Another great book. An obsessively detailed, sweeping look at the science and history of cooking, logically organized from fire (BBQ) to water (braise/boil) to air (bread,) to fermenting. He takes great pains to point out that processed food actually takes more time, pulls families apart, and is worse for you than cooking from scratch.
"Great cooking is all about the three 'p's: patience, presence, and practice."
"Every cuisine has its characteristic 'flavor principle,' Rozin contends, whether it is tomato-lemon-oregano in Greece; lime-chili in Mexico; onion-lard-paprika in Hungary, or, in Samin's Moroccan dish, cumin-coriander-cinnamon-ginger-onion-fruit."
" It seems to me that one of the great luxuries of life at this point is to be able to do one thing at a time, one thing to which you give yourself wholeheartedly. Unitasking."
" I found that, much like gardening, most cooking manages to be agreeably absorbing without being too demanding intellectually. It leaves plenty of mental space for daydreaming and reflection."
" The ads have also helped manufacture a sense of panic about time, depicting families so rushed and harried in the morning that there is no time to make breakfast"
" It is remarkable how much sheer bullshit seems to accrete around the subject of barbecue. No other kind of cooking comes even close. Exactly why, I'm not sure, but it may be that cooking over fire is so straightforward that the people who do it feel a need to baste the process in thick layers of intricacy and myth. It could also be that barbecue is performed disproportionately by self-dramatizing men."
" Is there any more futile, soul-irradiating experience than standing before the little window on a microwave oven watching the carousel slowly revolve your frozen block of dinner?"
" Obesity rates are inversely correlated with the amount of time in food preparation. The more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower it's rate of obesity."
" For me, cooking is about seeking the deepest, farthest, richest flavors in everything I make. About extracting the absolute most out of every ingredient"
"in a world where so few of us are obliged to cook at all anymore, to choose to do so is to lodge a protest against specialization—against...the infiltration of commercial interests into every last cranny of our lives. To cook for the pleasure of it, to devote a portion of our leisure to it, is to declare our independence from the corporations"
" Gaston Bachelard ...we categorize many of our emotions by their relative weight; they make us feel heavier or lighter... sadness is weighed down and earthbound. joy is aerial, and the sensation of freedom defies the bonds of gravity... Elation, effervescence, elevation, levity, inspiration: air words all, alveolated with vowels, leavening the dough of everyday life."
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