Cooked - A Natural History of Transformat Part 7

There is one last cook fire I need to tell you about, one that made me think that, even after some two millions years of practice, the possibilities of cooking with fire may not be exhausted yet. I found this fire in the microscopic town of Axpe, in the Basque Country of Spain, high in the rocky hills between the cities of San Sebastian and Bilbao. This is where, in an undistinguished but ancient stone house on the town square, a self-trained chef in his fifties by the name of Bittor Arguinzoniz, a former lumberjack and electrician, has been quietly and intently reinventing what it means to cook with fire in the twenty-first century.

I met Arguinzoniz within twenty-four hours of cooking with Ed Mitch.e.l.l in Manhattan, and the contrast between the two men and their worlds could not be starker. Bittor does not like to give interviews, or for that matter even talk much, at least not while he's cooking, a process demanding such fierce concentration that a visitor to his kitchen feels at first like an intruder and then utterly invisible. He is a modest, ascetic man, tall, slender except for a compact paunch, and gray as smoke. Bittor likes to work in solitude, seldom leaves Axpe (where he grew up in a house with no running water or electricity; his mother heated and cooked exclusively with wood), and is not given to p.r.o.nouncements, except perhaps one: "Carbon es el enemigo"-"Charcoal is the enemy." He believes cooking is all about sacrifice, though I soon realized he was referring to the sacrifice of the chef himself, rather than that of the creatures he cooks.

The kitchen at Asador Etxebarri (which in the Basque tongue means "New House") combines the gleaming, controlled geometry of stainless steel-six grills of Bittor's own design lining one wall-with the raw power of a raging wood fire. On the opposite wall, at waist height, two open ovens each hold a stack of blazing logs. Every morning, Bittor and his sous-chef, a loquacious but protective Australian named Lennox Hastie, begin the day by cooking a large quant.i.ty of the local oak, citrus, olive, and grape logs in the two ovens, to produce the wood coals with which Bittor cooks exclusively.

Bittor flavors all his food with wood, a different species and even a different kind of ember (glowing red or ashy white, intensifying or fading) for each dish. Grapevines, which burn hot and aromatic, he matches with beef, whereas a single dying ember of oak would be used to more subtly inflect the flavor of a scallop. A black plunger jutting from the wall above each of the wood ovens allows him to precisely control the amount of oxygen feeding the fire, and thereby the temperature, and the life span, of the wood coals it produces.

By the kitchen's screened back door stands a little lean-to, neatly stacked with different species of firewood and, on top of the woodpiles, crates of produce-tomatoes, leeks, onions, fava beans, and artichokes. Most of it has been grown a few miles up the hill, on a plot tended by Bittor's eighty-nine-year-old father, Angel, mainly because he could find nothing worth cooking in the market. ("Everything is prost.i.tuted," he tells me, with a little snort of disgust. "With chemicals.") Most of the seafood he cooks-lobsters, eels, sea cuc.u.mbers, oysters, clams, fishes of various kinds-is kept alive in salt.w.a.ter tanks (a challenge up here in the mountains) in a room off the kitchen until the appointed moment when the fire is ready and the creature is pulled from the water to meet it.

The afternoon I spent in his kitchen, Bittor had on a black T-shirt and gray slacks. He wore no ap.r.o.n, yet remained spotless: Liquids of any kind scarcely enter into his cooking. I had planned to ask if I could pitch in with the cooking, as I had done in North Carolina, but I quickly realized that, here, that would be tantamount to asking a brain surgeon if I might a.s.sist. Lennox made it clear I was lucky just to get into the kitchen.

Everything at Etxebarri is cooked to order, not a moment sooner. When the first order came in, I watched Bittor use a small stainless-steel scoop to retrieve a fist-sized pile of oak embers with which to cook a sea cuc.u.mber. Sea cuc.u.mbers are striated, slightly rubbery white sea creatures, reminiscent of squid, that live on the ocean floor. They require brief but intense heat to break down their leathery skin. Before he puts one on the grill, Bittor watches his coals intently, patiently waiting for them to ripen. A stainless-steel wheel above each grill, and connected to it by a system of cables and counterweights, allows him to make microadjustments in the distance between food and fire. When Bittor determines the coals are ready-strictly by eye; I never once saw him pa.s.s his hand over the fire to judge its heat-he places the sea cuc.u.mber over them. Now he spritzes it with a fine mist of oil, which he believes helps the food better absorb the aromatic compounds in wood. And then he silently waits, staring at the sea cuc.u.mber as if lost in a trance. He's looking for the slightest suggestion of a grill mark to form across the striations before flipping it, just once.

