dinner with the arch cook

The Ecologue

Dinner with the Arch Cook

Thanksgiving traditionally marks the end of the harvest in New England, but in fact harvest festivals of this sort take place around the world, and probably have been a part of human culture ever since agriculture developed --- about seven or eight thousand years according to archeologists. Hunting and gathering cultures generated their own particular rituals, which reach back even further, all the way back to the beginnings of human evolution.

But what about cooking? How did human beings ever manage to invent the idea of capturing fire and then subjecting the catch of the day, whatever that may have been --- to broiling on the coals of a controlled fire?

I had dinner a few weeks ago at the Rialto Restaurant, in Cambridge with a man who is, in a sense, the primordial authority on cooking, the Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham, who has been considering these matters over the course of his work with chimpanzees and preliterate cult ures. He is author, most recently, of the book Catching Fire: How cooking made us human. Wrangham’s thesis in the book is that the act of cooking, a practice that may be almost a million years old, is what shaped us into human beings. According to his theory, the human ability to cook food had a major effect on the physiology of the primates he terms the “habilines” which is to say, the general group of free ranging, tool using bands of prehumans who roamed the African savannah over a million years ago. With the control of fire and the development of cooking, everything changed. The disparate, loose bands of habilines became more cohesive as they gathered together around a central cooking fire. Food was shared; and the division between the sexes widened, as male hunters separated from women plant gatherers. Even our looks changed. Teeth became smaller, and internally, the human gut shortened, since cooked food is more easily digested than raw food. In the end, what emerged from these early cooking fires was Cro-Magnon Man --- which is to say us.

Given Wrangham’s thesis, dinner that night at the Rialto turned out to be an ironic affair. Cooking itself has evolved dramatically since those early fires with meals consisting of tubers and freshly killed meat, seasoned at best with ash and sand and grilled on coals. The act of preparing food for a table has evolved into an art, with a variety of practitioners, some of whom like painters and musicians, have developed a signature style. Likewise, cuisines have developed around the world, most of which were associated with certain regions. Now, with the access to cross cultural traditions, the art of cooking has crossed borders and chefs have invented new styles. One of these new styles is a drift towards uncooked foods.
The dinner at the Rialto was a special event, attended for the most part by serious foodies from around Boston, most of whom were as interested in the menu that night as the speaker. The table I was with was an eclectic mix including a bio-chemist, an epidimologist, and the editor of an arcane journal devoted to Renaissance interpretations of Classical Greek and Roman literature. In spite of the diversity of métiers the conversation before the event was mostly about food.

The chef at the Rialto, Jody Adams, (who, incidentally, was an anthropology major at Brown University before she became a chef) prepared an ironic three course dinner for that evening’s event. The irony arose from the menu she chose to present. It consisted of a presentation that leaned more towards raw food than cooked food. The first course included Duxbury oysters and Taylor Bay scallops, present with rolled cucumber with avocado and hibiscus. Second course was a seared tuna with a sprouted quinoa, garlic yogurt, raw beets, and dukkah,a mixture of nuts seasoned with Middle Eastern spices. The only fully cooked dish was the desert, a cinnamon apple terrine with brandied cream. All this was served with another uncooked, but perennially popular item, three pairings of European wines, including a 2005 Cotes du Ventoux.

The menu recapitulated Wrangham’s thesis, raw food, to seared food, to thoroughly cooked and spiced desert.

Dr. Wrangham grew up in Hertsford, just north of London, and like many of his generation, fed on bangers and beans when he was young. And although he could hardly complain about Ms Adams menu he had a lot to say about raw foods that night. According to Wrangham (although not to the raw food faddists) cooking improves the availability of nutrients of food, which is one of the keys to the evolutionary success of the human species.

As Wrangham pointed out at one point, as he sampled the lightly cooked tuna, “We are what we cook.”