Recipes are typically badly underspecified for someone inexperienced at cooking, and the sense this creates, that there’s some optimal thing to do that I’m expected to figure out but probably not going to be able to, is something I can find seriously demotivating (despite any explicit knowledge that whatever I end up doing will probably be satisfactory). I wouldn’t be surprised if (something like) this is a common problem for LWers.
This problem definitely exists and I’ve been bitten by it personally(1), but it used to be harder to get around than it is now. In previous generations it was assumed that basic cooking knowledge would be transmitted within the family—daughters learned by helping their mothers in the kitchen, and sons, well, they’d go through a brief bachelor period of poor nutrition, but people married early and getting hot meals again would be a good inducement towards “settling down.”
When this cultural context died, cookbooks were slow to catch up—they were still mostly written for people (women) who already knew their way around a kitchen. However, this has changed, and there are now excellent cookbooks available that will explain all the things other recipes assume you already know. Mark Bittman’s “How To Cook Everything” and Alice Waters’ “The Art of Simple Food” are two good ones.
The “America’s Test Kitchen” show on PBS is also good for seeing what the cooks are doing when they talk about julienning carrots or making an herb chiffonade or whatever.
(1) When I first started cooking for myself I didn’t understand the true purpose behind browning meat, and of course none of my cookbooks explained the Maillard reaction directly. I noticed that all recipes involving meat would specify that the meat be “browned on all sides” in separate batches over high heat, but I thought the purpose was simply to get it cooked more quickly. As a result I would sometimes skip this step, or even if I performed it I would crowd as much meat into the pan as I could—resulting in meat that wasn’t truly brown, but grayish because it had actually been steamed rather than seared. It also tasted dull, for which I blamed the cheap cuts of meat I was buying. Actually it turns out that some of the cheaper cuts of meat have the most flavor, if you cook them right. (Filet mignon is pricey because it’s a very tender cut of meat, but it has much less flavor than a cheap sirloin steak.)
This advice to brown all the meat’s surface area, and to even cut it into smaller pieces to increase the available surface area, to increase the effect of the Maillard reaction is setting off superstimulus warnings for me.
What are the nutritional effects of this reaction? A Google search has turned up mostly academic papers that discuss feeding large quantities of treated food to rats and chemical analysis of the result of applying heat to some mix of organic chemicals, which I am not sure how to draw conclusions from. This abstract has negative conclusions about the nutritional effects, but doesn’t really answer the question: How does the nutritional value of a piece of steak change when you brown it?
That article, and its external links, indicate the chemicals resulting from the Maillard reactions (AGEs) accumulated over time and contribute to the aging process. Young, apparently healthy people may have accumulated lots of AGEs but don’t realize it because the symptoms are delayed.
I would say that the fact that browning meat (and vegetables) can accelerate aging is among the things that people should systematically learn before they become adults.
I would say that the fact that browning meat (and vegetables) can accelerate aging is among the things that people should systematically learn before they become adults.
How much accelerated aging do you get per unit of tasting really really good? Do I stop browning meat before or after I consider it worthwhile to start a calorie restriction diet?
This advice to brown all the meat’s surface area, and to even cut it into smaller pieces to increase the available surface area, to increase the effect of the Maillard reaction is setting off superstimulus warnings for me.
Why? Roasting meat over a hot fire produces the same reaction. This is caveperson science.
The effect only occurs near the surface of the meat, as the interior moisture limits the temperature. So roasting a large piece of meat over a hot fire will cause the reaction in a much smaller proportion of the meat than cutting it into small pieces and deliberately browning all surface area. So roasting the large piece could make the surface tastier while leaving nutrition of the much larger interior intact, while cutting and browning can make the entire piece of meat tastier and less nutritious. The superstimulus is the non-ancestral concentration, and possible disassociation with indicated benefits, of the ancestral stimulus.
This is not high technology: all you need is a knife, a stick, a fire, and some meat. I’m pretty sure the technique is about as old as cooking. It just wasn’t until Maillard that people understood what was happening.