Next I watched Bittor "cook" an oyster, a process that involved choosing a single, perfect ember and placing it beneath the plump dove-gray ovoid with a pair of forceps, just so. I flashed back to James Howell, in Ayden, shoveling smoky wood coals under a pig. Here was the same basic operation, yet could this cooking possibly be more different? Fire, it seems, is protean; smoke, too. Bittor didn't actually want to cook his oyster, just wreathe it in the merest wisp of orange wood smoke, a process that took less than thirty seconds. The whole time, Bittor looked to be in a staring contest with the oyster. I can only infer-because he would not speak, and never touched the oyster-that he was watching for a change in the reflectivity of its surface, a certain shift in the quality of its glistening, that told him it was done, or, rather, ready for the table. He then pa.s.sed the oyster to Lennox, who gently slid it back into its sh.e.l.l. Bittor bent down and sprinkled several grains of sea salt over it, and then a spoonful of an off-white froth that Lennox had made by whipping the liquid that the oyster had left behind when it was shucked a few moments before.

I tasted twelve courses that Bittor had cooked, and all of them, up to and including the b.u.t.ter and the desserts, had in some way been touched, more or less, by wood smoke. This probably sounds like a recipe for monotony. That it was nothing of the kind remains something of a mystery to me. That oyster? It tasted more like an oyster than any oyster I have ever tasted. Somehow, the taste of smoke didn't merge with the oyster but coexisted alongside it, held in a perfect balance, so that it underscored the oyster's meaty brine, in the way that a frame or window can deepen our appreciation of a view we might otherwise overlook. Many of the dishes seemed to work that way, the native flavor of an octopus or tuna belly intensified by just the right note of the right kind of smoke, much as a careful deployment of salt can bring out the flavors of a food without announcing its own salty presence.

By the end of the meal, I began to think that Bittor had figured out how to use smoke as a sixth flavor principle, ent.i.tled at last to equal billing with salt, sour, sweet, bitter, and umami. And maybe smoke is that, one of the irreducible, primary colors of taste. Or so at least it can seem, perhaps because wood smoke was cooked food's first flavor, the taste we gave to raw nature when we first introduced it to fire. This, anyway, was the sort of speculation inspired by Bittor's cooking, at once so elemental and so delicate that it becomes a meditation on the nature of cooking itself.

When Bittor and I sat down to talk at a picnic table outside, he spoke of cooking with wood as the "best way to honor the product." For him fire is not about the transformation of nature-of the animals and plants and fungi he works with-but about achieving something more like an italicization of nature, making the food more like itself rather than something else.

"What the grill is going to do is reveal the excellence or mediocrity of the product," Bittor explained, which is why he must go to such lengths to secure the freshest and best produce. For him the grill is a tool for exploring the natural world, the creatures of the sea and the meadows (the steak he grilled for me was too good to be true: a cut from a fourteen-year-old dairy cow that he quickly charred on both sides at once in a blazing-hot fire of grapevines) but also of the woods: the various trees he cooks with. For the trees are clearly this former forester's first love, and their flavors inflect everything he touches. Though to my surprise, Bittor insisted that his medium is not smoke, a taste and a smell he regards as crude; rather, he flavors his food with the "perfume" or "fragrance" of wood. But isn't that communicated to the food by means of smoke? "No, no, no smoke," he insisted. It was here I got lost, either in the vagaries of translation or in the metaphysics of burning trees.

