Harish Palaniappan's

Food is science.. or rather... cooking it is.

When I used to be a self-learned cook a few years back (now i cant do anything more than ready-to-cooks), things were interesting every day. Everyday I used to wonder in all my intelligence as to how I landed here(with what I had cooked).

But... apart from those starting experiments, Cooking is like Management. And, just because you do it differently or your cooking tastes differently doesn't mean you did it wrong or bad. Its your style of it... or we call it here in chennai "kai pakkuvum".

Learning to cook, I used to wonder how humans have evolved from just heating/burning their raw food from the forest, to today, where we have so many ways of doing it.. and we have different masters of the art. Enter food technology.

Here, I can only talk about the technology I had the time to learn. From my understanding, in south-india there are two main ingredients of every food namely 'pulipu, uppu'..(bitter, and salt)

And later I always admired how intelligent i was, when I realized,
'the amount of puli determines .. pulipu..
'the amount of uppu determines ... how much of the food's raw taste should be hidden..'
.. and things like that..

Translated (to the best of my food-english):
"amount of salt determines.. how much of the food's raw taste you want to hide'
"amount of bitter determines... how much of that bitter feeling you want your food to evoke.. for the tongue to relish it"

Imagine.. salt is from oceans.. how interestingly humans have mixed it
in the old ape-man days to taste their food more better. I see no connection between oceans and food atleast in those early stages..

Probably some apes thought their animal-catch was dirty and washed it in a salty river..and may be that's how mixing salt in food evolved.. Yes, I have heard that in some countries, salt is not mixed to food, especially non-vegetarian cooking. Its their way.

At this time I remember how my physics master at school told a story about how the apes learnt to eat with their hand.

"The apes initially ate food like other animals eat even today... directly dipping your mouth into the stuff. :o)
But sometime it seems, there was drought in forest, and the apes didn't get any animal to kill.. they were very
hungry.. very very hungry...
After weeks, they killed an animal and put it under fire.. while it was under fire, being cooked, all the apes were waiting in hunger to relish it.
Even when it was not enough time under the fire for being fully cooked... they couldn't wait any longer.. and in a hurry one ape, trying to tear some cooked meat plunged his hand into the food. It was so hot, and by his reflexes he pulled his hand back and put his fingers in his mouth to wet the burn on the fingers. while he did this, he tasted food on his finger.. he did it again. and this started to evolve as eating food with hands.. "

:o)

Now.. make your own stories for eating with knives and forks... cooking with vessels and all that..

If you got something interesting post it here.

I just got hungry. bye bye.