According
to Greek myth, Prometheus had stolen fire from the gods and gave it to mortals.
For this the gods condemned him to be chained to a large boulder, where, every
night, an eagle would eat his liver. Forever.
Maybe
Prometheus’ punishment was just. Imagine eating constantly eating raw antelope.
Imagine constantly freezing, even in Sub-Saharan Africa. Imagine being
constantly being attacked by insects, lions or the dark.
But
controlling fire was not just a matter of stealing it. Fire is a complex
chemical reaction involving oxygen, fuel and an ignition source. Unless all
three elements are present, a fire will not start. It’s still a wonder that
humans managed it at all. While dates for man’s earliest control range from 1.7
million to 400,000 years, for most anthropologists, incontrovertible evidence
of controlled fire appears around 125,000 years ago.
Fire
has had a remarkable effect on our own evolution. According to the
anthropologist Richard Wrangham, the ability to cook food with fire was the defining moment in evolution: it
explains the shift from the more ape-like Homo
habilis to our modern ancestor, Homo
erectus. As cooking makes food more bioavailable, more energy could be
devoted to human brain and body development than on digestion. Although direct
evidence of cooking, such as ash deposits and carbonized animal bones, is often
lacking in archaeological records, Wrangham argues that smaller teeth and
larger brains suggest fundamental changes in eating habits from raw to cooked.
But the most interesting aspect of
Wrangham’s thesis is on human sociality. Before fire, everyone foraged for him
or herself. You eat what you can find. But as cooked food takes time and
effort, it soon becomes a valuable resource. Wrangham argues that it is this need
to protect food that formed the need for social bonding between sexes.
While some anthropologists dispute
Wrangham’s interpretation of the archaeological evidence, there is little
dispute about the importance of fire to humanity. What Wrangham does not
discuss in detail is how early man may have prepared food. What kinds of tools
did they use? How did they manage heat? How did they know when food was done?
Modern kitchens and recipes with their measurements and standards cannot answer
these questions.
For Niklas Ekstedt it is this
standardization in modern cooking that has erased the ancient craft knowledge
of our hominid ancestors. Reading 17th and 18th c.
Swedish cookbooks, Ekstedt noticed the inordinate amount of attention paid to
cooking fires. As a challenge to himself and the dining establishment, the
owner/chef of the eponymous restaurant Ekstedt in Stockholm has based an entire
menu only using wood-based fire. There are no gas stoves, no electric ovens, no
pacojets- only open fire, a hearth oven and a wood burning iron stove.
The tacit, embodied knowledge of
how to build a fire and how to cook over fire cannot be written down. It is
this knowledge Ekstedt wanted to recover in his restaurant. Ekstedt admits the
learning curve was steep. In an experience he likens to Thor Heyerdahl and the
Kon-Tiki, building the restaurant and the menu required the staff to set aside
past experiences: “We all started from scratch.” Everything, from how to build
the fire itself, to which woods were best for cooking, and which utensils and
cooking equipment functioned best, demanded a complete re-thinking from the
team’s culinary training. . Hardware warehouses replaced kitchen supply stores.
Soldering irons, heavy gloves and blacksmithing tools became commonplace.
Diners have also had to test their
palates. Ekstedt still uses traditional Scandinavian ingredients, but the fire
and custom utensils make for new dishes. Damp seaweed is used to package
mussels inside a wire basket. Lobster is smoked in a chimney. In a twist on
using traditional cast iron cooking, Ekstedt incorporates the iron itself into
the dishes. By throwing acid into his cast iron pots, iron leeches into sauces,
purees, and garnishes. The result is diners saying, ”I haven’t tasted this
before.”
The
most unpredictable factor of all is the fire itself. As Ekstedt acknowledges,
“No one is bigger than the fire.” Just as cooking changed social relations for
early man, the fire in Ekstedt’s kitchen has changed the hierarchy of his
kitchen. There is no “I” in fire. “Everything I know I learned from my team.”
Karl
Marx called Prometheus “The greatest saint and martyr of the philosopher’s
calendar.” Although fire’s gifts have been many, perhaps the greatest gift lies
in society. For Niklas Ekstedt, the revolution has just begun.