In Bittor's view, there is no food that cannot be enhanced by fire, by this quality of that-which-is-not-smoke, though exactly how to achieve this enhancement is not always obvious. "My cooking is a work in progress; I am still experimenting." At the moment, he's on a quest to figure out how to grill honey. A metalworker, Bittor has fabricated pans with stainless-steel meshes so fine he can "cook" something as delicate and minuscule as caviar. Lennox said it had pained him to watch Bittor experiment with kilo after kilo of caviar (at $3,200 per kilo) until he was ready to add it to the menu. To cook mussels, he built a kind of Bundt pan that conducts smoke through a central funnel to flavor the briny liquor without letting so much as a drop of it escape. For his b.u.t.ters and ice cream, Bittor briefly warms cream in unglazed crockery that admits only the most indirect hint of smoke-or, rather, the perfume of wood.

In fact, my meal at Etxebarri began and ended with variations on smoked cream, and for me these remain the most memorable tastes of the afternoon, if not of my whole exploration of fire to date. Bittor churns his b.u.t.ter himself and serves it without bread. It is meant to be eaten plain, like a fine cheese, and his b.u.t.ters-there were both cow's milk and goat-become a study in contrasts, of these two different methods nature has evolved for transforming gra.s.s into b.u.t.terfat. But that hint of smoke, or whatever you want to call it, brought out something else in the cream, something entirely unexpected, even poignant.

Cream-the richest, sweetest part of milk-is of course our first flavor, the taste, in a spoon, of life's first freshness and innocence, long before we ever encounter the taste of cooked food. And what is smoke-or ashes, with which one of the b.u.t.ters has been dusted-if not the very opposite of that freshness? There it is, innocence and experience mingled in a spoonful of ice cream. Bittor, whom no one would describe as a sunny man, has figured out a way to pa.s.s a fleeting, chill shadow of mortality over the formerly uncomplicated happiness of ice cream.

A dark dessert, you might say, and rightly so, yet the fact that anyone could do so much with so little-with some superlative produce and a wood fire-strikes me as a most happy and hopeful discovery. In Bittor's kitchen I got to witness, and to taste, the apotheosis of the control of fire. The cook fire, which had seemed so ancient in North Carolina, here in Spain seemed new again, fresh with possibility.

This is certainly not what you expect to find in contemporary Spain, a country that has become known for "molecular gastronomy"-for an elaborate kind of cooking that leans more heavily on science and technology than on nature, or, as the chefs now call it, "product." As it happens, Ferran Adria, perhaps the world's most famous exponent of molecular gastronomy, a chef known for cooking with liquid nitrogen, xanthan gum, synthetic flavors and textures, and all the other tools of modern food science, is an admirer of Bittor's cooking and comes often to Axpe to dine at Etxebarri. Adria was once quoted in Gourmet magazine saying, "Bittor probably couldn't be doing what he's doing if I hadn't done what I did first." It is a claim of breathtaking arrogance, and when I read it back to Bittor, he bristled slightly, then waved it away like a fly.

"Ferran cooks for the future," he tells me. "I am more interested in going backward. But the further back we can go, the more we can then advance.

"At this point there are people trying to cook with no product at all"-with nothing whatever derived from nature. This he believes is a dead end. "You can fool the palate," he says, "but you cannot fool the stomach."

And yet Ferran Adria may be right to put his cooking before Bittor Arguinzoniz's in this one sense: It may be that a taste for Bittor's cooking, for his obsessive, slightly mad investigation into the nature of wood and fire and food, has been prepared by our culture's ongoing attempt to transcend all those things, not just with molecular gastronomy, but with artificial flavors and colors, synthetic food experiences of every kind, even the microwave oven. High and low, this is an age of the jaded palate, ever hungry for the next new taste, the next new sensation, for mediated experiences of every kind. It's unclear how far that quest can take us, or when it might lose its savor. But isn't it always precisely when we are most at risk of floating away on the sea of our own inventions and conceits that we seem to row our way back to the firm sh.o.r.e that is nature? And though the sh.o.r.e we return to is never quite the same one we left, it has not let us down yet.

"This kind of cooking is as old as man himself," Bittor Arguinzoniz says when I ask him why in a world such as ours the power of cooking over a wood fire should still transfix us. It isn't very complicated. "We carry it in our genes. When you come into a room-it could be a clearing-and you notice the smell of wood smoke, it is a powerful thing. You ask, What is cooking? And then your senses open!"

