Liverpool opinions
What's cooking? - The debt that civilisation owes women
By John
Williams
Hitler demanded that women be restricted to 'Kinder, Kurche, Kuchen', as if the kitchen was an insignificant place and that parenting was solely the domain of women.
If anything convinced me that the flaky corporal should never have been enlisted, much less promoted to such dizzy heights, then it was his crass denial that the kitchen is not only the heart of civilisation, but was, also, its soul and inspiration.
My children, both of whom are, thankfully, healthy and bright, owe their aptitude at school to their mother's loving nurturing and her willingness to allow them to create an awful mess in the kitchen, as they baked what they called 'famous mixtures'.
These consisted of glutinous masses of flour, eggs and almost anything that would fit into a mixing bowl. After much stirring they were baked, put out to cool and then left uneaten, even by the birds. What, you may ask has any of this got to do with civilisation?
Everything we do in the kitchen involves chemistry, maths, geometry, physics, metallurgy and art. You don't think so? Try making a good mayonnaise without bowls, a whisk and the knowledge that oil and egg emulsify if mixed in the right quantities at the correct speed. When the first mothers of mankind huddled around the campfires they were nurturing not only their immediate offspring but all of their descendants.
Imagine those prehistoric dinner parties, without utensils, crockery, or even place mats! All they had were their fingers and a raging hunger, for food and the knowledge to create place mats to die for. This hunger must have inspired the creation of first clay and then, later, metal pots.
Ah! You say, metal would have been developed by men, to forge weapons at the Macho Metal Corporation. Why? I mean, at that stage animals were just as easily slain by wooden spears as by any iron tipped variety, unless of course some trendy nomadic bistro had put Rhino noisettes on the menu.
Why, then, did man develop metal? Metal utensils, unlike clay and flint, could be shunted from place to place without breaking, thus ensuring that their owners did not have to surrender their no claims bonus, while iron knives stripped flesh from bone more efficiently than flint and enabled man to enjoy fillets and other choice cuts. Culinary refinement was in full flow!
The development of pottery must rank as one of the most profound artistic and scientific achievements of mankind. And this presents modern man with a dilemma, because if they claim that it is a woman's place in the kitchen and a man's place in the wild or the battlefield, then they cannot make any claim on the discoveries of the basic tenets of civilisation.
Let's face it, whoever discovered the way to make pots fire proof, and measured and weighed the ingredients to cook in them, was employing many of the techniques that were fundamental in the creation of the hanging gardens of Babylon, the Pyramids and all the other great confections in history.
When Alfred burnt the cakes he not only went hungry but he blew the whistle on mans' main contribution to civilisation, the destructive use of iron and fire. Alfred's kitchen ended up a smouldering ruin, just like Adolf's Germany.