You seem to be trying to convince pre-agricultural hunter gatherers who did not even eat meat all that often and had to work hard for every calorie of food they consumed to put a substantial extra effort into cooking their meat that you yourself, with your modern access to inexpensive raw ingredients and pre-manufactured metal cookware, often skipped when told to do so by a recipe because you didn’t think it did anything more than cook the meat faster.
You seem to be trying to convince pre-agricultural hunter gatherers who did not even eat meat all that often and had to work hard for every calorie of food they consumed to put a substantial extra effort into cooking their meat
They didn’t have to work hard, and they ate meat more than most humans could eat. I just finished reading the part of Clark’s A Farewell to Alms where he covers how hunter-gatherers where far better off than basically any farmer. Going through my notes, I see:
The surprise here is that while there is wild variation across forager and shifting cultivation societies, many of them had food production systems which yielded much larger numbers of calories per hour of labor than English agriculture in 1800, at a time when labor productivity in English agriculture was probably the highest in Europe. In 1800 the total value of output per man-hour in English agriculture was 6.6 pence, which would buy 3,600 kilocalories of flour but only 1,800 kilocalories of fats and 1,300 kilocalories of meat. Assuming English farm output was then half grains, onequarter fats, and one-quarter meat, this implies an output of 2,600 calories per worker-hour on average.32 Since the average person ate 2,300 kilocalories per day (table 3.6), each farm worker fed eleven people, so labor productivity was very high in England. Table 3.13 shows in comparison the energy yields of foraging and shifting cultivation societies per worker-hour. The range in labor productivities is huge, but the minimum average labor productivity, that for the Ache in Paraguay, is 1,985 kilocalories per hour, not much below England in 1800. The median yield per labor hour, 6,042 kilocalories, is more than double English labor productivity....Primitive man ate well compared with one of the richest societies in the world in 1800. Indeed British farm laborers by 1863 had just reached the median consumption of these forager and subsistence societies.
In contrast [to the monotonous English diet] hunter-gatherer and subsistence cultivation diets were widely varied. The diet of the Yanomamo, for example, included monkeys, wild pigs, tapirs, armadillos, anteaters, alligators, jaguar, deer, rodents, a large variety of birds, many types of insects, caterpillars, various fish, larvae, freshwater crabs, snakes, toads, frogs, various palm fruits, palm hearts, hardwood fruits, brazil nuts, tubers, mushrooms, plantains, manioc, maize, bananas, and honey.
Well, look at the list: these people are eating (among other things) ”...rodents, a large variety of birds, many types of insects, caterpillars, various fish, larvae, freshwater crabs, snakes, toads, frogs...” In other words, small animals.
The bottom line is that the Maillard reaction is not a modern superstimulus. It’s not in the same class of things as a candy bar. It’s a reaction that occurs naturally when meat is seared, not something like a Snickers bar that can only be created through a tremendous amount of artificial processing using modern technology. This whole debate over whether cavepeople had the tools and insight to make toad shishkebobs is absurd. The basic question is settled: Humankind has unquestionably been exposed to the Maillard reaction ever since we started cooking, and has been deliberately exploiting it for a very, very long time.
The bottom line is that the Maillard reaction is not a modern superstimulus.
The bottom line is that the products of the Maillard reaction are unhealthy for humans and taste better to humans that healthy alternatives. Whether or not the Maillard reactions were less concentrated (note, this does not mean non-existent) in our evolutionary path has bearing on a possible explanation of this bottom line, which we can directly observe in modern times.
It’s not in the same class of things as a candy bar.
A candy bar does involve more processing and is a greater superstimulus in absolute terms, though the Maillard reactions are in a way more insidious. Any adult human eating a candy bar will be aware that they are consuming an unhealthy desert, but most adults consuming browned meat will be under the false impression that they are eating something healthy.
The bottom line is that the products of the Maillard reaction are unhealthy for humans
I’m kind of stunned at your ability to jump to certainties based on extremely flimsy evidence. And the way you’re clinging to a hypothesis that has no historical support. This is strongly anti-rational behavior.
It doesn’t seem like continuing this discussion would be productive.
I think you’re missing part of JGWeissman’s argument, which is somewhat understandable as he hasn’t explicitly spelled it out.