Part II

WATERA RECIPE IN SEVEN STEPS

"The transformation which occurs in the cauldron is quintessential and wondrous, subtle and delicate. The mouth cannot express it in words."

-I Yin, a Chinese chef, 239 B.C.

"Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes it water, and n.o.body knows what it is."

-D. H. Lawrence, Pansies

I.

Step One: Finely Dice Some Onions

Is there anyone alive who actually enjoys chopping onions? Oh, there may be some Buddhists who give themselves over to the work, even to the tears, on the principle that, "when chopping onions, just chop onions"-i.e., don't resist or complain about it, just be there in the moment, doing it. But most of us are not so Zen. When chopping onions, we b.i.t.c.h about chopping onions. It's no wonder everyday home cooking is in trouble, now that there are so many cheap and easy ways to outsource the work, chopping included. Prepare dinner yourself from scratch and, more often than not, the recipe will begin with a dice of onions, and the onions, more often than not, will resist.

In fact, there are few things we eat that defend themselves against us quite as effectively as an onion. From the onion's point of view, the blade of your knife might as well be the incisor of a rodent: a mortal threat that elicits a chemical reaction cleverly designed to thwart the would-be attacker. Hoping to make chopping onions more interesting, if not more pleasant, I looked into the onion's strategy, and was surprised to learn that the plant does not mount its defense until the moment tooth or blade pierces cell wall.

If you could shrink yourself down to the size of a mitochondria or nucleus and swim around inside an undamaged onion cell, you would find the environment surprisingly benign, the taste of the ambient fluid sweet, certainly no cause for tears. Although there are four different defense molecules floating all around you, you probably would not notice them. What you might notice floating around you are these vacuoles, little balloonlike storage structures that in onions contain an enzyme that functions as a kind of trigger. When a blade or tooth breaks open a vacuole, the enzyme escapes, locates one of the defensive molecules, and breaks it in two. The volatile new chemical compounds that result are what give raw onions their powerfully sulfurous and irritating smell. One of the most volatile of these compounds is, aptly, called "the lachrymator"tear maker. It escapes from the damaged cell into the air and proceeds to attack the nerve endings in a mammal's eyes and nasal pa.s.sages, before breaking down into a noxious c.o.c.ktail of sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and sulfuric acid. "A very effective molecular bomb!" is how Harold McGee describes it. Indeed. Imagine a "food plant" that greets its eater with a hit of sulfuric acid and tear gas. That is the onion.

Lately I've gotten plenty of practice chopping onions, because I've been spending time in the kitchen learning how to cook pot dishes-soups, stews, braises-and it seems like almost all of these dishes, no matter what the culinary tradition, begin with a chopped onion or two or six. This is one of the many differences between cooking with fire and cooking with water, or for that matter with any liquid: Pot dishes make much more use of plants-vegetables, herbs, spices-and usually depend for their flavor on the reactions that occur when plants are combined with one another, and with meat, in a hot liquid medium. More often than not, onions const.i.tute the foundation of these dishes, usually in combination with a small handful of other aromatic but equally unprepossessing vegetables, including carrots, celery, peppers, or garlic. Homely in the best sense, pot dishes are about marrying lots of prosaic little things rather than elevating one big thing.

In fact, it is the precise combination of these chopped-up plants that usually gives a pot dish its characteristic flavor and cultural ident.i.ty. So if you start with a dice of onions, carrots, and celery sauteed in b.u.t.ter (or sometimes olive oil), you've made a mirepoix, which marks the dish as French. But if you begin by sauteing a mince of diced onions, carrots, and celery in olive oil (and perhaps add some garlic, fennel, or parsley), you've made a soffritto, the signature of an Italian dish. However, a "sofrito"-when spelled with one "f" and one "t"-is a dice of onions, garlic, and tomato in place of celery, and identifies the dish as Spanish. (Cajun cooking begins with a dice of onions, garlic, and bell pepper-"the holy trinity.") If a recipe calls for a base of diced spring onions, garlic, and ginger, you've left the West entirely and made what is sometimes called an "Asian mirepoix," the foundation of many dishes in the Far East. In India, pot dishes usually begin with a "tarka," a dice of onions and spices sauteed in clarified b.u.t.ter, or ghee. Even if we're unfamiliar with these terms or techniques, the aroma of these chopped-up plant bases instantly tells us where in the world we are, culinarily speaking.

