125 Quotes About Food-anthropology

We humans are constantly on the move around the world, and when we migrate we take our eating habits with us. We do so to use our agricultural and culinary knowledge, and because eating familiar food maintains our link with home and eases our homesickness. We may have to substitute ingredients and adapt our cooking methods, but even after several generations, our heritage is still evident in the food we serve at home.

Historically, one of the seminal features of a pie is its ability to be eaten out of the hand.

Once upon a time, everything baked in an oven that was not bread was 'pie'.

The problem with cooking meat this way [open fire] is that even if it does not burn, the valuable and tasty juices drip away and the meat dries and shrinks. Other cooks at other times got around this problem by wrapping the meat up to protect it - in leaves, for example. Or clay. Clay that, to another cook in perhaps, another time and place, felt just like dough. This last inspired step created the primitive meat pie - something medieval cooks called a 'bake-mete'.

The thick crust of the early pie acted like a baking dish. For hundreds of years, it was the only form of baking container - meaning everything was pie. The crust also, as it turned out, performed two other useful functions: it acted as a carrying and storage container (before lunch boxes) and, by virtue of excluding air, as a method of preservation (before canning and refrigeration).

After a few millennia of inspiration, the primitive clay oven gave rise to the gleaming modern steel version. A high-tech oven alone does not, however, turn a bake-mete into a pie as we know it. One more important development was necessary. Pastry had to be invented.

Dough becomes pastry when fat is added.

Wheat is the only grain with a significant amount of gluten, so we have our first clue to the origins of pastry. Superb pastry could only have developed where wheat was grown: rye, barley and oats do not make good pastry, nor do rice or maize or potato starch.

As far as a time-frame for these developments goes, we can probably reasonably deduce that the pie began its life some time before the fourteenth century in those areas of Europe where wheat was grown and pigs and cattle reared.