Step Three: Salt the Meat; then Brown it

The other task I usually tried to get done before Samin arrived on Sunday was to salt the meat we were planning to cook, an operation she regarded as absolutely critical and urged me to tackle early and in a spirit of shocking extravagance. "Use at least three times as much salt as you think you should," she advised. (A second authority I consulted employed the same formulation, but upped the factor to five.) Like many chefs, Samin believes that knowing how to salt food properly is the very essence of cooking, and that amateurs like me approach the saltbox far too timorously.

Before we learned to cook food in pots, humans never had to think about adding salt to their food. Animal flesh contains all the salt our bodies need, and roasting meat preserves most of the salt in it. It was only with the advent of agriculture, when people began relying on a diet of grain and other plants, and took to boiling much of their food (leaching the salt from it in the process), that deficiencies of sodium became a problem. This is when salt-the only mineral we deliberately eat-became a precious commodity. Yet in a modern diet completely saturated with sodium, deficiencies are not exactly a problem, so why would we want to salt meat at all, let alone so extravagantly?

Samin prefaced her defense of the practice by pointing out that the salt we add to our food represents a tiny fraction of the salt people get from their diet. Most of the salt we eat comes from processed foods, which account for 80 percent of the typical American's daily intake of sodium. "So, if you don't eat a lot of processed foods, you don't need to worry about it. Which means: Don't ever be afraid of salt!"

Judiciously applied, Samin explained, salt brings out the intrinsic flavors of many foods and can improve their texture and appearance. But it is not only the amount of salt that matters; the timing of its application is important, too. Some dishes (like meat) should get salted early, some in the middle of the cooking process, some only immediately before serving, and still others at every step along the way. In the case of meat that will be stewed or braised, you can't salt too soon or too liberally. At least one day before cooking was good; two or three days were even better.

But doesn't salting dry out a piece of meat? Yes, it can, if you don't salt it far enough in advance. Initially, salt draws moisture out of the cells of muscles, which is why, if you haven't salted your meat well in advance of cooking it, you're probably better off not doing it at all. But as the salt draws water out of the meat, a kind of osmotic vacuum forms in the cells. Once the salt has been diluted by the water it has attracted to it, this salty liquid is drawn back into the cells (along with any spices or other flavorings present in it), greatly improving the meat's flavor. Put simply, salting early helps meat later absorb flavors, including but not limited to the flavor of salt.

It took me awhile, but eventually I got comfortable salting meat to Samin's ultraliberal specifications. "Sprinkling" does not do justice to the practice she taught me, though "pouring it on" might be putting matters a bit too strongly. She taught me how to pick up quant.i.ties of kosher salt by dipping all five fingers into the box like a crane and then, with a rhythmic rubbing together of thumb against fingers (a bit like sowing tiny seeds), I found I could spread a nice, even layer of salt all over a piece of meat, making sure to coat any crevices and cavities. Sowing this much salt felt all wrong, I have to admit, and yet, when I discovered the meat didn't come out tasting particularly salty, I succ.u.mbed. Now I, too, am a proud, indulgent liberal with the salt.

The last important step before putting the ingredients of a braise or stew into the pot is to brown the meat in a little fat. This is done for two reasons: to add another layer of flavor to the dish by incorporating the hundreds of tasty compounds created by the Maillard reaction and caramelization, and to make the dish more appealing to look at, browned meat being more attractive than gray. Without browning, Samin explained, both the flavor and color of the meat would be paler.

The problem is that meat won't ever brown in a liquid that consists mostly of water. In order for the Maillard reaction to take place, meat needs to reach a higher temperature-250F at least-than water can ever attain, since water can never exceed the boiling point-212F. To caramelize the sugars in meat requires an even higher temperature, in excess of 330F. Because oil can reach these temperatures that water can't, the best way to brown meat is in a pan with a little fat. (Browning can be accomplished in a hot oven, too, and often is in restaurants, but at some risk of drying out the meat.)

Many recipes recommend patting dry the exterior of the meat to promote better browning. Some are particular as to what kind of fat to brown meat in: Julia Child liked to use bacon fat, which adds another layer of flavor to a dish. Sometimes, Samin and I would brown the meat while the mirepoix or soffritto cooked in another pan; other times, we'd brown the meat first, leaving us a pan coated with flavored fat and browned bits of meat in which to cook, and enrich, the mirepoix.

