Iam a food blog · Celebrating the awesomeness of food.

 With the turns we give to the culinary subject, the truth is that we have not yet managed to reach a clear definition of what cooking is and when it began to be practised. Because, apart from chronological evidence, if we were clear about what cooking is and what it is not, it would be much easier to trace the beginning of this practice, whatever its limits may be, than in this way.

In any case, I'm afraid it's another one of those questions with no single answer. It will depend a lot on the approach. Ferran Adrià recently proposed the following example in Logroño: "If I pick a strawberry from the bush, clean it, put it on a plate without applying any technique to it and offer it to you, is that cooking?" More or less the same reflection, but speaking of a freshly caught barnacle on the rocks, he made it to me during the visit to the BulliTaller that he told a few weeks ago. So the only thing we are clear about is that the limits are not clear.

According to some historians, cooking begins when the fire begins to be applied to food. It's a good starting point. But I have my doubts. And what about the food that was consumed before the discovery of fire? Let's say, for example, that the hunted animal was cut up in a specific way, portioned and, probably, subjected to some techniques (salted, aerated, maturing...), then cut into portions and distributed, albeit without having set fire to it. Isn't that cooking? Let us suppose that, in addition, they were consumed in a specific place within the habitat and distributed using utensils as plates, for example. Or that, even that prepared meat was destroyed together with other foods, vegetables, for instance, that each diner could combine to his liking. I'm still wondering, is that cooking? Since we are talking about foods that are made for consumption, I would say yes, although we are not talking about the use of fire.

And this brings us to much more recent doubts. Are these same rules applicable today? You can cook without fire. A salad, some anchovies in vinegar, sashimi... Now, where do we put the limit? Opening an oyster is cooking? Picking a strawberry, cutting it into slices and serving it is cooking? What if we don't cut it up and just put it on a plate? What if we put it on the scale but add a drop of orange juice? Or if we put it on the plate but remove the stalk and place it in the most aesthetic way possible?

The limit is difficult to mark. So here we enter the realm of speculation. Each one can suppose, more or less argued, that he is at one point or another. From my point of view, it has nothing to do so much with the number of techniques to which the product is subjected as with the intention. So cooking is more of an anthropological category than a technological one.

Let me explain: cooking, from my perspective, is to socialize the physiological function of eating, is to load it with content and intentions. Cooking is considering the product as something else, ritualizing it; It has to do with sharing or, even when cooking to eat alone, with the ritual of eating, preparing, presenting, and tasting in a space and at a certain rhythm. Cooking is eating from the human perspective. In some way, it is to denature the alimentary function, to humanize it. It is to make it ours and part of our cultural fabric.

In the end, cooking is creating culture from food. It is appropriating a product of nature and endowing it with meanings. Transform it to some degree, decontextualize it and recontextualize it. Cooking is the ritual of processing a portion of food. Sometimes to make it more easily assimilable. In others not. The accent, in other cases, is in the ritual, in the company meal, in the feed of the patron saint's feast, in the meal with your partner, in the dinner that you prepare for your children, in the meal with friends—on the sofa watching the game, at the feast in which peace is signed in a war, at the prince's wedding banquet, at the last meal of the condemned to death, at the feed of the tribal shaman, different from that of the others.

Since when can we talk about cooking? From the moment we apply an intention to the products. It can be a simple aesthetic intention (presentation), a transformative intention (technical) or, from a different point of view, a ritual intention (context). But in any of the cases, it goes far beyond simple food. And it has nothing to do with altering more or less the product. It is a process by which we incorporate a natural element into our cultural universe. So simple and so complex.