Читать книгу The Complete Book of Pressure Cooking - L.D. Michaels - Страница 6

The simplest – and most misleading – description of cooking is the application of heat to food. A cooking encyclopedia could easily identify more than 20 sorts of cooking, and if you thought about it yourself, you’d find you knew and used most of them. Different levels of heat, different combinations of air and water and steam, the presence of fat, both solid and liquid, even the type of cooking vessel and the source of heat – all contribute to the taste of the various sorts of food we eat. A potato can be fried, baked, boiled, steamed, roasted, sautéed, mashed, combined with milk or cheese, sprinkled with herbs and spices … it can even be first boiled, then mashed and seasoned before frying or baking … and in each case the taste will be quite different, while still obviously being a potato.

What we admire in food is its taste, its texture and its appearance. Increasingly, too, we are concerned about its effect on our health. Most of us know by instinct what cooking method to use in each case, but only a few of us can actually explain what is going on. Some of the fear that the pressure cooker arouses comes, I am sure, because instinct doesn’t seem to help and everything goes on inside beneath a firmly sealed lid. In fact, the rules of cooking don’t alter that much.

I was fortunate that, when I was finally free of home and college and was sharing a house in West London, one of my friends had completed a proper cordon bleu course – but in Jamaica. So added to the traditional grande cuisine menu were Caribbean specialities bought in Portobello Market, which we watched him cook with interest. As he operated over the stove, he would murmur to himself what he was doing to the food, how it was changing in colour and taste, how juices were flowing in and out and how each ingredient affected the next. That’s how I really began cooking.

The two variables in cooking are the make-up of the original food and the method of applying heat. We need to heat certain foods in order to be able to digest them in our systems. We need to cook certain foods simply to improve their taste – we eat more if we like what we eat. In some cases heating destroys them, at least partly. You have to make a choice.