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This book was living in the cabin I was staying at last month, and was definitely a good one to read while snowed in as it was all about how to make everything you could possibly want to eat if you were stuck with lots of time on your hands and a well-stocked larder.
This is really two books very awkwardly intermingled; as is usually the case in such works, one is good and one isn't.
The good one is Pollan trying out various methods of food creation with lessons from experts, mostly focusing on ones that have largely fallen out of the common cooking repertoire for modern Americans, such as cheese making, beer brewing, and pickling via fermentation (as opposed to vinegar). He also studies barbecue, bread making, and braising. Those parts were lots of fun and made me want to try some of them out. I'd love to ferment at home in theory, as I like pickles, but the prospect of botulism if I screw up and also having to skim off "hairy mold" EW EW EW makes that unlikely. But I'll definitely give bread making a try.
The bad one is his apparent decision that the book needed more of a high concept than that, leading to his bizarre division of techniques into four elements and then pontificating on how this is very deep. Braising is "water cooking," really? How exactly do you braise without using heat (fire?) And why is barbecue "fire" when it also crucially utilizes smoke (air?) He does say that all of them use all the elements, but that just points out how totally arbitrary and pointless his division is.
Even worse, he connects the elements and techniques to gender. Braising is feminine because the chef who teaches him braising is a woman (Samin Nosrat of Heat Salt Acid) and water is feminine. Apparently fire and air are masculine, so barbecue and bread-baking are inherently and traditionally masculine stretching back for all eternity, and that is why barbecuers and bread bakers are men. Also, that is why Pollan, who is a manly male man, feels most deeply connected to those pursuits and is so much prouder of his bread loaf and feels a deep inherent manly desire to prove his masculinity by photographing his bread loaf for Instagram as proof of his manhood, just like the cavemen did.
I cannot even wrap my head around how profoundly stupid this is. You cannot look at the recent American stereotype of grilling/barbecuing as masculine cooking as proof that "fire cooking" has always been a man's job! Even more stupid (if possible) is his association of bread with masculinity. Baking is traditionally female! Baking cakes is still considered feminine, and the only difference between cakes and bread is yeast, which ought to be considered feminine if you're going to be consistent with your idiotic reductiveness as yeast is alive and women bring forth life. (Not really, as sperm is also alive, but at if you're going to be stereotypical you should at least be consistent.) Basically the techniques Pollan liked best, probably because men taught them to him, are masculine.
To quote an old aunt I knew as a child after she got buttonholed for ages by an annoying bore, "What a stupid story. Dumb, dumb, dumb."
Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
This is really two books very awkwardly intermingled; as is usually the case in such works, one is good and one isn't.
The good one is Pollan trying out various methods of food creation with lessons from experts, mostly focusing on ones that have largely fallen out of the common cooking repertoire for modern Americans, such as cheese making, beer brewing, and pickling via fermentation (as opposed to vinegar). He also studies barbecue, bread making, and braising. Those parts were lots of fun and made me want to try some of them out. I'd love to ferment at home in theory, as I like pickles, but the prospect of botulism if I screw up and also having to skim off "hairy mold" EW EW EW makes that unlikely. But I'll definitely give bread making a try.
The bad one is his apparent decision that the book needed more of a high concept than that, leading to his bizarre division of techniques into four elements and then pontificating on how this is very deep. Braising is "water cooking," really? How exactly do you braise without using heat (fire?) And why is barbecue "fire" when it also crucially utilizes smoke (air?) He does say that all of them use all the elements, but that just points out how totally arbitrary and pointless his division is.
Even worse, he connects the elements and techniques to gender. Braising is feminine because the chef who teaches him braising is a woman (Samin Nosrat of Heat Salt Acid) and water is feminine. Apparently fire and air are masculine, so barbecue and bread-baking are inherently and traditionally masculine stretching back for all eternity, and that is why barbecuers and bread bakers are men. Also, that is why Pollan, who is a manly male man, feels most deeply connected to those pursuits and is so much prouder of his bread loaf and feels a deep inherent manly desire to prove his masculinity by photographing his bread loaf for Instagram as proof of his manhood, just like the cavemen did.
I cannot even wrap my head around how profoundly stupid this is. You cannot look at the recent American stereotype of grilling/barbecuing as masculine cooking as proof that "fire cooking" has always been a man's job! Even more stupid (if possible) is his association of bread with masculinity. Baking is traditionally female! Baking cakes is still considered feminine, and the only difference between cakes and bread is yeast, which ought to be considered feminine if you're going to be consistent with your idiotic reductiveness as yeast is alive and women bring forth life. (Not really, as sperm is also alive, but at if you're going to be stereotypical you should at least be consistent.) Basically the techniques Pollan liked best, probably because men taught them to him, are masculine.
To quote an old aunt I knew as a child after she got buttonholed for ages by an annoying bore, "What a stupid story. Dumb, dumb, dumb."
Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