But wherever we go, we have to do a lot of chopping to get there. On the plus side, chopping leaves you plenty of time for reflection, and one of the things I've been thinking about while doing it is, appropriately enough, the "drudgery" of everyday cooking. Curiously, you never hear that word around the grill. When men cook outdoors over a fire, it's usually a special occasion, so by definition cannot be "drudgery." Grill work itself is less prosaic, too: less detailed (no recipe needed) but also more social, more public, more like performance. Fire! Smoke! Animals!-This is drama, drudgery's ant.i.thesis, and about as far from dicing and mincing, from the fine work of fingers, as a cook can get. Indeed, the only time the grill man or pit master deploys a knife is at the very end of his show, to carve or chop the animal, and that qualifies as ceremony.

There's nothing ceremonial about chopping vegetables on a kitchen counter, slowly sauteing them in a pan, adding a liquid, and then tending the covered pot for hours. For one thing, there's nothing to look at. (And please don't even try, since a watched pot never boils.) For another, this sort of cooking takes places indoors, in the prosy confines of a kitchen. No, this is real work.

So why would you-why would anyone?-do it if you didn't have to? When you could go out or order in or pull "a home meal replacement" from the freezer and nuke it in the microwave? This is of course precisely what more and more people are doing today instead of cooking. Cooking is no longer obligatory, and that marks a shift in human history, one whose full implications we're just beginning to reckon. No one has to chop onions anymore, not even the poor. Corporations are more than happy to chop them for us, and often at bargain rates. In many ways this has been a blessing, especially for women, who in most cultures for most of history have chopped most of the onions. Today, the typical American spends a mere twenty-seven minutes a day on food preparation, and another four minutes cleaning up. That's less than half the time spent cooking and cleaning up in 1965, when I was a boy. Somewhat more than half of the evening meals an American eats today are still "cooked at home," according to the market researchers. That sounds like a lot, until you discover that the meaning of the verb "to cook" has been defined radically downward in the last few years.

I learned this from a veteran food-industry market researcher named Harry Balzer, a blunt Chicagoan with whom I've now spent several illuminating, if discouraging, hours discussing the future of cooking. Balzer has been studying American eating habits for more than thirty years; the NPD Group, the market-research firm he's worked for since 1978, collects data from a pool of two thousand food diaries to track American eating habits. A few years ago, Balzer noticed that the definition of cooking held by his respondents had grown so broad as to be meaningless.

"People call things 'cooking' today that would roll their grandmother in her grave," he explained. "Like heating up a can of food or microwaving a frozen pizza." So the firm decided to tighten up, at least slightly, the definition of what it means to cook, in order to capture what was really going on in American kitchens. To cook "from scratch," they decreed, means to prepare a main dish that requires some "a.s.sembly of ingredients." So microwaving a pizza does not count as cooking, though washing a head of lettuce and pouring bottled dressing over it does. Under this generous dispensation (no chopping required), you're also cooking when you spread mayonnaise on a slice of bread and pile on some cold cuts or a hamburger patty. (Home or away, a sandwich is today the most popular meal in America.) At least by Harry Balzer's none-too-exacting standards, we Americans are still cooking up a storm: 58 percent of our evening meals qualify, though even that figure has been falling steadily since the 1980s.

Like most people who study consumer behavior, Balzer has developed a somewhat cynical view of human nature, which his research suggests is ever driven by the quest to save time or money or, if possible, both. He puts it less delicately: "Face it: We're basically cheap and lazy." Over the course of several conversations, I kept asking him what his research had to say about the prevalence of the activity I referred to as "real scratch cooking"-the kind of cooking that begins with chopping onions. But he wouldn't even touch the term. Why? Apparently the activity has become so rarefied as to elude his tools of measurement.

"Here's an a.n.a.logy," Balzer offered. "A hundred years ago, chicken for dinner meant going out and catching, killing, plucking, and gutting a chicken. Do you know anybody who still does that? It would be considered crazy! Well, that's exactly how cooking will seem to your grandchildren. Like sewing, or darning socks-something people used to do when they had no other choice. Get over it!"

