The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [206]
Another thing cooking is, or can be, is a way to honor the things we’re eating, the animals and plants and fungi that have been sacrificed to gratify our needs and desires, as well as the places and the people that produced them. Cooks have their ways of saying grace too. Maybe this explains why I wanted to prepare the pig two ways, and to serve Angelo’s pig pâté. For me, doing right by my pig means wasting as little of it as possible and making the most of whatever it has to offer us. Cooking something thoughtfully is a way to celebrate both that species and our relation to it. By grilling one cut of my pig and braising the other, I was drawing on the two most elemental techniques people have devised for transforming raw meat into something not only more digestible but also more human: that is, cooking meat directly over a fire and, with liquid, in a pot. Both techniques promise to turn the flesh of animals into something good to eat and good to think, but each reflects a slightly different stance toward the animal. The second proposes a more “civilized” method of cooking meat, since it achieves a more complete transcendence or (take your pick) sublimation of the animal, and perhaps the animal in us, than the first. It leaves no trace of blood, which suits some meat eaters more than others, but it seemed to me I should give both approaches to the pig their due.
It was a long day of such transformations, as one after another the raw stuffs of nature—chunks of meat, piles of wild fungi, the leaves and pods of plants, and piles of pulverized grain—took on whole new forms, many of them wondrous. Bread dough magically rose and crisped; desiccated mushrooms came back to fleshy life; meat turned brown and caramelized; indigestible beans softened and sweetened; the leaves of herbs inflected whatever they touched; and all these unprepossessing parts of things combined into what promised to be greater and more delectable wholes.
The repetitive phases of cooking leave plenty of mental space for reflection, and as I chopped and minced and sliced I thought about the rhythms of cooking, one of which involves destroying the order of the things we bring from nature into our kitchens, only to then create from them a new order. We butcher, grind, chop, grate, mince, and liquefy raw ingredients, breaking down formerly living things so that we might recombine them in new, more cultivated forms. When you think about it, this is the same rhythm, once removed, that governs all eating in nature, which invariably entails the destruction of certain living things, by chewing and then digestion, in order to sustain other living things. In The Hungry Soul Leon Kass calls this the great paradox of eating: “that to preserve their life and form living things necessarily destroy life and form.” If there is any shame in that destruction, only we humans seem to feel it, and then only on occasion. But cooking doesn’t only distance us from our destructiveness, turning the pile of blood and guts into a savory salami, it also symbolically redeems it, making good our karmic debts: Look what good, what beauty, can come of this! Putting a great dish on the table is our way of celebrating the wonders of form we humans can create from this matter—this quantity of sacrificed life—just before the body takes its first destructive bite.
3. AT THE TABLE
It remained to be seen whether my own cooking would redeem any of these ingredients, but by the appointed hour everything was more or less ready, except me. I raced upstairs to change and, before I had my shoes tied, heard the doorbell ring. The guests were arriving. They came bearing feast-appropriate gifts: Angelo with his wine and pâté, Sue with a bouquet of lemon verbena picked from