Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

by Michael Pollan

  But even better, I found, is the satisfaction that comes from temporarily breaking free of one’s accustomed role as the producer of one thing—whatever it is we sell into the market for a living—and the passive consumer of everything else. Especially when what we produce for a living is something as abstract as words and ideas and “services,” the opportunity to produce something material and useful, something that contributes directly to the support of your own body (and that of your family and friends), is a gratifying way to spend a little time—or a lot. I doubt it’s a coincidence that interest in all kinds of DIY pursuits has intensified at the precise historical moment when we find ourselves spending most of our waking hours in front of screens—senseless, or nearly so. At a time when four of our five senses and the whole right side of our brains must be feeling sorely underemployed, these kinds of projects offer the best kind of respite. They’re antidotes to our abstraction.

  To join the makers of the world is always to feel at least a little more self-reliant, a little more omnicompetent. For everyone to bake his own bread or brew her own beer is, we’re told, inefficient, and by the usual measures it probably is. Specialization has much to recommend it; it is what allows Chad Robertson to make a living baking bread and me to make one writing books. But though it is certainly cheaper and easier to rely on untold, unseen others to provide for our everyday needs, to live that way comes at a price, not least to our sense of competence and independence. We prize these virtues, and yet they have absolutely nothing to do with the efficiencies of modern consumer capitalism. Except perhaps to suggest that there might be some problems with modern consumer capitalism.

  Of all the roles the economist ascribes to us, “consumer” is surely the least ennobling. It suggests a taking rather than a giving. It assumes dependence and, in a global economy, a measure of ignorance about the origins of everything that we consume. Who makes this stuff? Where in the world does it come from? What’s in it and how was it made? The economic and ecological lines that connect us to the distant others we now rely on for our sustenance have grown so long and attenuated as to render both the products and their connections to us and the world utterly opaque. You would be forgiven for thinking—indeed, you are encouraged to think!—there is nothing more behind a bottle of beer than a corporation and a factory, somewhere. It is simply a “product.”

  To brew beer, to make cheese, to bake a loaf of bread, to braise a pork shoulder, is to be forcibly reminded that all these things are not just products, in fact are not even really “things.” Most of what presents itself to us in the marketplace as a product is in truth a web of relationships, between people, yes, but also between ourselves and all the other species on which we still depend. Eating and drinking especially implicate us in the natural world in ways that the industrial economy, with its long and illegible supply chains, would have us forget. The beer in that bottle, I’m reminded as soon as I brew it myself, ultimately comes not from a factory but from nature—from a field of barley snapping in the wind, from a hops vine clambering over a trellis, from a host of invisible microbes feasting on sugars. It took the carefully orchestrated collaboration of three far-flung taxonomic kingdoms—plants, animals, and fungi—to produce that ale. To make it yourself once in a while, to handle the barley and inhale the aroma of hops and yeast, becomes, among other things, a form of observance, a weekend ritual of remembrance.

  The world becomes literally more wonderful (and wonderfully more literal) as soon as we are reminded of these relationships. They unfold over the span of evolutionary time but also over the course of a few hours on a Sunday in a neighbor’s backyard. I’m thinking of the relationship of the barley grass (Hordeum vulgare) and the brewer (Homo sapiens) and the remarkable fungus (Sacccharomyces cerevisiae), working together to create all these interesting new molecules—the intoxicating one, of course, but also all those other magic chemical compounds that fermentation teases out of a grass seed so that, when the ale washes over our tongue, we’re made to think of a great many other unexpected things: fresh bread and chocolate and nuts, biscuits and raisins. (And, occasionally, Band-Aids.) Fermentation, like all the other transformations we call cooking, is a way of inflecting nature, of bringing forth from it, above and beyond our sustenance, some precious increment of meaning.

  II.

  In the year or so since I completed the quasi-formal part of my education in the kitchen, several of the transformations I’ve not yet quite mastered have found their way into the weave of everyday life, and others have fallen away or been relegated to special occasions. It’s curious what sticks and what doesn’t—what turns out to suit your temperament and the rhythm of your days. To try your hand at doing something new is to find out a few new things about yourself, too. Which is yet another good reason for coming into the kitchen.

  For me, of all the transformations, braising has proved to be the most sustainable and most sustaining. Improving my knife skills (and mental attitude toward chopping onions), and learning how to slow cook in a pot just about anything in the market, has changed the way we eat, especially in the cooler months of the year. What not so long ago had seemed insurmountably daunting has become an agreeable way to spend half a Sunday: finely dicing my way through piles of onions, carrots, and celery, slowly simmering those while browning a cheap cut of meat, and then braising it all in wine or stock or water for a few unattended hours. Not only do we get a couple of weeknight meals out of it, but the meals are infinitely more delicious and interesting (and inexpensive) than anything we ever used to have on a Tuesday or Wednesday night.