The fact that the Maillard reaction was, most likely, present in ancient cooking does not imply that the results of that reaction are harmless. It’s evidence in that direction, but it’s not conclusive. In particular, the fact that the compounds caused by the Maillard reaction build up over time and lead to a somewhat earlier death, rather than being a faster-acting kind of poison, make it hard for evolution to select against liking those compounds. (It’s similarly hard for evolution to select against other things that happen after organisms are mostly done raising their offspring, such as Alzheimer’s.) Thus, it’s not particularly improbable that both ‘the Maillard reaction has been used by humans for many thousands of years’ and ‘the products of the Maillard reaction reduce human lifespan’ are true, and if there are studies that say the latter, they aren’t in conflict with the former.
The fact that the Maillard reaction was, most likely, present in ancient cooking does not imply that the results of that reaction are harmless.
Yeah, that’s a somewhat different topic than the question of whether the Maillard reaction can be described as a “superstimulus” in the way Eliezar defined the term here—if you read the link, you’ll see that he’s talking specifically about “a point in tastespace that wasn’t in the training dataset—an impossibly distant outlier on the old ancestral graphs. Tastiness, formerly representing the evolutionarily identified correlates of healthiness, has been reverse-engineered and perfectly matched with an artificial substance.” This description applies well to a Snickers bar, but does not apply at all to the Maillard reaction, which was in fact very present “on the old ancestral graphs.”
The question of whether cooking food makes it less healthy is one that applies to all food, not just meats and veggies that have undergone the Maillard reaction. One of the mistakes JGWeissman made was to do a quick Google search looking only to confirm his preconceptions, and to stop there, instead of trying to figure out how the research he’d found fits into the broader picture of truth (rather than how it could be twisted to score a point in a silly argument). In fact, the overarching question is one that’s being rather hotly debated, as you can figure out quickly if you Google terms like “raw food diet.” The food science on this is complicated, not at all settled, and I am not an authority on the subject so I’m not going to try to summarize it here—but suffice it to say that if we start wading into this we won’t be just talking about the Maillard reaction anymore.
One of the mistakes JGWeissman made was to do a quick Google search looking only to confirm his preconceptions
My “preconceptions” were that this process I just read about which breaks down amino acids and carbohydrates (which makes them tastier) might be destroying the nutritional value of the amino acids and increase the amount of of simple sugars that cause blood sugar spikes. I was very uncertain about the size of the effect, expecting it to be somewhere in between this completely destroys the nutritional value of the affected meat, to this is a negligible affect that leaves most of the nutritional value in tact (and I should use this technique when cooking). I was surprised to learn (not from my own Google search, but from following links from Saturn’s comment), that the results of the reaction are actively harmful.
and to stop there
I posted a comment expressing my dissatisfaction with the amount of information I got from search, including the closest thing I found to an answer and further questions that I had.
instead of trying to figure out how the research he’d found fits into the broader picture of truth
Fitting things “into the broader picture of truth” sounds like a nice ideal, but I don’t see how to cash that out into a concrete action here.
(rather than how it could be twisted to score a point in a silly argument)
The question of nutritional effects is what I have been primarily interested in here. It seemed appropriate to me to clarify that the hidden query I was really asking with “Is this a superstimulus?” was about nutritional values and what I should do about it, not the ancestral environment.
In fact, the overarching question is one that’s being rather hotly debated, as you can figure out quickly if you Google terms like “raw food diet.”
It usually works better to separate out a single question, and control other factors when conducting experiments to answer it. Trying to figure out the effects of advanced glycation end products, phytonutrients, killing bacteria, and pure veganism all at once is likely to cause confusion.
(The existing downvote isn’t from me. I’m probably not going to respond to this, but if I do it will be no sooner than tomorrow—I don’t have the time or energy to properly parse it right now.)
It’s not that much extra effort, and if I ate more meat at the time I would have discovered the (substantial) effect much sooner. Also, if I’d been taught to cook by a human being instead of teaching myself from cookbooks, I would never have made the faulty assumption about that step being skippable. The insight about browning meat fully is easy to discover, and once discovered is normally transmitted to other cooks as part of their training.
