin how long some dish we were cooking should cook, she offered this slightly gnomic answer: "Until the meat relaxes." Here was one way that slow cooking with water or fire had the same effect. "When you're cooking a muscle, which is basically what meat is, first it tenses up like this"-she scrunched her shoulder, drew in a breath, and grimaced-"but then, at a certain point, it suddenly unclenches"-she released her shoulders and her breath-"so that when you touch it you can feel that it has relaxed. That's when slow-cooked meat is done."

Time is the missing ingredient in our recipes-and in our lives. I'm not going to pretend that the Ur-braise I've described here can be made in just twenty minutes of "active cooking time," as the recipes now like to promise. There's at least a half hour of that (chopping onions, sweating the mirepoix, browning the meat, etc.), and probably more if you cook the onions as slowly as they should be cooked. On the other hand, once that work is done, you can put the pot on low (or just throw everything in a Crock-Pot) and do something else for the rest of the afternoon-make the sides and a dessert, check your e-mail, take a walk-while the pot works its leisurely magic. But unless you make your braise in a Crock-Pot (which is always an option), you do need to be around to keep an eye on it, which for most of us today is a lot to ask, at least during the week. In households where both partners work outside the home, it is difficult, if not impossible, to weave this sort of cooking into the rhythms of weekday life.

Yet even on the weekends, most of us are moving too fast for slow cooking, even unattended slow cooking. So if we cook at all we clip ten- and twenty-minute recipes from the newspaper and throw expensive filets on the grill. This is certainly what Judith and I do most nights, and it took me awhile to get accustomed to the idea of spending several hours at a time in the kitchen, even on a weekend day. Coming into the kitchen, I always felt divided against myself, torn, because there was always something else, something more pressing, I could be doing with that time-household errands, exercise, reading, watching television. But knowing Samin was going to be here for four hours of cooking, I eventually found that I could (like some of the meat we were cooking) relax into it, clear my mind of competing desires, and give myself over to the work. When chopping onions, just chop onions.

This time became a kind of luxury, and that is precisely when I began truly to enjoy the work of cooking.

You could argue that this sort of cooking was a special case, and it was. Our cooking was luxuriously optional, not obligatory. It didn't happen every day, either. It was also not time spent alone, which I've come to think is a big part of the "drudgery problem" with cooking, and one of the reasons so many of us happily abandoned the kitchen as soon as that became a real option. Cooking can be isolating in households where one person is expected to do it all-typically the woman in a nuclear family. Yet it's worth remembering that it is cooking alone that is the historical exception. Historically, cooking has been a much more sociable activity than it became after World War II, when so many people moved to the suburbs and the nuclear family with a wife who didn't go off to work became the norm.

Before that, multiple generations of women in a family would often cook together. And before the industrial revolution, when men first left the home to earn wages, men and women commonly worked together (at different tasks, it's true) to put food on the table. The household was a more self-sufficient unit before the rise of the market and the division of labor. Going back still further, the women in small, traditional communities would perform food work as a group, grinding grain or making bread in what anthropologists call "the conversational circle." Even today, in many Mediterranean villages, you find communal ovens, where people bring their proofed loaves, roasts, and braises, and pa.s.s the time in conversation while waiting for their dishes to come out of the oven. Sundays with Samin had some of that flavor. Sooner or later, Judith and Isaac, our son, would drift into the kitchen and pick up a knife to help, and conversation became a more or less constant companion to the soothing, rhythmic sounds of kitchen business.

It is true that this cooking was purely elective. But nowadays, what cooking isn't? With fast- and convenience food so cheap and ubiquitous, cooking is hardly ever obligatory anymore, even among the poor. We all get to decide whether to cook, and increasingly, we decide not to. Why? Some people will tell you they find it boring or daunting. But the most common reason people offer is, they don't have the time.

And for many of us, that is true. For years now Americans have been putting in longer hours at work and enjoying less time at home. Since 1967, we've added 167 hours-the equivalent of a month's full-time labor-to the total amount of time we spend at work each year, and in households where both parents work, now the great majority, the figure is more like 400 hours. Americans today spend more time working than people in any other industrialized nation-an extra two weeks or more a year. This probably owes to the fact that, historically, the priority of the American labor movement has been to fight for money, whereas the European labor movement has fought harder for time-a shorter workweek, longer vacations. Not surprisingly, in those countries where people still take home cooking seriously, as they do in much of Europe, they also have more time to devote to it.