A few of Samin's tips for browning: Big chunks of meat are better than small; bone in is better than out. Use just enough oil to coat the pan and conduct heat evenly; too much, and you'll be frying the meat, too little, you're apt to scorch it over patches of dry, naked pan. Cast iron is best. Watch carefully to prevent any blackening, which can render the whole dish bitter. But brown every surface you can reach, the sides included. Take your time to do it thoroughly. And stop as soon as the color is "toasty beautiful."

In short, another straightforward kitchen procedure improved by patience and presence.

Whether we were browning a duck leg or a lamb neck or a shoulder of pork, this was the point when the kitchen would begin to fill with the complex and captivating aromas of the browning reactions: savory and meaty, but also earthy, floral, and sweet, the precise mix and balance of them all depending on the type of meat being browned. Outwardly, browning looks like a fairly simple operation, but at the molecular level it adds a great deal of complexity to the dish, hundreds of new compounds and, taken together, a whole other layer of flavors. And there was yet another layer still to add: After we removed the browned meat from the pan, we would deglaze it with a little wine, boiling off the alcohol while freeing up the browned bits stuck on the bottom of the pan with a spatula. This liquid would end up in the braise, too, adding "one more little layer of deliciousness"-this on top of the mirepoix layer and the Maillard layer we had already laid down. I was beginning to understand what Samin meant when she talked about "building" the flavor of a simple dish by extracting the deepest, furthest, richest flavors from even the humblest of ingredients. And that's before we put anything into the pot.

IV.

Step Four: Place all the Ingredients in a Covered Pot

In 1822, a German art historian and gastronome by the name of Baron Karl Friedrich von Rumohr published a book called The Essence of Cookery that, among other things, sought to elevate the prestige of the humble stockpot, and see it for the revolutionary development in human history that it was. "Enough of the fire," the Baron declared. "Innumerable natural products were rendered edible by the invention of the cooking pot," he wrote, a method of cooking he deemed more highly evolved and richer in possibilities than cooking over a fire. "Man had finally learned the arts of boiling and stewing and was now able to combine animal products with the nutritious and aromatic products of the plant kingdom, creating a new end product. For the first time, it was possible for the art of cookery to be developed in all directions."

Perhaps because a German is bound to have less credibility on matters of gastronomy than a Frenchman, Rumohr is not nearly so well known or widely read today as his more flamboyant contemporary, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. But in some ways The Essence of Cookery holds up better than The Physiology of Taste, in which much of the science and history is pure fancy. Compared with Brillat-Savarin, Baron Rumohr has his feet firmly planted on the ground, or, rather, on the floor of the everyday domestic kitchen, a place where water commands as much respect as fire. In fact, his definition of cooking includes it: "To develop, with the aid of heat, water and salt, the nutritional, refreshing, and delectable qualities of those natural substances which are suitable for the nourishment or restoration of mankind." Rumohr's aim in writing The Essence of Cookery was to return cooking, which he felt had fallen into a "state of over-refinement and exaggeration," back to basics, and nothing symbolized straightforward, honest cooking better than the stockpot.

Historically, cooking in pots with water comes much later than cooking with fire, since it awaited the development of watertight and fireproof containers in which to do it. Exactly when these appeared, however, is uncertain. Some archaeologists put the advent of ceramic pottery as early as twenty thousand years ago in Asia. Cooking pots show up in many places around the world, including the Nile River delta, the Levant, and Central America, between ten thousand and seven thousand years ago. All of these dates fall hundreds of thousands of years after humankind domesticated fire, and it is generally agreed that the practice of cooking in pots didn't become widespread until the Neolithic era, when humans settled into patterns of life organized around agriculture. The technologies of agriculture and clay pottery-both of which make different uses of earth and fire-turn out to be closely linked.

Yet there is reason to believe that food was being boiled even before the invention of cooking pots. In numerous ancient sites around the world, archaeologists have dug up burned stones and fired clay b.a.l.l.s the purpose of which was for many years a mystery. In the 1990s, a young Native American archaeologist named Sonya Atalay was working in a ninety-five-hundred-year-old site called catalhoyuk, one of the earliest known urban centers in Turkey, when she found thousands of round fist-sized fired-clay b.a.l.l.s. Stumped, she brought a couple of the b.a.l.l.s to an elder in her tribe, the Ojibwa, hoping he could identify them. He took one look and told her: "You don't need a Ph.D. to know that these are cooking stones."

Archaeologists believe the stones were heated in a fire and then dropped into an animal skin or watertight basket that had been filled with water. The hot cooking b.a.l.l.s allowed the cook to bring water to a boil without having to expose its container to the direct heat of a fire. This method, which is still employed today by some indigenous tribes, allowed people to soften seeds, grains, and nuts and render many toxic or bitter plant foods edible long before there were pots.

