Read Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation for Free Online

control of fire is so ancient and represents
such a momentous turn in human history that it has engendered a great many myths and
theories to explain how it might have come to pass. Some of these are just plain crazy,
and not only the ancient ones, either. Take Sigmund Freud’s theory, for example.
In a footnote to
Civilization and Its Discontents
, Freud traces the control of
fire to the fateful moment when man—and by “man” in this case he really
means
man
—first overcame the urge to extinguish whatever fires he chanced upon
by peeing on them. For countless millennia this urge apparently proved irresistible,
much to the detriment of civilization, the rise of which awaited its repression. Perhaps
because putting out fires with one’s stream of urine is something women
can’t do very well, the activity served as an important form of male competition,
one that Freud suggests (no surprise here) was homoerotic in character. Cooking with
fire remains very much a competitive male preserve, and those of us who do it should
probably count ourselves lucky Freud isn’t around to offer his analysis of exactly
what it is we’re up to.
    The course of human history shifted on the
fateful day when it dawned on some fellow possessed of an unusual degree of self-control
that he didn’t
have
to pee on the fire, and could instead preserve the
flames and put them to some good use: keeping himself warm, say, or cooking his dinner.
Freud believed this advance, like so much else of value in civilization, owed to the
unique human ability to govern, or repress, the inner drives and urges before which
other animals are powerless. (Not that we have many reports of animals putting out fires
with
their
urine.) For him, the control of self is the precondition for the
control of fire and, in turn, for the civilizationthat that discovery
made possible. “This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for his
renunciation of instinct.”
    In all the time I’ve now spent with
pit masters, whiling away the hours before the smoldering logs, I’ve never once
brought up Freud’s fire theory. I’m just not sure how well it would go over.
I have, however, on occasion brought up a second theory, one that, though it is equally
outlandish, contains a bright cinder of poetic truth that can usually be counted on to
bring a smile to the streaked, perspiring face of a barbecue man.
    This is the theory put forward by Charles
Lamb, the English writer (1775–1834), in his essay, “A Dissertation upon Roast
Pig.” Lamb claims that all meat was eaten raw until the art of roasting was
accidentally discovered, in China, by a young man named Bo-bo, the dimwitted son of a
swineherd named Ho-ti. One day, while Ho-ti was off gathering mast for his pigs, his
son—“a great lubberly boy” who liked to play with fire—accidentally burned
down his family’s cottage, in the process incinerating a litter of piglets. While
he was surveying the ruins and deciding what to tell his father, “an odor assailed
his nostrils, unlike any scent which he had before experienced.” When Bo-bo
reached down to feel one of the burnt pigs for any sign of life, he singed his fingers
and then instinctively touched them to his tongue.
    “Some of the crumbs of the scorched
skin had come away with his fingers, and for the first time in his life (in the
world’s life indeed, for before him no man had known it) he
tasted—crackling!”
    Bo-bo’s father returned to find his
cottage in ruins, his piglets dead, and his son gorging himself on their corpses. Ho-ti
was sickened by the scene of carnage, until his son exclaimed to him “how nice the
burnt pigs tasted,” and, bewitched by the extraordinary aroma, he, too, sampled a
piece of crackling and found it irresistibly delicious. Father and son decided to keep
their discovery secret from theirneighbors, whose disapproval they
feared; to burn one of god’s creatures was, after all, to imply it was less than
perfect raw. But in