  I must say my time with the pit masters has definitely made me a more confident and accomplished griller. (I try not to misuse the hallowed term “barbecue.”) Some nights I even cook with wood, taking the time to burn the logs down to bright cinders before putting on the meat or fish. In general, I cook much more slowly and carefully with fire than I used to, and the results are well worth it, in both tenderness and flavor. Though on many weeknights, when time is tight, I still crank up the gas grill and quickly sear some kind of filet.

  But the most surprising legacy of my time in North Carolina is the annual pig roast we throw every fall. Before meeting Ed Mitchell and the Joneses, I was definitely not the sort of person who would ever think to cook a whole animal in the front yard, much less have any idea how to go about it. Now I guess I am. Though it’s very much a team effort, with Judith and Isaac and Samin and my old friend (and amateur pit master) Jack Hitt playing key roles, along with a crew of volunteers who come by to tend the fire through the long night of slow cooking. Early in November, I arrange for a pig from Mark Pasternak, a farmer in Nicasio, and drive out there with Jack or Samin to pick it up on a Friday morning. That afternoon, once we’ve seasoned it and built a wood fire, Jack and I hoist the pig onto the pit for its twenty-hour or so cook.

  The fire pit has gotten a few upgrades, including a sturdy cast-iron grate to hold the pig, and a hemispheric steel frame (contributed by my brother-in-law, Chuck Adams, even though he keeps kosher) that we wrap with heavy-duty foil and painter’s tarps to create a sealed oven. The contraption still looks like a redneck spaceship landed in the garden, but it holds the heat so well that the pig can go hours before we have to add new wood coals. (Or charcoals: We’re not averse to using a little Kingsford during the night if it’ll buy us a few more hours of sleep.) We deploy a half dozen probes wired to oven thermometers in order to monitor the temperature both in the pit and in the pig itself, and try to keep the oven no hotter than 200°F. All day Saturday, while we work on the side dishes (coleslaw, rice and beans, cornbread), friends and neighbors drift in and out of the yard, drawn by the smoke and its captivating aromas. />
  When the thermometers inform us the internal temperature of the meat is approaching 190°F, the pig is done—usually early Saturday evening, shortly after the guests arrive. Everyone gathers around as we lift the cover off the pit to reveal a considerably smaller but now handsomely lacquered and fragrant pig. Now it’s showtime. Jack pulls the meat from the bones, chopping and seasoning it on a big wooden plank, while I use Ed Mitchell’s technique to crisp the skin on the gas grill, flipping rubbery flaps of pigskin this way and that until the magic moment when they suddenly turn into blistered brown glass: crackling! We mix it all together, the steaming meat and the precious crackling, and let people build their own sandwiches. Memorable sandwiches.

  The whole event is a ridiculously ambitious undertaking, and every year we vow this is the last one, but that hasn’t happened yet and probably won’t. What was an experiment has become a tradition, and traditions have a way of gathering momentum around them over time. People start asking about the date of the next pig roast before the end of the summer; they’ve come to count on it. Judith will tell you the best part of the pig roast happens long before the first guest arrives: For her, it’s all about the team working together to create a special occasion. For me, the pig roast is also an opportunity to reconnect with a wider circle of friends, as well as with Jack and the rest of the pit crew, the farmer who supplies the pig, and then with the whole culture of barbecue.

  Any time you cook a whole animal in public is going to feel like a ritual, will have that ceremonial weight. Maybe it’s the presence of the animal itself, providing such a vivid reminder of what’s involved whenever we eat meat—those echoes of sacrifice. Or maybe it’s the sight of fifty or sixty people sharing the same pig, enjoying their barbecue. Is there a sweeter proof of the power of cooking to bring people together—to create a community, even if only for a night? “There’s something very powerful about that dish,” as Ed Mitchell told me that afternoon in Wilson, “just don’t ask me what it is.”

  For next year, Isaac and I have been talking about brewing a special beer for the pig roast, and maybe we’ll get it together in time. But, honestly, I’m not sure brewing will ever be more than a very occasional activity, something he and I might do when he’s home visiting from college. Though we are getting better at it, I realized the other day, when I opened the fridge and reached for a Pollan’s Pale Ale rather than a Sierra Nevada. (Though the Humboldt Spingo proved something of a disappointment—not enough hops, Shane and I decided, to balance out the heaviness of the malt.) But even if I don’t brew more than once or twice a year, I already have a much better understanding of what is going on in a really good ale, and as a result enjoy drinking them much more than I used to.

  I would never have expected bread baking to take up permanent residence in my life, but apparently it has—not every day, but a couple of times a month, and always with satisfaction. I’ve found the work is easy to fold into the rhythms of a writing day at home; it gets me up from my chair every forty-five minutes to turn (and smell and taste) the dough. I’ll bake a couple of loaves on a Saturday when we have friends coming to dinner, or as a treat for the family—baking never fails to improve the mood of a household. For a long time, I was feeling a little trapped by a sense of responsibility to the sourdough starter—the need to care for and feed it every day, like a pet. But recently I learned how to safely put it into hibernation for weeks at a time. I’ll feed it well, wait an hour or two, then add enough additional flour to form a dry ball, and simply lose the container in the back of the refrigerator. A few days before I want to bake again, I dig the starter out and wake it up, by feeding and stirring it twice daily. Every time I take it out of the fridge, the gray clay seems so inert and lifeless and sour that I’m sure the culture has finally died. But after a couple of days of attention it starts throwing bubbles and smelling like apples again, and I’m back in business as a baker. It’s been a lesson to me, in the continuing possibility of “cultural revival,” to borrow Sandor Katz’s nice term. Meanwhile, the bread gets better and better, and I find that a really good oven spring can still make my day.