Boiling water vastly expanded the horizons of edibility for our species, especially in the world of plants. All kinds of formerly inedible seeds, tubers, legumes, and nuts could now be rendered soft and safe-and therefore the exclusive nutritional property of h.o.m.o sapiens. In time, boiling stones gave way to clay pots, a transition Atalay has doc.u.mented at catalhoyuk. The invention of fired, watertight pots, which made boiling food safer and easier, represented a second gastronomic revolution, the first having been the control of fire for cooking. All this revolution lacked is its own Prometheus, though perhaps that is as it should be for a method of cooking generally thought of as more domestic than heroic.

But without the cook pot, just how far would agriculture have gotten? Many of the important crops humankind has domesticated require boiling (or at least soaking) for us to be able to eat them, especially the legumes and the grains. The cook pot is a kind of second human stomach, an external organ of digestion that allows us to consume plants that would otherwise be inedible or require elaborate processing. These auxiliary clay stomachs made it possible for humans to thrive on a diet of stored dry seeds, which in turn led to the acc.u.mulation of wealth, the division of labor, and the rise of civilization. These developments are usually credited to the rise of agriculture, and rightly so, but they depended as much on the cook pot as on the plow.

Cooking food in pots also helped expand the human population, by allowing for earlier weaning of children (thereby increasing fertility) and a longer life span, since both the very young and the very old could now be fed soft foods and nutritious soups out of the pot, no teeth required. (So pots functioned as external mouths as well.) In all these ways, the pot, by domesticating the element of water, helped us to leave behind hunting and to settle down. According to the historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, the invention of the cook pot (and its offshoot, the frying pan) is the last innovation in the history of cooking until the advent in our own time of the microwave oven.

In drawing his bright line between roasting and boiling as the two princ.i.p.al modes of food preparation, Claude Levi-Strauss characterized them, respectively, as "exocuisine" and "endocuisine"-that is, "outside" and "inside" cooking. Levi-Strauss wants us to take these terms figuratively as well as literally, since he regarded the methods as recipes for something much bigger than a meal: Each also tells a different story about our relationship to both nature and other people. So cooking over fire was "outside" cooking in two senses: Not only was the cooking done outside, in the open, with the meat exposed to the flames, but the process itself was exposed to the larger social world-it was a public ritual conducted by men and open to outsiders. By comparison, endo-, or inside, cooking took place within the confines of the closed pot and, more often than not, within the private s.p.a.ce of the household. The interior of the cook pot itself, concave and shielding its contents from view, symbolized the home and the family, its lid a kind of roof over a domestic s.p.a.ce presided over by women. Levi-Strauss describes New World tribes where "a man never boils anything," and others in which boiling was a.s.sociated with the strengthening of family ties, and roasting with the weakening of those ties, since guests, including strangers, were often invited to partake.

Boiled food also stands at a further remove from uncivilized nature than does roasted food, which requires nothing more than the element of fire (and perhaps a stick) to cook the meal. In addition to a fire, boiling depends on a cultural artifact-the pot-and the process involves not just one but two mediations-a layer of clay and the medium of water-between food and flame. The pot also allows for a more complete cooking of foods, which is why Aristotle rated boiling "higher," or more civilized, than roasting, "on the grounds that it was more effective in destroying the rawness of meat." (Evidently he was unfamiliar with slow-cooked Southern barbecue.) If all cooking is a process of transforming the stuff of nature into culture, boiling achieves a more complete transformation of the animal being eaten by (among other things) eliminating any trace of blood.

After the meal, the cooking implements used to boil food are all carefully cleaned and preserved, Levi-Strauss points out, while the wooden frame used to barbecue meat was traditionally destroyed after the feast. Why? For fear that the vengeful animals would use it to turn the tables and roast one of us. This superst.i.tion speaks to the fact that roasting is more closely a.s.sociated with violence and danger, which might explain why in many cultures women-traditionally identified with giving life rather than taking it-are prohibited from doing it. "Boiled food is life," Levi-Strauss writes, "roast food death." He reports finding countless examples in the world's folklore of "cauldrons of immortality," but not a single example of a "spit of immortality."

Is there anyone who takes the trouble to clean and care for a grill, or grilling implement, the way we do an old ca.s.serole or serving spoon from our childhood? It's not just the elements that account for the differential survival rates of outdoor grills and cooking pots. The former get tossed as soon as the baked-on grime becomes too thick to face; the latter become cherished family heirlooms.

