Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (59 page)

All this talk of intoxication was getting me
in the mood to sample one of my home brews. But my Irish ale was still fermenting in the
basement, and when I checked its gravity (10.18) I knew it needed a few more days before
it would be ready. (Heroic patience is a critical component of successful brewing.) What
I did have on hand and ready to drink was my jug of wild mead. The week before, I had
restarted its fermentation, in the hopes of diminishing its sweetness and elevating its
alcohol. Champagne yeast is a strain of
S. cerevisiae
selected over the years
for its exceptional vigor, alcohol tolerance, and prodigious output of carbon
dioxide—important in making champagne. Kel had warned me to put the mead in a heavy
swing-top or champagne bottle, since the yeast was liable to blow the cap off an
ordinary beer bottle.

I had already had one explosion in my
basement. In the middle of the second night of the Irish ale’s fermentation, I was
awakened by an extremely loud clap. I didn’t think much of it—this is a city that
percolates at night with all sorts of obscure sounds, not to mention the occasional
earthquake. But when I went down to the basement to check on the carboy the next
morning, it had literally blown its top. The airlock was gone; the clap I’d heard
must have been the report of it hitting the ceiling. A cascade of oatmeal-colored foam
was erupting in slow motion from the neck of the bottle, and the white ceiling
directly above had been splattered by rude blotches of brown wort. I
made a mental note to tell my parents how very little has changed.

It had been two weeks since I pitched my
low-proof wild mead with the killer yeast. There was no way to tell if anything was
happening in the bottles, since the fermentation was now taking place in a sealed
environment—no bubbles to watch squeezing their way through an airlock. But I figured
whatever was going to happen had happened by now, so I chilled a bottle of the mead, and
popped open the swing top. The bottle gave a satisfying
pop!
and emitted a tiny
puff of cold steam before the mead began to bubble over its lip. When I poured the mead
into a wineglass, I could tell immediately that the champagne yeast had done its job:
The mead had become several degrees paler in color and considerably livelier. Measuring
the final gravity, I calculated the alcohol was up over 13 percent.

The mead was almost completely dry and
exuberantly effervescent. It actually tasted a little like champagne, though it was
obviously something very different: There were strong hints of honey, as well as figs
and sweet spices and something I hadn’t noticed before, the unmistakable scent of
flowers. It was not only unusual but really good. And it was strong. By the time I got
down to the bottom of the glass, where a pale powdery remnant of champagne yeast had
collected, I could feel the warm, suffusing glow of alcohol wash over me. There’s
really nothing quite like that first soft spring breeze of intoxication. Keep drinking
all you want, but you will never get it back.

Nothing has really changed, you’re the
same guy sitting at the same kitchen table, and yet everything feels just a little
different: Several degrees less literal. Leavened. And whether or not this angle of
mental refreshment offers anything of genuine value, anything worth saving for the
consideration of more ordinary hours, it does seem to open up, however briefly, a
slightly less earthbound and more generous perspective on life.

I found myself turning that Coleridge quote
over in my mind, thinking about imagination as a kind of mental algorithm that
“dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create.” Okay, it seemed
completely obvious that Coleridge had to be talking about getting high. But what was
less obvious, and what now struck me with some force, was the correspondence between
Coleridge’s notion of the imagination and (can you see it coming?) the process of
fermentation. For what is fermentation but a
biological
faculty for doing the
same thing: transforming the ordinary stuff of nature by “dissolving, diffusing,
and dissipating” whatever is given, as the necessary prelude to creating something
new? Fermentation is the secondary imagination of nature.

Hey, I told you I’d been drinking. Yet
even now, in a more sober hour, I wonder if there might not be something here, a
metaphor worth stretching and bending to see what it can do for us. Try this: In the
same way that yeasts break down a substrate of simple plant sugars to create something
infinitely more powerful—more complex and richly allusive—so Coleridge’s secondary
imagination breaks down the substrate of ordinary experience or consciousness in order
to create something that is likewise less literal and more metaphorical: the strong wine
of poetry where before there was only the ordinary juice of prose. And yet these two
phenomena are not just analogies, existing in parallel. No, they cross, literally, since
alcohol figures in both: as the final product of biological fermentation, and as a
primary catalyst of imaginative fermentation. As yeast goes to work on sugars to produce
alcohol, alcohol goes to work on ordinary consciousness. It ferments us. (So says the
drunk:
I’m pickled.
) To produce … what? Well, all sorts of
things, most of them stupid and mistaken and forgettable, but every now and again that
alcohol-inspired mental ferment will throw off the bubble of a useful idea or
metaphor.

I like to think of the one in the last
paragraph as exhibit A.

Two weeks later, on another Sunday morning,
the carboy and I made the trip back to Shane’s house so he and I could bottle our
ten gallons of Humboldt Spingo. Shane had gone so far as to find a Victorian English
beer label on the Internet, and then used some graphics software to swap out the letters
for the original brewer’s name with those of our home brew, a pixel at a time.

As we carefully siphoned the fresh beer into
bottles and capped them, I couldn’t help but wonder about the sanity of the whole
project. Two grown men with a great many other, more pressing things to do had blown a
big hole in two weekends to make something they could just as easily have bought for a
few dollars. (It’s not like you can’t buy excellent “craft” beer
these days, even in the supermarket.) So why had we gone to the considerable trouble of
making something that in all likelihood would never surpass the commercial product?

To justify brewing your own beer—or baking
your own bread, or fermenting your own sauerkraut or yogurt—on purely practical grounds
is not easy. To save money? Maybe in the case of the bread, and surely in the case of
everyday home cooking, but brewing beer requires an investment in equipment it would
take an awful lot of drinking to recoup. So why
do
we do it? Just to see if we
can, is one answer, I suppose, though that doesn’t take you much past your first
acceptable batch. If you do get that far, however, there does come the deeper
satisfaction of finding yourself in a position to give a very personal kind of gift—the
bottle of home brew (or jar of pickles, or loaf of bread) being a convenient and
concrete expression of the generosity that is behind every act of cooking.

There is, too, the pleasure of learning how
a certain everyday something gets made, a process that seldom turns out to be as simple
as you imagined, or as complicated. True, I could have read all about brewing, or taken
a tour of a brewery and watched the process. Yet there is a deeper kind of learning that
can only be had by doing the work yourself, acquainting all your senses with the ins and
outs and how-tos and wherefores of an intricate making. What you end up with is a
first-person, physical kind of knowledge that is the precise opposite of abstract or
academic. I think of it as embodied knowledge, as when your nose or your fingertips can
tell you that the dough needs another turn or is ready to be baked. Knowing how to bake
bread or brew beer with your own two hands is to more deeply appreciate a really good
beer or loaf of bread—the sheer wonder of it!—when you’re lucky enough to come
across one. You won’t take it for granted, and you won’t stand for the
synthetic.

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.

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.