community of Homo sapiens as they gather around an open
hearth enjoying a cooked animal. The description of the expe-
rience sounds as if it could have been uttered by a waiter intro-
ducing a dish to guests at any white-tablecloth establishment
today: “The texture of the product was completely different,
turning crispier, tenderer and more pleasant; the smell it gave
off was intensified because of the hot fat and the toasting ...
the color changed; and the pleasant sensation of heat was felt
when it was touched, bitten and enjoyed in the mouth.”
Don’t get carried away and imagine the existence of a Stone
Age Noma or French Laundry. To disabuse you of that fantasy,
the book brings up serving and plating, “two basic processes
in a fine dining restaurant.” For the Paleolithic foodie, Adrià’s
conclusion is clear, if cheeky: “There was no line separating
serving/plating from ingestion.”
Origins delves into wonkier material such as the Maillard
reaction, which is what happens when heat is applied and
“certain components in the reducing sugars interact with
amino acids and proteins to form a ‘sugar–amino’ com-
pound that ... sets off a series of reac-
tions.” Or, what you and I call browning
and roasting.
Elsewhere, the four stages of
caramel ization are enumerated, and
the reader is warned “if more heat is
applied, full pyrolysis will be achieved,
turning the product into a bitter black
compound.” Quality of life may have
changed since Paleolithic times, but the
chemical properties of cooking haven’t.
Some of the writing can be heavy-
going indeed. Origins uses 138 pages to
lay out a strict methodology Adrià dubs “Sapiens”—Latin for
“one who knows.” It frames this book and the seven others to
follow, which will include explorations of the food of ancient
Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome and a history of the
first great French golden age of gastronomy in the 17th and
18th centuries.
The effect of the colorful schematics and sometimes recon-
dite text is like that of studying the Kabbalah—gnostic, gno-
mic, arcane, but ultimately rewarding. Its intricate philosophy
holds up cooking and dining as definitions of what it means
to be human. And it’s a generous worldview, too. Adrià and
company treat the often caricatured Homo neanderthalensis as
an equal to Homo sapiens when it comes to culinary matters.
Stone Age cooking is the furthest thing from what Adrià
became famous for—what he calls “techno-emotional” cuisine
and what the rest of the world knows as molecular gastronomy.
But who wouldn’t pay attention to a man who transformed the
art of cooking and dethroned the French as overlords of fine
dining? Adrià made the world speak of haute cuisine as an idea
that could be expressed in any language, and he’s now trying
to break another barrier. By bringing us back to the primal dis-
covery of the pleasures of flavors, textures, and temperatures,
he is out to conquer time. <BW>59CRITIC Bloomberg Pursuits March 1, 2021
Ferran Adrià, the chef of the revolutionary restaurant El Bulli,
makes a concession in the introduction to The Origins of
Cooking: Paleolithic and Neolithic Cooking. “This book is some-
what heavy-going, to be honest,” he writes.
It’s fair warning, even for those who know what it’s like to
be ensnared in one of his extended postprandial discussions
of the phantasmagorical meal they’ve just had. Before he shut
down the culinary shrine on the Catalan coast in 2011, I had the
good fortune of being waylaid on five or six occasions, happily
held hostage to lectures that went on for an hour or more after
other guests and much of the staff had left.
Origins is Adrià in a different, more serious mode. It’s the
anchor volume of a planned eight-volume systematic history
of Western cuisine that’s sensitive not only to his part in that
history but also to the role of anyone who’s ever worked in a
restaurant. The 592-page tome, a collaboration between Adrià
and a team of specialists, lays out an evolutionary timeline
about why those in the industry—whether chef or scullery min-
ion, busser or maitre d’—do what they do. And he begins from
the time before the first fire was lit.
This isn’t a caveman cookbook. It’s Adrià making inter-
disciplinary connections between chefs today and those from
2.5 million to 3,500 B.C., pointing out ties with the past to set
the present in context. As such, Origins can be sober and dry
at times. But, like any good host, Adrià is a master of condu-
cive atmospherics.
A section called “Paleolithic Without Fire” presents a menu
of culinary delights from the era, including antelope bone mar-
row, fermented persimmon, fresh horse brain, cheek and
tongue of mammoth, mashed crocodile meat, and, to prove
that some things never change in fine dining, oysters.
The book is studded throughout with stylish lists, maps,
photographs, and chronological tables. There’s a deer skele-
ton diagram that shows the butchering expertise—using only
stone tools—of Homo erectus. The accompanying text makes
clear archaic humans were filleting the carcass systematically
and extracting marrow from the bones.
Origins is adamant, however, that, in terms of cuisine, the
raw and the cooked is a false dichotomy. Adrià says the El Bulli
team has come up with a third term: the “unraw”—food that’s
been physically transformed without heat. The fermented per-
simmon in the tongue-in-cheek menu, for instance, wouldn’t
have been barrel-aged but simply overripe or rotten fruit that
hominids learned to pick out because of its alcohol content.
Fire did mark a paradigm shift in how humans ate, though.
Mastering it required expertise and patience and perhaps
offers a clue to the development of gastronomic aesthetics. A
series of photos illustrates the laborious process it would have
taken to boil water when pottery didn’t exist: heating stones to
near red-hot and then dropping them into hollowed-out tree
trunks filled with water. Why go through all the trouble? Homo
sapiens and Neanderthals apparently boiled bones to render
all the fat out of a carcass. “A little rendered fat: the prehistoric
flavor enhancer,” the book declares. ’Twas ever thus.
In the section “Paleolithic With Fire,” the book imagines a
The Origins of
Cooking: Paleolithic
and Neolithic Cooking
($150; Phaidon)