It's generally thought that the entrance of women into the workforce is responsible for the collapse of home cooking, but the story turns out to be a little more complicated, and fraught. Yes, women with jobs outside the home spend less time cooking-but so do women without jobs. The amount of time spent on food preparation in America has fallen at the same precipitous rate among women who don't work outside the home as it has among women who do: In both cases, it has fallen about 40 percent since 1965.* In general, spending on restaurant and take-out food rises with income. Families where both partners work simply have more money to pay corporations to do their cooking, yet all American families now allow corporations to cook for them when they can. There is an irony in the fact that many of the women who have traded time in the kitchen for time in the workplace are working in the food-service industry, helping to produce meals for other families who no longer have time to cook for themselves. These women are being paid for this cooking, true, yet a substantial part of their pay is going to other corporations to cook their families' meals.

Now, whenever anyone-but especially a man-expresses dismay at the decline of home cooking, a couple of unspoken a.s.sumptions begin to condense over the conversation like offending clouds. The first a.s.sumption is that you must be "blaming" women for the decline in cooking, since (and here is a.s.sumption number two) the meals no longer being cooked are women's responsibility. It's not hard to identify the basis for these a.s.sumptions: Women have traditionally done most of the household food work, so to defend cooking is automatically to defend those roles. But by now it should be possible to make a case for the importance of cooking without defending the traditional division of domestic labor. Indeed, that argument will probably get nowhere unless it challenges the traditional arrangements of domesticity-and a.s.sumes a prominent role for men in the kitchen, as well as children.

Even so, the decline of cooking remains a fraught subject, and there are many people who don't think a man has a leg to stand on talking about it. But the very touchiness of the subject turns out to be an essential element of the story. When women left the house to go to work, there was a problem: Who would now do the housework? The women's movement plopped that difficult question onto kitchen tables all over the world. How fair was it to expect women who now worked to continue taking care of the children, cleaning the house, and putting meals on the table? (In the 1980s, one sociologist calculated that, when you added up work at work and work at home, working women were putting in fifteen hours more work a week than men.*) The time had come, clearly, for a renegotiation of the division of labor in the family.

This promised to be a very difficult and uncomfortable conversation. No one was looking forward to it. And then we found a way to avoid having it. Several ways, actually. Couples who could afford to defused the conflict by paying other women to clean the house and take care of the children. And instead of arguing about who should get dinner on the table, or how that work might be equitably shared, the food industry stepped into the breach with an offer that proved irresistible to everyone, male or female, rich or poor: Why don't you just let us cook for you?

Actually food manufacturers had been working to convince us they should do the cooking since long before large numbers of women entered the workforce. Beginning after World War II, the food industry labored mightily to sell Americans-and American women in particular-on the processed-food wonders it had invented to feed the troops: canned meals, freeze-dried foods, dehydrated potatoes, powdered orange juice and coffee, instant and superconvenient everything. As Laura Shapiro recounts in her social history, Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, the food industry strove to "persuade millions of Americans to develop a lasting taste for meals that were a lot like field rations." The same process of peacetime conversion that industrialized our farming, giving us synthetic fertilizers made from munitions and new pesticides developed from nerve gas, also industrialized our eating.

Shapiro shows that the shift toward industrial cookery began not in response to a demand from women entering the workforce, or even from feminists eager to escape the drudgery of the kitchen, but was mainly a supply-driven phenomenon. Processing food is extremely profitable-much more so than growing it or selling it whole. So it became the strategy of food corporations to move into our kitchens long before many women had begun to move out.

Yet for years, American women, whether they worked or not, strenuously resisted processed foods, regarding them as a dereliction of their "moral obligation to cook," something they viewed as a parental responsibility on par with, and part of, child care. And though second-wave feminist writers like Betty Friedan depicted all housework as a form of oppression, many women drew a distinction between cooking, which they regularly told food-industry researchers they enjoyed, and other domestic tasks. As author and nutritionist Joan Gussow has said, "There is absolutely no evidence that cooking is, or was, a hated ch.o.r.e from which the food processors-as they claim-liberated women." But though it may not have been a hated ch.o.r.e, it was one of the easier ch.o.r.es to hand over to the market when time became short and the household workload too burdensome.

In fact, many second-wave feminists were ambivalent on the gender politics of cooking. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second s.e.x that, though time spent in the kitchen could be oppressive, it could also be a form of "revelation and creation; and a woman can find special satisfaction in a successful cake or a flaky pastry, for not everyone can do it: one must have the gift." We can read this as either a special (very French) exemption for the culinary arts, or as a bit of genuine wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen. But this ambivalence about the value of cooking raises an interesting question. Has our culture devalued food work because it is unfulfilling by its very nature or because it has traditionally been women's work?

