Work with What You’ve Got

Work with What You’ve Got

Settings provide constraints that influence how things develop. We must work with what we have, the materials on hand, and the tools available. Not everything is available everywhere, and the use of setting in the arts teaches us that the place in which our art exists will shape the content of the art.

Cuisines are shaped by the constraints introduced by their settings. For many thousands of years, people ate only what they could grow locally. Plants were chosen as foodstuffs in part as a response to differing amounts of water or daylight. Certain foods grow better in certain soils. The decision about which animals to raise or domesticate was influenced not only by the animals in the territory but also by the ability to grow enough food for the people there to eat.

What we cooked with depended on the materials around us. Clay pots were not found all over the globe, and neither were copper pots. How we prepared foods too was dependent on our settings. What suited our homes best (knowing those homes were also a reaction to setting)—open pits? Ash ovens? And our cuisines, even our modern ones, can trace some of their particulars back to the amount and type of fuel locally available hundreds of years ago.

In the sixteenth century, should you have taken a trip around the wealthy homes in England, you would have invariably eaten roasted meat of some sort. Meat arranged and set close to a blazingly hot open fire, turned continuously for hours (often by young male servants), then brought to the table and carved with special knives, was standard fare for the upper classes. A carver would give you a chunk of meat, which you would then eat with the aid of your personal knife.

England had an abundant fuel source in easily harvestable wood and areas for grazing animals in large pasturelands. In Consider the Fork, Bee Wilson explains, "English cooks chose to roast great carcasses by the heat of great fires in part because…the English were abundantly well-endowed with firewood." English cuisine and cooking culture grew around fuel availability. The abundance of firewood led to the development and refinement of the roasting technique. "The roast beef of England reflected a densely wooded landscape, and the fact that there was plenty of grass for grazing animals. The English could afford to cook entire beasts beside the heat of a fierce fire, throwing on as many logs as it took, until the meat was done to perfection."

The open roasting of big English game had a knock-on effect in terms of table utensils and etiquette. For the English, because the cutting of meat came after the cooking, carving meat was part of the dining experience. "The knives at the carver’s disposal were many: large, heavy knives for carving big roast such as stag and oxen; tiny knives for game birds; broad spatula-like serving knives for lifting the meat onto the trencher; and thin, blunt-bladed credence knives for clearing all the crumbs from the tablecloth." Not all cultures developed the use of knives at the table. For some, knifework is mostly done in the kitchen. It was elements in the setting—namely, resource availability in terms of food and fuel—that gave rise to many elements of the dining experience.

The English needed knives at multiple stages, from preparation to consumption, and because various meats maintained their differences up to the moment they were served, with venison having a different texture than mutton, the final meal lent itself to the development of an even wider variety of knives. The English gave knives a place at the table, so that the final step in meat consumption was people doing their own carving. English meals are still prepared with the expectation that knives will be on the table as well as in the kitchen. And even though few people in England are roasting whole animals over an open fire, going over to someone’s house for Sunday roast is still a quintessentially English activity.

We don’t have to go very far to find numerous examples of the interplay between setting and cuisine. Every culture has started with what’s on hand, then developed technologies and dishes to adjust what they have to what they want: preserving fruits and vegetables for consumption in the months they don’t grow, salting meat to have it available on a more regular basis instead of only after a hunt.

The story of sherbet in the Ottoman Empire follows the classic pattern of adjusting to constraints based on the weather and seasonal food availability. "After water, the principal beverage was sherbet," writes Priscilla Mary Isin in her book Bountiful Empire. Sherbet, however, was not a single drink. Similar, maybe, to tea in North America today, sherbet was a type of drink that was adjusted based on the weather, where it was served, and who was drinking it.

Sherbet could be served either cold or hot, depending on the season. "Sherbet was chilled with ice in the summer, and in the winter hot spiced sherbets were sold in the streets," explains Isin. It could warm you up or cool you down. In the age before personal electric icemakers, you might think iced sherbet would have been only for the upper classes. But the transience of the medium actually led to its accessibility. "In hot weather sherbet was chilled using snow collected during the winter," says Isin. "Shops selling snow were ‘as numerous as butchers,’ and since it melted quickly in hot weather it was sold at a price affordable even by the poor." Because most everyone could afford some type of sherbet, it became part of many cultural traditions. It was given out at religious feasts and celebrations like weddings. It became part of the ritual of new motherhood. Sherbet was how travelers were traditionally welcomed home.

The only limits on sherbet flavors were what was available and what could be preserved somewhere in the empire. Flavorings included pomegranate, lemon, violet, tamarind, plum, myrtle, fig, lily, mint, honey, rose, bitter orange, winter cherry, apple, quince, and mulberry—and this is not an exhaustive list. If you were poor, you may have only drunk chilled water with a little honey. If you were the sultan or in his entourage, your sherbet might have "luxury ingredients such as coconut, rosewater, musk, and ambergris."

Part of the reason sherbet was served year-round is that the ingredients used to make it were preserved when they were fresh. Isin explains that "sherbet mixes in the form of syrups, pastes, or tablets were prepared by Ottoman housewives and confectioners when each fruit or flower was in season." That way, they were available whenever anyone had a craving for quince or mint.

Sherbet spread from the Ottoman Empire all over Europe. In each place, it was adapted to the setting. In Italy, flavors included pistachio, strawberry, and fennel and may have evolved from there into the modern sorbetto. By the time sherbet got to England in the mid-seventeenth century, sugar had replaced the honey, and baking soda was added to give it fizz, to reflect local tastes and easier-to-obtain ingredients.

The lesson here is that our setting impacts us far more than we realize. The conditions it presents and the constraints it contains define the range of choices we can make. Not everything is possible everywhere. As food is shared, it adapts to local constraints and often evolves into new delicacies.