There's not a lot I can recall of my mother's kitchen when I was growing up, but one image I can easily summon is of the turquoise ca.s.serole from which she ladled out beef stews and chicken soups. Made by Dansk, it was Scandinavian in design, sleek and thinly walled, though its unexpected heft suggested steel beneath the aquamarine enamel. Crowning the ca.s.serole was a lid that you lifted using a slender X-shaped handle; the handle was cleverly designed to allow the inverted top to double as a trivet. Every chip and scratch of its bright enamel is precisely recorded in my memory; I'm sure even today I could pick my mother's ca.s.serole out of a lineup of otherwise identical ones.

The captivating smells that emanated from that pot, their never-once-broken promise of something rich and satisfying to eat, seeped out to fill the house and lure us from our separate rooms toward the kitchen as dinnertime approached. In our modern, all-electric 1960s kitchen, that pot with its centripetal energies was the closest thing we had to a hearth, a warm and fragrant synecdoche for domestic well-being.

In fact, my attempt to reconstruct that kitchen in memory fifty years later starts from an image of the aquamarine ca.s.serole perched on top of the stove, and gradually builds out from there, to take in the yellow porcelain sink, the rectangular white Formica table in the corner with the curvy Jetsons-style chairs, the tan rotary phone on the wall, the birdcage hanging (unwisely) next to that, and the picture window overlooking the great, two-trunked oak tree in the front yard that loomed benevolently over the house. When it was time for dinner, my mother would carry the ca.s.serole from the range to the table, set it down dead center on its trivet, lift the turquoise lid, and serve us, one by one, from the rising cloud of fragrant steam.

A comfortable old pot like that one, filled with a thick stew still hatching bubbles from its surface, is a little like a kitchen in miniature, an enclosed pocket of s.p.a.ce in which a hodgepodge of cold ingredients get transformed into the warm glow of a shared family meal. What more do you need? Like the kitchen, the pot bears the traces of all the meals that have been cooked in it, and there is a sense (even if it is only a superst.i.tion) in which all those past meals somehow inform and improve the current one. A good pot holds memories.

It also holds us, or that's the hope. To eat from the same pot is to share something more than a meal. "To eat out of the same cauldron" was, for the ancient Greeks, a trope for sharing the same fate: We're all in this together. In the same way that the stew pot blends a great many different ingredients together, forging them into a single memorable flavor, it brings the family together as well. (Or at least it did, until my sisters declared themselves vegetarians, splintering the one-pot family meals into a menu of different entrees.) This might sound like a sentimental conceit, but compare the one-pot dinner to the sort of meal(s) that typically emerge from the microwave: a succession of single-serving portions, each attempting to simulate a different cuisine and hit a different demographic, with no two of those portions ever ready to eat at the same time. If the first gastronomic revolution unfolded under the sign of community, gathered around the animal roasting on the fire, and the second that of the family, gathered around the stew pot, then the third one, now well under way, seems to be consecrated to the individual: Have it your way. Whereas the motto hovering over every great pot is the same one stamped on the coins in our pocket: E pluribus unum.

The symbolic power of the pot-to gather together, to harmonize-might begin in the home, but it reaches well beyond it, all the way into the political realm. The ancient Chinese conceived of the well-governed state as a cauldron, specifically a three-legged one called a ding. In this monumental pot the skilled chef-c.u.m-administrator deploys his culinary skills to forge a diversity of clashing interests into a single harmonious dish. Closer to home, the "melting pot" sought to achieve a similar result in the social sphere, resolving the diverse flavors of our far-flung immigrant histories into a single American stew. The common pot is always pushing against the sovereignty of individual taste. Which might help explain why its popularity is in decline today while the microwave's is ascendant.

But it would be a mistake to overlook the darker side of cooking in pots. Another Greek saying-"To boil in the same cauldron"-suggests a less happy take on the shared destiny. There is, too, the witch's cauldron, also presided over by women, yet producing the very ant.i.thesis of comfort food. Who knows what is cooking down there in that scary pot? Bubbling away beneath the murky swamp of sauce might be eye of newt or tail of rat. All pot cooking is occult in some degree, the precise ident.i.ty of the ingredients hidden from inspection, more or less illegible. "Mystery meat" is how children refer to it, and rightly so.

Given what a cla.s.sicist once called "the Homeric horror of formlessness," it's no wonder that roasting is the only kind of cooking ever described in Homer. The pot dish, lidded and turbid, has none of the Apollonian clarity of a recognizable animal on a spit; it trades that brightly lit, hard-edged object and its legible world for something darker, more fluid and inchoate. What emerges from this or any other pot is not food for the eye so much as for the nose, a primordial Dionysian soup, but evolving in reverse, decomposing forms rather than creating them. To eat from the pot always involves at least a little leap into unknown waters.