Maybe we should get over it. But before we do, it's worth considering for a moment how even something as tedious as chopping onions gets, paradoxically, more interesting, and more problematic, as soon as doing it is no longer obligatory. When cooking is optional, a person can elect not to do it, a choice that may reflect one's values or simply a desire to use the time in some other way. Yet for the person who believes home cooking still has some value, its new status as optional sets up a conflict-between competing desires-that may never have surfaced when cooking was simply what had to be done if the family was to eat. As soon as we have choices about how to spend our time, time is suddenly in much shorter supply, and it becomes that much harder to be in the kitchen, in either the literal or the Buddhist sense. Shortcuts suddenly seem more attractive. (I can buy a bottle of chopped garlic, or a bag of prechopped mirepoix!) Because you could be doing something else, something more pressing or simply more fun. This is certainly how I've usually felt when chopping onions.

By the same token, though, the not-cook option-for which we have food manufacturers and fast-food restaurants to thank-means that people can also, for the first time, choose to cook purely for the pleasure of doing it. A form of "work" can now be approached as a "leisure activity." But this is not a choice Harry Balzer is willing to take very seriously, either because he thinks we're just too lazy to enjoy doing any unnecessary work, or because he is, finally, in the business of helping food companies profit from the decline of everyday home cooking. Or it could simply be that he subscribes to the general view in a modern specialized consumer culture that "leisure activities" should involve consumption, whereas any activity involving production is leisure's opposite: work. Put another way, a leisure activity is one you can't conceive of paying someone else to do for you. (Watching television, for example, or reading a book, or doing the crossword puzzle.) Everything else-everything that the market has figured out a way to do for us-becomes a species of work, something that any rational actor would presumably outsource just as soon as he or she could afford to.

This at least is how economists seem to view the question of work and leisure: as ant.i.thetical terms that neatly line up with the equally ant.i.thetical categories of production and consumption. But perhaps that view says more about them, and consumer capitalism, than it does about us. For one of the most interesting things about cooking today-optional cooking-is how it confounds the rigid categories of work and leisure, of production and consumption. The Buddhists are probably right about chopping onions: It's all a matter of how you choose to see and experience it, as a ch.o.r.e to resist or a kind of path-a practice, even. Depending on the context, the very same activity can have diametrically opposed meanings. Is cooking a form of oppression, as many feminists argued (with some justification, I might add) in the 1960s? Back in the 1970s, KFC ran billboards depicting a family-sized bucket of fried chicken under the slogan "Women's Liberation." And so perhaps it was, and still is for many women even now, and especially when both partners work at jobs outside the house. Yet even with those demands, today there are more and more people, men and women both, who view home cooking-and even raising and killing chickens!-as a means of liberation from the influence, on our lives and culture, of corporations like KFC. Which raises an interesting question: As a political matter, is home cooking today a reactionary or a progressive way to spend one's time?

At the moment, it's all up for grabs. Which is one reason I was curious to spend some time in the kitchen learning how to cook the very kinds of dishes that throw these sorts of questions into sharp relief. "Grandma cooking," as it's sometimes called: the formerly mundane (now "special") dishes that are cooked in pots and, more often than not, begin with onions and take considerably more than twenty minutes to put on the table. I seriously doubted I would ever get to the stage of enlightenment where, when chopping onions, I was just chopping onions. (You'll know I succeeded if the rest of these pages are blank. Oh-guess not.) But perhaps I could at least get to a place where I was completely at home in the kitchen, and where whatever lies on the other side of the "end of cooking" would come into sharper focus.

Here's the first thing I learned: In the same way that the procedure for cooking over fire, if viewed from a sufficient distance, can be reduced to a single basic recipe (animal plus wood fire and time), so, it turns out, can cooking with water in pots. If you thumb through cookbooks from every imaginable culinary tradition, the variations seem infinite, and though there are a million different ways to make a stew or braise or soup, the underlying structure, or syntax, of all these dishes is very nearly universal. Let me propose a radically simplified version of that structure, something that might serve as a kind of template or Ur-recipe for dishes organized around the element of water:

Dice some aromatic plants