Respectfully, you seem to me to be clinging rather hard to an unevidenced theory.
Try cutting up the meat with a bone knife that you make and sharpen yourself, instead of your metal store-bought knife, and skewering it on a stick you find that is strong enough to skewer the meat, but small enough not tear apart the small pieces of meat, instead of browning in a metal pan or skewering on a metal skewer, and then tell our hunter-gatherer ancestors that it’s not that much extra effort.
if I ate more meat at the time I would have discovered the (substantial) effect much sooner.
That is speculation. What we know is that you didn’t discover it from the amount of meat you did in fact eat.
The insight about browning meat fully is easy to discover
Hindsight bias.
Respectfully, you seem to me to be clinging rather hard to an unevidenced theory.
I don’t accept your theory that humans have been cutting meat into small pieces and browning all the surface area since they invented cooking. Your theory has no evidence stronger than tenuous speculation based on modern cooking that doesn’t seem to take into account the differences of the ancestral environment.
Try cutting up the meat with a bone knife that you make and sharpen yourself
How do you imagine that the hunter-gatherers are skinning and butchering the animal? With their fingernails?
I don’t accept your theory that humans have been cutting meat into small pieces and browning all the surface area since they invented cooking.
Okay. I don’t claim to know that for certain or anything. You’ve already accepted that the technique is at least thousands of years old, which is as far as I can feel really sure—although I’ll admit that it seems to me much more likely that the technique of cutting meat into small pieces was discovered substantially earlier, given its utter simplicity.
Edit: quoted parent as when I responded, the 2nd part was added after
Try cutting up the meat with a bone knife that you make and sharpen yourself
How do you imagine that the hunter-gatherers are skinning and butchering the animal? With their fingernails?
Of course they skinned and butchered the animal with knives. That doesn’t change the fact that producing and maintaining those knives is a lot of work for them, and they are more difficult to use than our modern knives, and this does have impact on the marginal costs of additional preparation of the meat.
Seriously, I found your reply to be sarcastic and unsubstantial.
Find a cookbook, which often contains more fleshed-out recipes, instead of searching online. You can of course evaluate a cookbook for this property before you buy one. I find watching Alton Brown (Good Eats) helpful, in that he covers things too simple to be a recipe (eggs), mentions specific problems you might have, explains such things, and of course you can see it being done, which helps. He also explains some of the science behind cooking, which is fun. I assume other cooking shows fix many of these same problems (Julia Child? I haven’t watched).
I often cook Alicorn’s recipes, and can ask her for help if something is underspecified. Finding a somewhat experienced cook to help (preferably in person) might be useful?
German recipes are even worse. They don’t specify things like pans, oil, how to combine ingredients, or sometimes even baking temperatures. They’re basically a list of ingredients and assume you know… well, more than I do. Plus I don’t speak German very well, so I had a nightmare making the one recipe I properly translated.
Yes, this is part of what I am tring to get at. What’s needed are not cookbooks but cooking textbooks. Though apparently these exist now—I recently got one—but since I’ve not yet had time to actually start learning to cook I can’t personally vouch for it.
Recipes are typically badly underspecified for someone inexperienced at cooking, and the sense this creates, that there’s some optimal thing to do that I’m expected to figure out but probably not going to be able to, is something I can find seriously demotivating (despite any explicit knowledge that whatever I end up doing will probably be satisfactory). I wouldn’t be surprised if (something like) this is a common problem for LWers.
This problem definitely exists and I’ve been bitten by it personally(1), but it used to be harder to get around than it is now. In previous generations it was assumed that basic cooking knowledge would be transmitted within the family—daughters learned by helping their mothers in the kitchen, and sons, well, they’d go through a brief bachelor period of poor nutrition, but people married early and getting hot meals again would be a good inducement towards “settling down.”
When this cultural context died, cookbooks were slow to catch up—they were still mostly written for people (women) who already knew their way around a kitchen. However, this has changed, and there are now excellent cookbooks available that will explain all the things other recipes assume you already know. Mark Bittman’s “How To Cook Everything” and Alice Waters’ “The Art of Simple Food” are two good ones.
