The Quest for Fire

"What a piece of work is man. How noble in reason. How infinite in faculty. In form and moving how express and admirable. In action how like a god. The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals."

It is generally accepted as truth, that the thing that separates man from the lower orders, puts him at the top of the food chain as it were, is his ability to use tools. I'll not argue that as an assumption, but will question the monolithic nature of it as a stand alone dogma.

I believe it is equally important to consider the food chain itself. Simply put, more profoundly than any other creature, Man is an omnivore.

Man survived and migrated and adapted to whatever foodstuff he could digest...........and thrived. From the cat, the lowest form of mammalian life, (face it, a cat is a reptile with fur....just one evolutionary step up from laying eggs) to the highest order of primates, when the peculiar environment that provides their sustenance is diminished, they start to die.

Thus we come to the question of fire..........

Fire is a naturally occuring thing. It probably didn't take an australopithecine Einstein to see that it provided warmth and light, and scared the lions and tigers away. These uses of fire make perfect sense. Why, though, would our dim-witted, barely human, distant forbears (omnivores, remember) put a hard won and perfectly acceptable-as-it-is ration of food into a fire?

They had no concept of infection. They had no way to associate sickness or disease with something they had ingested days earlier. Wherefore,then, cooking?

If allowed to speculate, (who's to stop me?.....aren't blogs lovely like that?)I would have to imagine that, one night, the tribe came across the toothsome remains of some large animal abandoned by its sated predators. The meat not consumed by other scavengers was torn off the carcass and divided among themselves. Some clumsy sub-human putz copped a stumble near the fire and his precious share of protein went flying into the flames. Just barely possessed of enough reason to understand that it was a choice of retrieve it or starve, he managed to paw aside the burning sticks and snag the charred lump of flesh out of the red hot embers. (I'm also betting that this was the guy who invented the oven mitt too..........but that is another entry.)
He may have paused a bit as he looked at what had become of his supper, but eat he must, so he closed his eyes and took a bite.

Can you imagine what must have gone through that primitive brain as the succulent juices of the worlds first fire seasoned steak burst upon his taste buds? It had to have been a moment very much like that scene in the movie "2001", when the monkey men found the big slab, listened to Also Sprach Zarathustra, and suddenly got the brilliant idea to beat the fuck out of each other with sticks.

This,dear readers, was truly the birth of civilization.....not religion, not war, not prostitution.....cooking. In the absence of any other reason or compulsion to commit food to flame, the cooking of food, as practice by the primitive, was purely and only a consequence of, and a reaction to, sensual pleasure.

Not even sex is as purely motivated. We are hard wired to crave sex as a part of our reptilian instinct to procreate. Sex rearranges the brain chemistry and provides a temporary relief of clinical depression in some people. Some people do it because they feel they have to, or to kill time, or because they just can't say no. Some people feel like they are going to die if they don't and then feel like shit about themselves because they did. Some people don't do it at all, or even want to............but every human on earth reacts with salivary lust to the aromas and flavors of a well cooked meal. Even poor misguided ascetics and vegans twist themselves in culinary knots in the attempt to make their pitiful fistfulls of fruits and nuts taste like something resembling food. Even the man who would rather drink than fuck is brought to a near swoon when he passes through the delicious miasma of scents that surround a steak house.

Thus we enter into the world of Cooking with Gutz........

We'll grill and roast and fry savory meats of every stripe.
We'll bake pies.
We'll saute buttery, garlicky shrimp and scallops.
We'll make salads and sandwiches and soups.
We'll stock your pantry and equip your kitchen.
We'll deal with the leftovers and never waste another bite of food.
We'll dine like nobility on a pauper's purse.

So bring your ingenuity, your creativity, your sense of fun, your imagination..........above all, bring your healthy appetite,

and come on into the kitchen.