Free Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham Page A

operation of this fluid, in the same manner, almost entirely resist its action. Many hours elapse before the slightest appearance of digestion is observable, and this only upon the surface, where the external laminae become a little softened, mucilaginous, and slightly farinaceous. Every physician who has had much practice in the diseases of children knows that partially boiled potatoes, when not sufficiently masticated (which is always the case with children), are frequently a source of colics and bowel complaints, and that large pieces of this vegetable pass the bowels untouched by digestion.” It was the same with meat. When Beaumont introduced boiled beef and raw beef at noon, the boiled beef was gone by 2 P.M. But the piece of raw, salted, lean beef of the same size was only slightly macerated on the surface, while its general texture remained firm and intact.

    Sadly, St. Martin came to resent being a focus of scientific interest. By the time of his death in 1880 at the ripe old age of eighty-five, he felt thoroughly mistreated. He had long refused to have anything to do with Beaumont, and his family shared his sense of abuse. Dr. William Osler, often described as the father of modern medicine, hoped to study St. Martin’s body and even buy his stomach, but the family refused. They kept his body privately for four days to ensure that it rotted, then they buried him in an unusually deep grave, eight feet down, to thwart any medical interest in his organs.

     
     
     
    Beaumont’s discovery that soft and finely divided foods are more easily digested conforms to our preference for such items. In 2006 the London department store Selfridges received five advance orders for a new product: the world’s most expensive sandwich. For £85 ($148) people had the chance to eat a 595-gram (21-ounce) mixture of fermented sourdough bread, Wagyu beef, fresh lobe foie gras, black truffle mayonnaise, brie de Meaux, English plum tomatoes, and confit. The beef explains the high price. Wagyu cattle are one of the most expensive breeds in the world because their meat is exceptionally tender, and no effort is spared to make it so. The animals are raised on a diet that includes beer and grain, and their muscles are regularly massaged with sake, the Japanese rice wine. The fat in the meat is claimed to melt at room temperature. The exceptional value of Wagyu beef illustrates a notable human pattern: people like their meat tender. “Of all the attributes of eating quality,” wrote meat scientist R. A. Lawrie, “texture and tenderness are presently rated most important by the average consumer, and appear to be sought at the expense of flavour and colour.” A key aim of meat science is to discover how to produce the most tender meat. Rearing, slaughtering, preservation, and preparation methods all play their part.

    So does cooking. According to cooking historian Michael Symons, the cook’s main goal has always been to soften food. “The central theme is that cooks assist the bodily machine,” he wrote. He cited Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management , which in 1861 sought to advise naive housewives about the fundamentals of the kitchen. The first of six reasons for cooking was “to render mastication easy.” “Hurrying over our meals, as we do, we should fare badly if all the grinding and subdividing of human food had to be accomplished by human teeth.” A second reason for cooking stressed the point Beaumont had discovered: “to facilitate and hasten digestion.”

    The way Kalahari San hunter-gatherers prepare their food suggests a similar concern for making their meals as soft as possible. They cook their meat until “it is so tender that the sinews will fall apart.” Then “it is usually crushed in a mortar.” It is the same with plant foods. After melons or seeds have been cooked by burying them in hot embers or ashes, their contents are “ground in a mortar and eaten as a gruel.”

    Tropical and subtropical