I don't own a cauldron, unfortunately, but we do own a couple of heavy-duty ca.s.seroles made from cast iron (and coated in a blue enamel) and a red porcelain tagine, one of those Moroccan pots with stovepipe lids that look like festive hats. Recently I bought two clay ca.s.seroles: a La Chamba handmade in Colombia from unglazed black clay, and a wide terra-cotta ca.s.serole from Tuscany glazed the color of winter wheat. I like to think of these new pots as future heirlooms, provided I don't crack or drop them before they've had a chance to become venerable. Such pots might begin life as ordinary commodities, but in time the ones that endure acc.u.mulate rich sediments of family history, until they become one of the very least commodified objects in our possession.

The weight and thickness of these receptacles make them ideal for slow-cooked braises and stews, as well as for soups and beans. They warm up slowly and diffuse their heat evenly through the dish, gently blending flavors without developing hot spots that might cause some ingredients to cook too fast or burn. The advantage of the cast-iron ca.s.serole, by comparison, is that you can put it directly on the flame to brown meat or sweat a soffritto. Most earthenware pots can be used only in the oven, which means dirtying a second pot or pan to prepare ingredients. But clay pots are the gentlest cookware there is, and the most conserving of both heat and memory: Many cooks claim that over time they build up flavors in their clay that will improve anything you cook in them. Earthenware pots can also be brought to the table, where they will keep their contents piping hot as long as guests care to linger.

The vegetables go into the cook pot first, the mirepoix or soffritto (and/or any other vegetables called for by the recipe) spread out evenly across the bottom of the dish to form a nice cushion for the larger, chunkier ingredients. You don't want pieces of meat sitting directly on the pot's hot floor, where they might stick or burn, and have that much less opportunity to mingle productively with the other ingredients. Only after the meat has been comfortably settled on its bed of vegetables should the braising liquid be introduced: the all-important medium that will unify the ingredients, and in time become itself something much greater than the sum of whatever it was and everything it now connects-sauce!

V.

Step Five: Pour the Braising Liquid over the Ingredients

"Whatever it was" might be wine or stock or a puree or juice or milk or beer or dashi or plain old water from the tap, depending on the recipe and its cultural reference or the cook's desire. But in fact all of these liquids are really just enhanced forms of water, H2O serving as what the chemists call the "continuous phase" in which various other molecules disperse to great and flavorful effect.

In the story of a stew, the pot is the stage and water the hero (or the nonhuman hero, anyway), the elemental actor that supplies unity of character and makes things happen. True, there are a few braises that call for no added liquid, but, as long as they cook slowly in a covered pot, liquid will soon appear anyway, in the form of juices seeping from the meat or the vegetables, and these liquids will perform ably in the role of water.

Which in cooking is protean: creative and destructive and ultimately transformative. Water that has been domesticated by being confined to a pot might not seem as potent as the wild water that carves canyons and coastlines, but its powers are impressive even so. Consider some of the things water can do once it has been captured in a cook pot and that pot has been put on a fire:

First, the water will conduct the fire's heat, evenly and efficiently, conveying it from the walls of the pot into every cranny of whatever's being cooked in it. If that happens to include dried seeds, water will bring them back to life-sometimes literally, by inspiring them to germinate, or figuratively, by making them soft and plump enough to eat. But water, sufficiently heated, can kill, too, dispatching dangerous bacteria in our food. It will sterilize meat and detoxify plants and fungi. It will leach out salt and bitterness. Water in a pot can bring together far-flung taxonomic kingdoms, marrying plants and animals and fungi, so that they might act on one another-swap flavors, alter textures. Given enough time and the proper amount of heat, water will break down the toughest fibers in both plants and animals, transforming them into food. Given still more time, it will break these foodstuffs down into a rich paste and, eventually, into a tasty, nutritious liquid: a dispersed phase of its continuous self. But what water breaks down it also rea.s.sembles along new lines.

Water will extract molecules from one ingredient and diffuse them so that they might encounter and act on the molecules in another ingredient, breaking some chemical bonds and forging new ones, which might be aromas, flavors, or nutrients. In a pot, water is the medium of flavor as well as heat, allowing spices and other seasonings to get around and make their presence felt. It also dilutes the effect of the most pungent spices, like peppers, making them more amenable. Given heat and time, water softens, blends, balances, harmonizes, and marries.