Cooked - A Natural History of Transformat Part 23

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a hero of the young Emerson's with a notorious drug habit, described a mental operation he called "secondary imagination" that he believed was the wellspring of a certain type of poetic creation. Secondary imagination, Coleridge wrote, is the faculty that "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create." This notion of imaginatively transforming the givens of ordinary perception through a process of mental distortion is an idea that would go on to shape Romanticism in all the arts, from abstract painting to improvisational jazz. Can Coleridge's transforming imagination really be understood without reference to the experience of intoxication?* Whether by means of a flowering plant or a microbe invisible to the naked eye, letting nature overpower us is a way to break down stale perspectives and open up fresh ones, or so the poets have always believed. We may not be able to tally it with any precision, but can there be much doubt that the poetic imagination owes a sizable debt to this yeast?

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 bas.e.m.e.nt, 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 diminis.h.i.+ng 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 bas.e.m.e.nt. 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 winegla.s.s, 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 gla.s.s, 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 a.n.a.logies, 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.

Afterword

Hand Taste I.

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 surpa.s.s 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 pa.s.sive 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 enn.o.bling. It suggests a taking rather than a giving. It a.s.sumes 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 relations.h.i.+ps, 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 relations.h.i.+ps. 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 relations.h.i.+p of the barley gra.s.s (Hordeum vulgare) and the brewer (h.o.m.o 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 gra.s.s 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 att.i.tude 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 Mitch.e.l.l 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 st.u.r.dy 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 s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p 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 200F. All day Sat.u.r.day, 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 190F, the pig is done-usually early Sat.u.r.day 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 Mitch.e.l.l'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 gla.s.s: 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 Mitch.e.l.l 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Noella 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.s-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 h.o.m.ogenization 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 pa.s.sive 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 relations.h.i.+ps 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 and 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 ma.s.sage. 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 ma.s.saged spice into leaf, the notion began to come into a rough focus.

Tongue taste is the straightforward chemical phenomenon that takes place whenever molecules make contact with taste buds, something that happens with any food as a matter of course. Tongue taste is the kind of easy, accessible flavor that any food scientist or manufacturer can reliably produce in order to make food appealing. "McDonald's has tongue taste," Hyeon Hee explained.

Hand taste, however, involves something greater than mere flavor. It is the infinitely more complex experience of a food that bears the unmistakable signature of the individual who made it-the care and thought and idiosyncrasy that that person has put into the work of preparing it. Hand taste cannot be faked, Hyeon Hee insisted, and hand taste is the reason we go to all this trouble, ma.s.saging the individual leaves of each cabbage and then folding them and packing them in the urn just so. What hand taste is, I understood all at once, is the taste of love.

Appendix I: