Cuisine and Empire Quotes

“Poverty . . . is a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation,” the Scottish merchant and statistician Patrick Colquhoun, turned London magistrate, said in 1806, ironically in an argument for raising people from destitution and misery to mere poverty. “It is the lot of man—it is the source of wealth, since without poverty there would be no labour, and without labour there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.”113 And weren’t the poor resentful that they could not eat rich meats, sauces, and sweets and dubious about the rule that each rank in society needed a distinct diet?”
― Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History

“With cooking, plants and animals became the raw materials for food, not food itself.”
― Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History

“If our vision of the way to have better food is to have less processing, more natural food, more home cooking, and more local food, we will cut ourselves off from the most likely hope for better food in the future.”
― Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History

“By arguing that home-cooked food is tastier and healthier than industrially produced food, it downplays how the large-scale, efficient bakeries and fish sauce manufacturies in Rome, tea-processing facilities in Buddhist monasteries, herring-packing plants in Holland, sugar-beet refineries in France, and roller mills around the world have improved diets, reduced heavy manual labor, and enhanced the range of tasty foods. Indeed, home cooking and industrial processing form a continuum, using mechanical, thermal, chemical, and biochemical methods to make farm products into something edible.”
― Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History

“The contemporary belief that the family meal is a place where children learn to become members of a moral society owes much to the Dutch.”
― Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History

“For those who could not afford to hire a cook, restaurants that sold restaurants—“restoring broths”
― Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History

“It’s good to be reminded that cities and states, courts and armies, writing and figuring, temples and cathedrals, all depended on those who stood to pound and knelt to grind.”
― Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History

“Grinding may look easy, and it is, for the first ten minutes. To grind a quantity of grain, though, as I found out when I tried, takes skill, control, physical strength, and time. I was quickly panting, sweaty, and dizzy, my hair in my eyes, and the mano slipping at awkward angles. Grinding is hard on the knees, hips, back, shoulders, and elbows, causing arthritis and bone damage. Grinding is lonely, too exhausting to allow for chatter. Kneeling to grind with the breasts swinging can be seen as submissive, demeaning, and sexually provocative, as lascivious eighteenth- and nineteenth-century illustrations of Mexican women grinding make clear. The heavy labor was relegated to women, convicts, and slaves, called “grinding slaves” in the technical language of seventh-century English court documents.42 Even today Mexican women in remote villages grind five hours daily to prepare enough maize for a family of five or six. For generation upon generation of grinders in the bread-eating parts of the world, the author of Genesis (3:19) had it nailed. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
― Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History

“In the Indus Valley, the Nile Valley, and Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, barley-wheat cuisine supported small cities by 3000 B.C.E., as millet cuisine supported them in the Yellow River Valley.19 The cuisine of Mesopotamia is the best known of the barley-wheat cuisines, already thousands of years old in 1000 B.C.E. It was prepared in cities and villages on the flat plain, hot and parched much of the year, partly marshy and covered with reeds, the home of fish and waterfowl, featureless except for the channels bringing water to irrigate the fields and the date palms lining the pathways between the fields. The abundance of rich soil and water for growing barley and wheat outweighed the lack of timber, building stone, and other resources. The poor, including foot soldiers, prisoners, construction workers, and servants, survived almost exclusively on barley dishes, receiving roughly made conical pottery bowls containing about two liters (a little over eight cups) of barley grains, porridge, or bread daily. They ate these with a little salt and dried fish. Their diet was so meager that a popular saying went: “When a poor man has died, do not try to revive him. When he had bread, he had no salt; when he had salt, he had no bread.”20”
― Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History

“With cooking, plants and animals became the raw materials for food, not food itself. Given that we commonly use the word “food” to describe what farmers grow, and given that we eat nuts, fruit, some vegetables, and even fish and steak tartare without cooking, the statement that plants and animals are not food may seem counterintuitive. The fact is that most of us get only a small fraction of our calories from raw foods. Even so, that fraction is probably higher than that of our ancestors, since we are the beneficiaries of millennia of breeding that have created larger, sweeter fruits and more tender vegetables and meat. Furthermore, even what we call raw has usually been subjected to many kitchen processes. Few of us sink our teeth into raw steak unless it has been finely chopped or sliced. Raw foodists allow slicing, grinding, chopping, soaking, sprouting, freezing, and heating to 104–120 degrees Fahrenheit. In spite of modern high-quality plant foods and careful preparation, it is almost impossible to thrive on such a diet, according to evidence gathered by Richard Wrangham. In antiquity, people happily accepted that humans ate cooked food. Indeed, they saw it as what distinguished them from animals. Perhaps it is because today we place so much emphasis on “fresh” and “natural” foods—which Susanne Freidberg has shown are made possible only by changing animal life cycles, modern transport, refrigeration, and ingenious packaging—that we underestimate how much we depend on cooking. In any case, there is no escaping that with cooking, food became an artifact, like clothes and dwellings, not natural but made by humans. A sheaf of wheat is no more food than a boll of cotton is a garment.”
― Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History

“If they are to be turned into bread, grains have to be ground. When I was a little girl, my father decided to make some flour from the wheat we had grown on the farm. He tried pounding it with a pestle and mortar but all he got was broken grains, not flour. He put it through the hand mincer screwed to the edge of the table with the same result. Finally, he attacked it with a hammer on the flagstone floor. After he gave up, defeated, my mother cleared up the mess. It was sobering to realize that if the commercial millers had vanished, we could have starved even with barns full of sacks of wheat. To turn wheat into flour, you have to shear, not pound, the hard grains, which requires a grindstone, as the people of Lake Kinneret had discovered. A friend in Mexico, where hand grinding still goes on, showed me how it works. She knelt at the upper end of a grindstone, called a metate—a saddle-shaped platform on three inverted pyramidal legs, hewn from a single piece of volcanic rock (fig. 1.7). She mounded a handful of barley, took the mano, a stone shaped like a squared-off rolling pin, in both hands with her thumbs facing back to nudge the grain into place, and, using the whole weight of her upper body, sheared the mano over the grain. After half a dozen motions, she had broken the grains, which now clustered at the bottom end of the metate. Carefully scraping them up with her fingertips, she moved them back to the top, and started shearing again, this time producing white streaks of flour. By the time she had sheared the grain from top to bottom five or six times, she had produced a handful of flour.”
― Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History