  III.

  Each of the different methods I learned for turning the stuff of nature into tasty creations of culture implies a different way of engaging with the world, and some are more sympathetic than others. The pit master performs his mastery of animal and fire on a public stage. The cook marries the flavors of aromatic plants in her pot at home. Both of these ways of cooking have found their places in my life, the first one on special occasions, and the second more routinely. Yet I would have to say that of all the transformations, fermentation has proved to be the one that has engaged me most deeply.

  Maybe it’s because fermenting has so much in common with gardening, work that has always suited me temperamentally. Like a gardener, the brewer and the baker, the pickler and the cheese maker all find themselves engaging in a lively conversation with nature. All work with living creatures that come to the table with their own interests, interests that must be understood and respected if we are to succeed. And we succeed precisely to the extent we manage to align our interests with theirs. As I learned from Sandor Katz and Sister Noëlla and Chad Robertson and all the other fermentos I met, mastery is never more than partial or temporary. “Dude, I don’t make this beer,” a brewer in Oakland once told me after I had complimented him on his black lager. “The yeasts make the beer. My job is just to feed them really well. If I do that, they’ll do all the rest.”

  But the work of fermentation is collaborative in another sense as well. It brought me into contact with a whole subculture of fermentos, many more in fact than I’ve mentioned here by name. I’m thinking of all the brewers and cheese makers, the picklers and bakers, who seemed to come out of the woodwork, like so many wild yeasts and lactobacilli, as soon as I resolved to learn their crafts. (Everything is everywhere.) Each of the various fermentation arts depends on not one but two subcultures, a microbial culture and a human culture. I would have thought that the industrialization (and pasteurization) of the modern food chain would have long since put both these cultures to rout. But in fact they are still very much alive and all around us, hidden in plain sight, awaiting just the right conditions, or questions, to reappear and revive.

  This, it seems to me, is one of the greatest pleasures of doing this wholly unnecessary work: the spontaneous communities that spring up and gather around it. Fermentos, I found, are uncommonly generous with their knowledge and recipes and starter cultures, perhaps because the microbes have taught them modesty, or because they understand that cultures of every kind depend for their survival on getting passed on, one hand to the next, down through time. Maybe, too, there is the sense of solidarity that comes from feeling yourself in the minority, as these post-Pasteurians surely do in this era of mass-produced and industrially sanitized food.

  To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest—on behalf of the senses and the microbes—against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe. It is also a declaration of independence from an economy that would much prefer we remain passive consumers of its standardized commodities, rather than creators of idiosyncratic products expressive of ourselves and of the places where we live, because your pale ale or sourdough bread or kimchi is going to taste nothing like mine or anyone else’s.

  But surely the most important of all the relationships sponsored by this work is the one between those of us who elect to do it and the people it gives us the opportunity to feed and nourish and, when all goes well, delight. Cooking is all about connection, I’ve learned, between us and other species, other times, other cultures (human an
d microbial both), but, most important, other people. Cooking is one of the more beautiful forms that human generosity takes; that much I sort of knew. But the very best cooking, I discovered, is also a form of intimacy.

  One of the most memorable cooking teachers I met in the course of my education was Hyeon Hee Lee, a Korean woman I visited in a town outside Seoul hoping to learn how to make traditional kimchi. It was a fairly brief encounter, no more than a few hours, but in retrospect it did as much as any other to help me find myself in the kitchen. Before we began, Hyeon Hee made sure, through our translator, that I understood that there are a hundred different ways of making kimchi; what she was going to teach me was just one way, the way of her mother and her grandmother before that.

  Hyeon Hee had done most of the prep before I arrived, brining the Napa cabbages overnight and pounding the red peppers, garlic, and ginger into a thick paste. What remained was for us to carefully rub the brilliant red paste into the leaves of the cabbages, which are kept intact, one leaf at a time. You had to make sure that every internal and external square inch of every head of cabbage received its own spice massage. Then you folded the leaves back on themselves and wrapped them around so that the whole thing vaguely resembled a pretzel, before gently placing the bright-scarlet knot at the bottom of an urn. Once the urn was full, it would be buried in the earth, beneath a little lean-to in the backyard.

  While we worked together that wintry November afternoon, kneeling side by side on straw mats, Hyeon Hee mentioned that Koreans traditionally make a distinction between the “tongue taste” and the “hand taste” of a food. Hand taste? I was beginning to have my doubts about the translator. But as Hyeon Hee elaborated on the distinction, while the two of us gently and methodically massaged spice into leaf, the notion began to come into a rough focus.