Friday, February 06, 2009

The Raw and the Cooked

Good golly, folks – can you remember the last time you felt really warm?  We’ve been trapped under a Narnian spell forever – where it’s “always winter and never Christmas.” Like Inuit peoples, we’ve all developed a connoisseur’s vocabulary for the subtleties of snow – the irritating squeakiness that comes with sub-zero temperatures, the insouciant fluff and slide of fresh stuff over ice, the welcome, gritty grippiness of old rutted snow that at least makes for better footing than the slick, partially shoveled walks that might as well be toboggan runs. I understand, freshly, why Dante’s Inferno was actually frozen at the core.

So: I’ve been summoning a hotter vision of Hell – and you can, too – just by picking up some pizza dough recipes and cranking your oven up to 500 degrees.  My talented brother-in-law made our family a gorgeous hand-made wooden pizza peel and gave us a baking stone, and now any other kind of cookery seems namby-pamby.  I’m addicted to the Extreme Oven Experience—the blast of hellish heat on my face, the singe of my brow, and the inevitable wrist and finger burns that come with learning to use a pizza peel skillfully. (Let’s just say that sliding those suckers out, once they’re blistered and crisp, is a darn sight easier than getting the raw, flaccid pies onto the stone.)

It’s not the carbs I crave, though – it’s those precious moments, when my torso is angled into the firey maw of our raging oven – THEN, finally, I feel warm again, despite the frigid drifts outside my door.  It brings to mind the galloping verses of Yukon poet Robert Service, whose tragicomic masterpiece, “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” tells the story of the Tennessee-born Sam McGee, who travels north for gold and freezes to death.  The poem’s speaker cremates him, and when he peeks inside his makeshift crematorium to check on Sam’s progress, he finds not ashes, but an ecstatic Sam, who is finally, finally warm.  The stanza goes:

And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm,
in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile,
and he said: “Please close that door.
It’s fine in here, but I greatly fear
you’ll let in the cold and storm --
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee,
it’s the first time I’ve been warm."

Poets aren’t the only ones weighing in on this issue, though.  According to anthropologists, applying heat, especially to food—is a key way to mark the transition from nature to culture.  Claude Levi-Strauss famously noted that any human culture can be divided symbolically into the “raw” and the “cooked,” with the “cooked” marking social evolutionary progress. Hard at work with my furnace of an oven, I do feel I’ve triumphed over nature just like the optimistic Sam McGee, but of course, the image also suggests my goose is cooked.

In our home kitchen, in fact, this evolutionary theory of the raw and the cooked seems to be working in reverse, with my generation – the mature, cooked generation – fading into the background while the evolving youth are suddenly obsessed with eating raw. What would an anthropologist say?  So much for my elder’s expertise in caramelizing onions, slow-roasting spiced vegetables, and topping blister-crusted pizzas with whatever can take the heat.  Instead, the teenagers who hang out in our kitchen are often UN-cooking, using a food dryer to produce funky flaxseed crackers, whirling up raw vegetables to make cool soups they call “living” food – which casts my victuals as deader than any doornail.  Theirs may well be the food of the future – full of flavor, texture, life.

It’s fitting, I suppose, to take the temperature of the times at this evolutionary moment in our nation’s history, with a new president at the helm. Just when the weather is at its most brutally cold, and proto-codgers like me are cranking the thermostat and zipping ourselves into those dorky fleece blankets with sleeves, the Obama generation is keeping it cool, assessing the raw materials of our country’s present, and, I hope, inventing new recipes for our future.  Like my daughter’s uncooked flaxseed crackers, the future might not be tasty right off, but it’s likely to be good for us.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on February 06, 2009
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