Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (63 page)

Pack the mixture tightly in a glass jar or
crock fitted with a lid that can hold at least 8 cups, making sure all the air is
squeezed out and the vegetables are completely submerged in their liquid. (If you
don’t have a large container, use two or three smaller containers, about 1 quart
each in volume.) There should be at least 3 inches between the packed cabbage and the
top of the jar. Push the vegetables down tightly using your fist. They should be covered
in their liquid. Before sealing the jar, either weight the vegetables down with a small
ceramic or glass jar or insert something nonreactive between the lid and the vegetables
to keep them submerged in the liquid: a plastic bag filled with stones or Ping-Pong
balls works well or lay a large cabbage, fig, or grape leaf over the shredded cabbage
and weight that down with clean stones or other heavy nonreactive objects. There should
be enough liquid to
cover, but if not add a little water. (Cabbages
can lose cell water depending on growing and storage conditions.) Any vegetables exposed
to the air will rot. If surface molds form, scrape them away and remove discolored
sauerkraut. The kraut may smell funky, like a gym locker, but it shouldn’t smell
rotten. For the first few days, store at room temperature, ideally between 65°F and
75°F, then move to a cooler location, such as a basement. That’s it: The mixture
will ferment on its own; the necessary microbes are already present on the leaves.

If you’re making kraut in a sealed
glass container, make sure to release the pressure every few days, especially the first
couple of days, when bubbling will be most active. In a mason jar, you’ll know
pressure is building when the metal top begins to bulge; open just enough to release the
gas and reseal. Those old-timey glass crocks with the hinged tops held in place by a
metal clasp work well since they will release pressure along their rubber gasket.
Easiest of all is a ceramic crock designed for making sauerkraut. Available online in
various sizes, these crocks have a water lock that releases bubbles of gas while keeping
air out. If at any point water seeps out of the jar during fermentation and the cabbage
mixture is not fully submerged in liquid, dissolve ½ teaspoon of fine sea salt in a cup
of water. Add enough brine to keep the sauerkraut submerged in liquid.

How long before the kraut is ready? It
depends—on the ambient temperature, the amount of salt used, and the local population of
microbes. Taste it after a week, then two weeks, and then weekly after that. When the
level of sourness and crunchiness is to your liking, move your kraut to the refrigerator
to put the breaks on the fermentation.

VARIATION
: To make a version of kimchi, replace
the cabbage with Napa cabbage and Daikon radish; the cabbage can be
sliced into half-inch rounds, and the daikon into quarter-inch rounds. Replace the
sauerkraut spice mixture with:

The rest of the process is the same as for
sauerkraut.

These are the cookbooks and books on cooking
I’ve found indispensable and to which I return again and again for explanation and
inspiration.

The Art of Simple Food,
by
Alice Waters

The Cambridge World History of
Food,
edited by Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us
Human,
by Richard Wrangham

The Essence of Cookery,
by
Karl Friedrich von Rumohr

An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with
Economy and Grace,
by Tamar Adler

A History of Cooks and
Cooking,
by Michael Symons

How to Cook Everything,
by Mark
Bittman

On Food and Cooking: The Science
and Lore of the Kitchen
, by Harold McGee

The Barbecue! Bible,
by
Steven Raichlen

The Magic of Fire: Hearth
Cooking,
by William Rubel

Seven Fires: Grilling the
Argentine Way,
by Francis Mallmann

Smokestack Lightning: Adventures
in the Heart of Barbecue Country,
by Lolis Eric Elie; photographs by Frank
Stewart

Braise: A Journey Through
International Cuisine,
by Daniel Boulud

Mediterranean Clay Pot
Cooking,
by Paula Wolfert

A Platter of Figs and Other
Recipes,
by David Tanis

Soffritto: Tradition and
Innovation
in Tuscan Cooking,
by Benedetta Vitali

Something from the Oven:
Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America,
by Laura Shapiro

The Taste for Civilization: Food,
Politics, and Civil Society,
by Janet A. Flammang

The Bread Baker’s
Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread,
by Peter Reinhart

The Bread Builders: Hearth Loaves
and Masonry Ovens,
by Daniel Wing and Alan Scott

English Bread and Yeast
Cookery,
by Elizabeth David

Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain
Breads,
by Peter Reinhart

Tartine Bread,
by Chad
Robertson

The Art of Fermentation,
by
Sandor Katz

Brewing Classic Styles: 80 Winning
Recipes Anyone Can Brew,
by John J. Palmer and Jamil Zainasheff

How to Brew: Everything You Need
to Know to Brew Beer Right the First Time,
by John J. Palmer

Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of
Microbial Evolution,
by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan

Uncorking the Past: The Quest for
Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages,
by Patrick E. McGovern

Wild Fermentation,
by Sandor
Katz

Listed below, by chapter, are the principal
works referred to in the text, as well as others that supplied me with facts or
influenced my thinking. Web site URLs are current as of September 2012. Any articles of
mine cited here are available at
michaelpollan.com
.

I explored the “Cooking
Paradox” in a 2009 essay for the
New York Times Magazine:

Pollan, Michael. “Out of the
Kitchen, Onto the Couch.” New York Times Magazine, August 2, 2009.

Flammang, Janet A.
The Taste for
Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society.
Urbana, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 2009. An important book, by a political scientist, on the gender
politics, and implications for civic life, of “food work.”

Lévi-Strauss, Claude.
The Origin
of Table Manners.
New York: Harper & Row, 1978. See especially the chapter
titled “A Treatise on Culinary Anthropology.”

———.
The Raw and the Cooked.
New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

Wrangham, Richard, et al. “The
Raw and the Stolen: Cooking and the Ecology of Human Origins.”
Current
Anthropology
(1999): 40, 567–94.

Wrangham, Richard W.
Catching
Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
New York: Basic, 2009.

Berry, Wendell. “The Pleasures
of Eating,” in
What Are People For?
Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010. My
discussion of the division of labor and self-reliance owes a large debt to Wendell
Berry’s entire body of work.

Pollan, Michael. “Why
Bother?”
New York Times Magazine,
April 20, 2008.

Zagat, Tim and Nina. “The Burger
and Fries Recovery.”
Wall Street Journal,
January 25, 2011.

Bachelard, Gaston.
Air and
Dreams.
Dallas: Dallas Institute, 2011.

———.
Earth and Reveries of
Will.
Dallas: Dallas Institute, 2002.

———.
The Psychoanalysis of
Fire.
Boston: Beacon, 1964.

———.
Water and Dreams.
Dallas: Pegasus Foundation, 1983.

Macauley, David.
Elemental
Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire and Water as Environmental Ideas.
New York: SUNY
Press, 2010.

The literature on American barbecue is
vast. The Web site of the Southern Foodways Alliance (
http://southernfoodways.org
/) offers a wealth
of excellent material, including short films of pit masters at work and oral histories
of North Carolina pit masters, such as Ed Mitchell and the Joneses. (
http://www.southernbbqtrail.com/north-carolina/index.shtml
)

I found these books and journals on
Southern barbecue particularly illuminating:

Egerton, John.
Southern Food: At
Home, on the Road, in History.
New York: Knopf, 1987.

Elie, Lolis Eric.
Smokestack
Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country.
New York: Farrar,
Straus, & Giroux, 1996.

———, ed.
Cornbread Nation 2: The
United States of Barbecue.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
2009.

Engelhardt, Elizabeth Sanders
Delwiche.
Republic of Barbecue: Stories Beyond the Brisket.
Austin, TX:
University of Texas, 2009.

Kaminsky, Peter.
Pig Perfect:
Encounters with Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways to Cook Them.
New York:
Hyperion, 2005.

McSpadden, Wyatt.
Texas
Barbecue.
A book of photographs, with a foreword by Jim Harrison and an essay
by John Morthland. Austin, TX: University of Texas, 2009.

Reed, John Shelton, and Dale Volberg
Reed with William McKinney.
Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina
Barbecue.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 2008.

Southern Cultures,
The Edible
South,
Vol. 15, No. 4, Winter 2009. Special issue on Southern food.

Carmody, Rachel N., et al.
“Energetic Consequences of Thermal and Nonthermal Food Processing.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of
America
108, 48 (2011): 19199–203.

Carmody, Rachel N., and Richard W.
Wrangham. “Cooking and the Human Commitment to a High-Quality Diet.”
Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology
, 74 (2009): 427–34.
Epub October 20, 2009.

———. “The Energetic Significance
of Cooking.”
Journal of Human Evolution
57 (2009): 379–91.

Fernández-Armesto, Felipe.
Near a
Thousand Tables: A History of Food.
New York: Free Press, 2002.

Berna, Francesco, et al.
“Microstratigraphic Evidence of in Situ Fire in the Acheulean Strata of Wonderwerk
Cave, Nothern Cape Province, South Africa.”
Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
109, 20 (2012):
E1215–20.

Jones, Martin.
Feast: Why Humans
Share Food.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Symons, Michael.
A History of
Cooks and Cooking.
Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 2000.

Wrangham, Richard, et al. “The
Raw and the Stolen: Cooking and the Ecology of Human Origins.”
Current
Anthropology
40 (2009): 567–94.

Wrangham, Richard W.
Catching
Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
New York: Basic Books, 2009.

A Few More Practical Books on Cooking
with Fire

Mallmann, Francis, and Peter Kaminsky.
Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way.
New York: Artisan, 2009.

Raichlen, Steven.
The Barbecue!
Bible.
New York: Workman, 1998.

———.
Planet Barbecue!
New
York: Workman, 2010.

Rubel, William.
The Magic of Fire:
Hearth Cooking—One Hundred Recipes for the Fireplace or Campfire.
Berkeley: Ten
Speed Press, 2002.

Harold McGee’s books are
indispensable to anyone interested in the science of cooking:

McGee, Harold.
On Food and
Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen.
New York: Scribner, 2004.

———.
The Curious Cook: More
Kitchen Science and Lore.
San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990. See
especially chapter 17: “From Raw to Cooked: The Transformation of Flavor,” a
brilliant speculation on why humans like the taste of cooked food.

———.
Keys to Good Cooking.
New York: Penguin Press, 2010.

Alter, Robert.
The Five Books of
Moses.
New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. See Alter’s notes to Leviticus for
discussion of sacrifice in the Old Testament and the kosher laws.

Bachelard, Gaston.
The
Psychoanalysis of Fire.
Boston: Beacon, 1964.

Barthes, Roland.
Mythologies.
Annette Lavers, tr. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. See the essay “Steak and
Chips.”

Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme.
The Physiology of Taste.
New York: Everyman’s Library, 2009.

Detienne, Marcel, and Jean-Pierre
Vernant.
The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks.
Chicago: University of
Chicago, 1989.

Douglas, Mary. “Deciphering a
Meal,” accessed online:
http://etnologija.etnoinfolab.org/dokumenti/82/2/2009/douglas_1520.pdf
.

Freedman, Paul, ed.
Food: The
History of Taste.
Berkeley: University of California, 2007. See especially the
chapter on ancient Greece and Rome by Veronika Grimm.