Either way, it appears that the food industry-along with the falling wages of American families, which is what drew most women into the workforce beginning in the 1970s-probably had more to do with the decline of cooking than feminist rhetoric. Not that feminist rhetoric didn't help. It did, especially when food marketers began deploying it themselves, as a clever way to align their products, and interests, with the rising feminist tide. Kentucky Fried Chicken was not the only convenience food that promised "women's liberation" from cooking. The industry was only too happy to clothe itself in feminist ideology if that would help it insinuate itself into the kitchen and onto the dinner table.

Yet running just beneath the surface of food-industry feminism was an implicit antifeminist message. Then as now, ads for packaged foods were aimed almost exclusively at women, and so reinforced the retrograde idea that the responsibility for feeding the family fell to Mom. The slick new products would help her to do a job that was hers and hers alone. The ads have also helped manufacture a sense of panic about time, depicting families so rushed and harried in the morning that there is no time to make breakfast, not even to pour some milk over a bowl of cereal. No, the only hope is to munch on a cereal bar (iced with synthetic "milk" frosting) in the bus or car. (Tell me: Why can't these ha.s.sled families set their alarm clocks, like, ten minutes earlier?!) Like so much of modern advertising, the commercials for convenience food simultaneously stoke an anxiety and promise to relieve it. The food industry's marketing message has the added benefit of letting men completely off the hook. For the necessary and challenging questions about who should be in the kitchen, posed so sharply by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, ultimately got answered for us by the food industry: No one! Let us do it all! With that, we welcomed the food industry into our kitchens as a way to head off the conflict brewing between Mom and Dad.

Yet it took years of such clever, dedicated marketing to wear down the resistance of many women to the farming-out of food preparation to corporations. They first had to be persuaded that opening a can or cooking from a mix really was cooking. Honest. This took some doing. In the 1950s, just-add-water cake mixes languished in the supermarket until the marketers figured out that if they left something for the "baker" to do-specifically, crack open an actual egg-she could take ownership of the cake, feel as though she had discharged her moral obligation to cook. But in the years since, our resistance has crumbled as the food scientists have gotten better and better at simulating real food while making it look attractive and seemingly fresh. At the same time, the rapid penetration of microwave ovens-which went from being a fixture in 8 percent of American households in 1978 to 90 percent today-opened up a vast new field of home-meal replacements by slashing the time it takes to, um, "cook" them.

The idea of cooking as a solemn parental obligation has not been completely vanquished, but, as Harry Balzer's research suggests, the corporate project of redefining what it means to cook and serve a meal to your family has succeeded beyond the industry's wildest expectations. People think nothing of buying frozen peanut-b.u.t.ter-and-jelly sandwiches for their children's lunch boxes. The march of packaged foods into our pantries and freezers has also undermined our willingness to buy fresh ingredients, Balzer has found, since they oblige us to do something with them before they go bad-yet another pressure of time. A wilting head of broccoli in the fridge is "a guilt trip," Balzer says, whereas a frozen entree loyally stands by us indefinitely. "Fresh is a ha.s.sle."

"We've had a hundred years of packaged foods," Balzer told me, "and now we're going to have a hundred years of packaged meals." Already today, 80 percent of the cost of food eaten in the home goes to someone other than a farmer, which is to say, to industrial cooking and packaging and marketing. More than half the money we spend to eat goes to food prepared outside the home. Balzer himself is unsentimental about this development; in fact, he looks forward to the next frontier in the industrial revolution of dinner.

"We're all looking for someone else to cook for us. The next American cook is going to be the supermarket. Take-out from the supermarket, that's the future. All we need now is the drive-through supermarket." In the end, women did succeed in getting men into the kitchen, just not their husbands. No, they've ended up instead with the men who run General Mills and Kraft, Whole Foods and Trader Joe's.

The whole question of time begins to look a little different when you consider what we're doing with the half hour a day that the food industry has so generously granted us. Longer hours at work are part of the answer. Another is more time spent in the car, on longer commutes. We're also spending more time shopping-for take-out food, among other things. (We forget how much time it can take simply to avoid cooking: all that time spent driving to restaurants or waiting for our orders, none of which gets counted as "food preparation.") But much of the half hour saved by not cooking is being spent in front of screens: watching television (nearly thirty-five hours a week on average), surfing the Web (about thirteen hours a week), and playing games on our smart phones. During the last few decades, we have somehow managed to find nearly two more hours in our busy lives to devote to the computer each day. In a day that still has exactly twenty-four hours in it, where in the world did we find all that time?

