A love of complex smells and flavours gave our ancestors an edge and stopped hangovers
A little while back I thought about how wild animals have to eat everything raw, and how bad it must taste. I guess they must have evolved to like it.
Cooked food releases an enormous amounts of aromas and fabulous tastes.
I remember when I was in my early 20's becoming obsessed with finding out what was the amazing taste that made pizzas so incredible. I eventually traced it to oregano, and I thought that was it, but later I discovered it was basil too. Awesome!
As a child we only ever had ground white pepper, and I hated it. But at work the canteen division made these incredible teacakes that they put sausages, burghers, and eggs in. In the sachets was coarsely ground black pepper, and I adored it. These teacakes had a bit of sugar in and were amazing!
Anyway, I was in for an even bigger treat: I bought a pepper mill and some black peppercorns, and I had freshly ground black pepper for the first time. Oh boy, after that it was pepper with everything, and life took on a new level!
When I was about 25, I thought that the tea didn't taste as good as it did when I was a boy. "What happened to the good old fashioned tea", I thought? Well, it hadn't really changed at all because we drank PG Tips, and the tea tasters ensured that all the batches were blended to taste exactly the same. What I really had was glorious those childhood memories that we all have, and in my case it was drinking fabulous tea with my dad. He used to tell me I was really good at making tea, and that I had perfected the art, but it took me a while to catch on that he was just getting me to make his tea all the time. Of course, I didn't care, it was all part of the fun, and I did make exceedingly good tea.
So I went on a mission to find some really great tasting tea, and I came across some excellent ones, like Nilgiri, Ceylon, and darjeeling, which became my favorite, but then one day I braced it and bought some expensive first flush darjeeling, and wow, I was knocked out - incredible, and I've never looked back ever since.
When I first met my present girlfriend, I would go around her house every Sunday and treat her to some of my first flush darjeeling, and she said she very much liked it. It was a special moment for us where we shared this amazing tea together - our secret. But after a few months she told me it was okay but she preferred her ordinary Tesco tea. What! I couldn't believe it. Anyway, I've never been able to get anyone else to like it either, and my brother tells me he absolutely hates it.
One day when I was 25, I went up to Harrods in London and bought some of the most expensive first flush darjeeling you can buy. It was £120 per pound, and I asked the tea specialist what was the smallest amount I could purchase, and he said £8 worth? So I bought it and got about 20 cups of tea out of it, so it turned out to be much cheaper than a cup of tea from a cafe. It was glorious, but I never bought it again as it was too expensive, and the cheaper 1st flush varieties were almost just a good.
Nowadays I'm getting into green tea. Try top grade Japanese sencha.
Cooked food tasted more delicious than uncooked food – and that’s why we opted to continue cooking it, he says: not just because, as academics have argued, cooked roots and meat were easier and safer to digest, and rewarded us with more calories.
Some scientists think the controlled use of fire, which was probably adopted a million years ago, was central to human evolution and helped us to evolve bigger brains.
The Guardian
2 comments:
Just reading this makes my mouth water.
I don't get the tea thing though. I'll put that down to culture.
“use of fire,.... helped us”
Anthropomorphism....
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