EATING AND COOKING AMBIENCE

EATING AND COOKING'S AMBIENCE There are people who eat, even relish eating, raw meat. Steak Tartar is a dish of raw hamburger topped with raw egg. It is eaten by the customer under a table cloth in "fine" restaurants. In like fashion is squab dispatched. Squab is a small bird. Raw fish, sushi, of course, is all the culinary rage these days, skewered decoratively. Of course certain tribes of warriors eat the hearts of their fallen enemies for strength. Cannibalizing fellow seafarers after shipwreck or other life-threatening disaster is very well documented. These thoughts were brought to mind when I reflect upon Harriet Beecher Stowe's observation in her classic UNCLE TOM'S CABIN (1852) that cooking is "indigenous" to Africans. She noted this attribute when she compared the states of orderliness in two kitchens that both were run by enslaved women on plantations : Aunt Chloe and Dinah. Mrs . Stowe has written: "There is all the difference in the world in the servants of Southern establishments, according to the character and capacity of the mistresses who have brought them up . "South as well as North, there are women who have an extraordinary talent for command, and tact in educating. Such are enabled, with apparent ease, and without severity , to subject to their will, and bring into harmonious and systematic order, the various members of their small estate, to regulate their peculiarities, and so balance and compensate the deficiencies of one by the excess of another as to produce a harmonious and orderly system.... "Dinah was a character in her own way, and it would be injustice to her memory not to give the reader a little idea of her. She was a native and essential cook, as much as Aunt Chloe--cooking being an indigenous talent of the African race; but Chloe was a trained and methodical one, who moved in an orderly domestic harness, while Dinah was a self-taught genius, and like geniuses, in general, was positive, opinionated, and erratic to the last degree ." P.191-192 Firing up outdoor grills evokes earlier days, when fire was deemed spiritual and cooking with fire was civilizing .