Well, we've gotten much better at mult.i.tasking, a phenomenon that makes this whole business of measuring how we budget our time much trickier. Mult.i.tasking also counts against cooking as an acceptable use of our time, since it is harder to check e-mail while chopping onions than it is to, say, eat while shopping online. And yet what's to keep us from looking at this "problem" as one of the great virtues of cooking?

One mult.i.tasking activity that has increased substantially as cooking has declined is a new human behavior called "secondary eating." When asked what Americans are doing with the time that industrial food preparation has freed up, Karen S. Hamrick, an economist at the USDA, said, "People spend more time eating. Eating while they're watching TV; eating while driving; eating while getting dressed; eating while they're doing almost everything else." A USDA study that Hamrick wrote found that Americans are now spending seventy-eight minutes a day engaged in secondary eating and drinking-that is, eating or drinking while doing something else.* This is now more time than they spend engaged in "primary eating"-aka meals. Who would ever have predicted that cooking less would actually lead us to eat more? But that is precisely what has happened.

The rise in "secondary eating" points up one of the subtler ways that not cooking might be deleterious to our health. There is good reason to believe that the outsourcing of food preparation to corporations and sixteen-year-old burger flippers has taken a toll on our physical and psychological well-being. But the reason is not simply because corporations and fast-food franchises cook poorly, true as that is. Rather, it's because the time that people used to spend cooking had a substantial, invisible, and generally positive effect on the way that they and their families ate.

That at least is the conclusion of some intriguing recent research on the links between time spent cooking and dietary health. A 2003 study by a group of Harvard economists led by David Cutler* found that most of the increase in obesity in America over the last several decades could be explained by the rise of food preparation outside the home. Ma.s.s production has driven down the cost of many foods, not only in terms of purchase price but, perhaps even more important, in the amount of time required to obtain them.

Consider the french fry. Fried potatoes did not become the most popular "vegetable" in America until the food industry relieved us of the considerable time, effort, and mess required to prepare them ourselves. Similarly, the ma.s.s production of cream-filled cakes, fried chicken wings and taquitos, exotically flavored chips and dips, or cheesy puffs of refined flour has transformed all these hard-to-make-at-home foods into the sort of everyday fare we can pick up at the gas station on a whim for less than a dollar. And the fact that we no longer have to plan or even wait to enjoy these foods, as we surely would if we were making them ourselves, makes us that much more likely to indulge impulsively.

Economics teaches that when the cost of something goes down, consumption of it goes up. But cost is measured not only in money; it can be measured in time, too. Cutler and his colleagues make a strong case that the decline in the "time cost" of food has had a substantial effect on our eating. Since the 1970s, we're consuming five hundred more calories a day, and most of them consist of precisely the sort of foods (like snacks and convenience foods) that are typically cooked outside the home. The study found that when we don't have to cook meals ourselves we eat more of them. As the amount of time Americans spend cooking has dropped by half, the number of meals Americans eat in a day has climbed; since 1977, we've added roughly half a meal's worth of food to our daily intake, most of it in the form of secondary eating.

Cutler and his colleagues surveyed cooking patterns across several cultures and discovered that obesity rates are inversely correlated with the amount of time spent on food preparation. The more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower its rate of obesity. In fact, the amount of time spent cooking predicts obesity rates more reliably than female partic.i.p.ation in the labor force or even income. Other research supports the idea that home cooking is a better predictor of a healthful diet than social cla.s.s. A 1992 study in the Journal of the American Dietetic a.s.sociation found that poor women who routinely cooked were likely to eat a more healthful diet than well-to-do women who did not.* A 2012 Public Health Nutrition study of the elderly in Taiwan found a strong correlation between regular cooking and superior health and longevity.

So time spent cooking matters-a lot. Which, when you think about it, should come as no surprise. When we let corporations cook for us, they're bound to skimp on quality ingredients and go heavy on the sugar, fat, and salt. These are three tastes we've been hardwired by natural selection to favor; they also happen to be dirt cheap and to do a good job masking the shortcomings of processed foods. Industrial cookery also increases the range of the tastes and cuisines available to us; we may not know how to cook Indian or Moroccan or Thai, but Trader Joe's does. Although such variety might seem like a good thing, as Cutler suggests (and any buffet table proves), the wider the choice of food, the more of it we will consume. And then there is dessert: If you make special-occasion foods cheap and easy enough to eat every day, we will eat them every day. The time and work involved in cooking, as well as the delay in gratification built into the cooking process, serve as an important check on our appet.i.te. Now that check is gone, and we're struggling to deal with the consequences.

