Cooking Techniques Handed Down from Antiquity

The climate of monsoon Asia raised a great variety of cooking techniques. Here we follow the wisdom of antiquity in the order in which a dish is made.

Harvest

First, the knowledge of taking and choosing ingredients. People built up, patiently and over generations, the knowledge for keeping farmland fertile: crop rotation, growing legumes after grain to return nitrogen to the soil; cutting the grass around the field and laying it down as green manure to supply minerals and suppress weeds. Even swidden agriculture carried its own distinctive knowledge and technique for managing and regenerating land.

Setting the annual calendar matters greatly for the harvest. Every ingredient has its proper season. The harvest festival, which strengthens the bonds of the community and gives thanks while praying for the next season’s yield, was also a shared social goal: a way of coordinating the schedule of work and marking an important turning point.

Then there is judging ripeness. Deciding at which point to eat a banana as it turns from green to yellow is itself an important skill. Food keeps changing after it is picked. Some food cultures prefer ingredients green; others prefer to let them ripen fully after harvest and then eat them a little way into the ageing.

Preparation

Leaching out bitterness and toxins is perhaps the most primitive cooking technique of all. Human beings have selected the edible from among a great many plants. Even today there are foods like cassava with strong toxicity, and others like the solanine in potatoes that harm the body if handled wrongly.

Soaking in water is the technique of steeping tubers, acorns and the like to draw out toxins and astringency; starch was refined at the same time. Withering is the technique of placing mountain vegetables such as bracken in the shade to make them easier to eat — a matter of the plant’s own enzymes, and distinct from fermentation, which is the work of microorganisms. Leaching with ash, boiling or steeping in the clear liquid from wood ash, removes harshness and astringency effectively.

Shaping under pressure is another common step. One of the simplest forms is kneading. The tissue and cells of the ingredient are worked and loosened, and shaped as required. Kneading makes the constituents extract more readily and contributes to fermentation; it also moves moisture, making the material easier to dry and so improving how well it keeps. In mountain regions this technique developed particularly far in the making of preserved foods.

Then there is pounding, the basic operation of grain cultures. Mortar and pestle were used not only for hulling but as a vessel for crushing vegetables and herbs. And there is grinding: mortar and pestle eventually developed into the more efficient stone mill, and milling technology spread.

As culture becomes more elaborate, shaping by cutting appears. Turning rice into noodles, for example, is widespread despite the labour it takes. One reason is that noodle cookery originates in the wheat-based millet farming culture.

Another reason is a cultural attachment to the long, thin form. Namasu, which appears among ritual offerings, was in antiquity a dish of finely cut fermented fish or fowl. The long thin shape was a mark of advanced culture and technique, and an elaborate dish like namasu may well have been a kind of status symbol, expressing the wealth of a place and the level of its cooking.

Preservation

We cannot pass over the techniques for making food last. In regions with a winter, how to keep food was a critical problem.

Drying is the simplest method. Drying in the shade tends to preserve the colour and flavour of the material; drying in the sun brings a sterilising effect and a distinctive flavour of its own. Smoking exposes food to an indoor hearth or to smoke: the components of the smoke act as a preservative, while the heat and dryness of the smoke drive off moisture.

And lactic fermentation, one of the most important preservation techniques of all. It is found widely; narezushi, the ancestor of sushi, is the representative case. Rice and fish were packed into a tub, weighted, and fermented in an anaerobic environment, securing a precious source of protein through the winter. In the mountain regions of Southeast Asia there are sour dishes made by packing meat, or tea leaves, into bamboo tubes and fermenting them. One imagines some cultural thread connecting the fermented meat dishes of Southeast Asia with the sourness of vinegar in Chinese cooking and in Japanese sushi.

Heating

Now to the finish. What marks monsoon Asia is a skill in handling moisture during heating.

Stone baking and stone steaming are found in Polynesia and elsewhere. Food is wrapped in banana leaves, placed on heated stones set in a pit, and covered with earth; moisture from the food and the leaves turns to steam and cooks it through. Related techniques include beggar’s chicken, wrapped in clay, and cooking in bamboo tubes. This is a culture found widely in the mountains of Southeast Asia.

Grilling over charcoal — cooking directly over fire without wrapping — is the most primitive and the most universal method of all. Steaming and boiling, heating with water prepared for the purpose, are the ordinary methods that carry through to the present day.

One last step

A word about wrapping. There is the culture of wrapping in bamboo grass or banana leaves, the culture of the dough wrapper in dumplings and steamed buns, the culture of rolling in nori.

Wrapping composes the appearance of a dish beautifully. The wrapping material has its own function too: leaves add aroma and have antibacterial properties, while a dough wrapper seals in umami and moisture. A chimaki wrapped in bamboo grass takes on the clean scent of the grass; a fish wrapped in banana leaf takes on the flavour of the leaf.

Wrapping does more than seal in aroma and savour. It is a cultural act carrying prayer and hospitality, and in this one extra step you can see the character of a place and the expression of its spirit.

This whole sequence is the crystallised wisdom of our predecessors: how to waste nothing of what nature provides, and to eat it well and for a long time. The manners of antiquity live on, unmistakably, in the work we do in our own kitchens.

As the anthropologist Naomichi Ishige puts it: food is a mirror that reflects culture.