The question is, can we ever go back? Once it has been dismantled, can a culture of everyday cooking (and "primary eating") be rebuilt? Because it's hard to imagine ever reforming the American way of eating unless millions of us-women and men both-are willing to make cooking and eating meals a part of daily life. The path to a healthier diet of fresh, unprocessed food (not to mention to a revitalized local food economy) pa.s.ses right through the home kitchen.

If this strikes you as an appealing idea, you might not want to call Harry Balzer to discuss it.

"Not going to happen," he told me. "Why? Because we're basically cheap and lazy, and the skills are already lost. Who is going to teach the next generation how to cook?"

Crusty as a fresh baguette, Harry Balzer insists on dealing with the world, and human nature, as it really is, or at least as he finds it in the survey data he has spent the last three decades poring over. But for a brief moment, I was able to engage him in the project of imagining a slightly different reality. This took a little doing. Most of his clients, who include many of the big chain restaurants and food manufacturers, profit handsomely from the decline of cooking in America; indeed, their marketing has contributed to it. Yet Balzer himself clearly recognizes what industrial cookery has cost us. So I asked him how, in an ideal world, we might begin to undo the damage that the modern diet of industrially prepared food has done to our health.

"Easy. You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. Cook it yourself. Eat anything you want-just as long as you're willing to cook it yourself."

Toward the end of my year of cooking with Samin, I began braising and stewing solo, regularly devoting my Sunday afternoons to cooking various pot dishes on my own. The idea was to make a couple of dinners at a time and freeze them to eat during the week: my own home-meal replacements, homemade. Weeknights, it's often hard to find more than a half hour or so to fix dinner, so I decided to put in a few hours on the weekend, when I would feel less rushed. I also borrowed a couple of minor ma.s.s-production techniques from the food industry: I figured that if I was going to chop onions for a mirepoix or soffritto, why not chop enough for two or three dishes? That way, I'd only have to wash the pans, knives, and cutting boards once. Making pot dishes in this way has proved to be the single most practical and sustainable skill-both in terms of money and time spent to eat well-I acquired in my cooking education.

Sundays without Samin have become a pastime I look forward to most weekends. Isaac usually keeps me company, bringing his laptop down to the kitchen so he can do his homework while I chop and saute, season and stir. Sometimes he'll wander over to the pot on the stove with a tasting spoon, and offer some unsolicited seasoning advice. But mostly we work in parallel, both of us absorbed in our respective tasks, with occasional breaks for conversation. I've learned that the very best time to talk to a teenager is while doing something else, and our hours at the kitchen island, during what is his last year at home, have become some of the easiest, sweetest times we've had together. I believe he feels the same way. One Sunday, Isaac answered the phone while I stirred a sugo; we were planning to make some fresh pasta together a little later in the day. It was my parents on the line.

"It's cold and drizzly here, but really cozy inside," I heard Isaac tell them. "Dad's cooking and the house smells so good. This is my perfect kind of Sunday."

Once I committed a couple of hours to being in the kitchen, I found my usual impatience fade and could give myself over to the afternoon's unhurried project. After a week in front of the screen, the opportunity to work with my hands-with all my senses, in fact-is always a welcome change of pace, whether in the kitchen or in the garden. There's something about such work that seems to alter the experience of time, helps me to reoccupy the present tense. I don't want you to get the idea it's made a Buddhist of me, but in the kitchen, maybe a little bit. When stirring the pot, just stir the pot. I get it now. It seems to me that one of the great luxuries of life at this point is to be able to do one thing at a time, one thing to which you give yourself wholeheartedly.

Unitasking.

VII.

Step Seven: Remove Pot from Oven. If Necessary, Skim Fat and Reduce Liquid. Bring to the Table and Serve.

All that first winter of Sundays without Samin, and several of the weekdays thereafter, we enjoyed a variety of tasty pot dishes: sugo over homemade pasta, braised short ribs in dashi, a pork-and-chili stew, braised duck legs, a vegetable tagine, coq au vin, beef stew, os...o...b..co, and so on. After some practice, I found that two hours of so-called active cooking time followed by a few more of unattended simmering could produce three or four nights' worth of good and-I don't mind saying-occasionally exceptional home cooking. I'm counting leftovers; stews and braises are infinitely more delicious the second or third night.

But one Sunday afternoon that winter, while Isaac and I were at work in the kitchen, we cooked up a little experiment, a plan for a family dinner later that week that would const.i.tute the precise negation of all the cooking we'd been doing to that point: "Microwave Night." The deal was, we would each choose whatever entree most appealed to us in the frozen-food case and make a dinner of them. How much time would we save? What would it cost? And what would the meal be like? Isaac saw it as a chance to indulge his desire for fast food. I was indulging a more journalistic curiosity.