The “America’s Test Kitchen” show on PBS is also good for seeing what the cooks are doing when they talk about julienning carrots or making an herb chiffonade or whatever.
(1) When I first started cooking for myself I didn’t understand the true purpose behind browning meat, and of course none of my cookbooks explained the Maillard reaction directly. I noticed that all recipes involving meat would specify that the meat be “browned on all sides” in separate batches over high heat, but I thought the purpose was simply to get it cooked more quickly. As a result I would sometimes skip this step, or even if I performed it I would crowd as much meat into the pan as I could—resulting in meat that wasn’t truly brown, but grayish because it had actually been steamed rather than seared. It also tasted dull, for which I blamed the cheap cuts of meat I was buying. Actually it turns out that some of the cheaper cuts of meat have the most flavor, if you cook them right. (Filet mignon is pricey because it’s a very tender cut of meat, but it has much less flavor than a cheap sirloin steak.)
This advice to brown all the meat’s surface area, and to even cut it into smaller pieces to increase the available surface area, to increase the effect of the Maillard reaction is setting off superstimulus warnings for me.
What are the nutritional effects of this reaction? A Google search has turned up mostly academic papers that discuss feeding large quantities of treated food to rats and chemical analysis of the result of applying heat to some mix of organic chemicals, which I am not sure how to draw conclusions from. This abstract has negative conclusions about the nutritional effects, but doesn’t really answer the question: How does the nutritional value of a piece of steak change when you brown it?
The nutritional effects do seem to be rather negative.
That article, and its external links, indicate the chemicals resulting from the Maillard reactions (AGEs) accumulated over time and contribute to the aging process. Young, apparently healthy people may have accumulated lots of AGEs but don’t realize it because the symptoms are delayed.
I would say that the fact that browning meat (and vegetables) can accelerate aging is among the things that people should systematically learn before they become adults.
How much accelerated aging do you get per unit of tasting really really good? Do I stop browning meat before or after I consider it worthwhile to start a calorie restriction diet?
Why? Roasting meat over a hot fire produces the same reaction. This is caveperson science.
The effect only occurs near the surface of the meat, as the interior moisture limits the temperature. So roasting a large piece of meat over a hot fire will cause the reaction in a much smaller proportion of the meat than cutting it into small pieces and deliberately browning all surface area. So roasting the large piece could make the surface tastier while leaving nutrition of the much larger interior intact, while cutting and browning can make the entire piece of meat tastier and less nutritious. The superstimulus is the non-ancestral concentration, and possible disassociation with indicated benefits, of the ancestral stimulus.
Cutting meat into small pieces is hardly a modern invention. Shish kebabs go way back.
How way back? Ancient (thousands of years ago) civilizations may have had variants of kebabs, but did we have them pre-agriculture?
This is not high technology: all you need is a knife, a stick, a fire, and some meat. I’m pretty sure the technique is about as old as cooking. It just wasn’t until Maillard that people understood what was happening.
You seem to be trying to convince pre-agricultural hunter gatherers who did not even eat meat all that often and had to work hard for every calorie of food they consumed to put a substantial extra effort into cooking their meat that you yourself, with your modern access to inexpensive raw ingredients and pre-manufactured metal cookware, often skipped when told to do so by a recipe because you didn’t think it did anything more than cook the meat faster.
They didn’t have to work hard, and they ate meat more than most humans could eat. I just finished reading the part of Clark’s A Farewell to Alms where he covers how hunter-gatherers where far better off than basically any farmer. Going through my notes, I see:
Since Clark seems to know so much about hunter-gatherers eating habits, does he say how they cooked their meat?
Just a guess… but probably not with enough precision that they could avoid getting the outer layer particularly hot if they hoped to cook at all.
I think we are all in agreement about that, the question is about how much surface area relative to volume the meat has.
Well, look at the list: these people are eating (among other things) ”...rodents, a large variety of birds, many types of insects, caterpillars, various fish, larvae, freshwater crabs, snakes, toads, frogs...” In other words, small animals.
The bottom line is that the Maillard reaction is not a modern superstimulus. It’s not in the same class of things as a candy bar. It’s a reaction that occurs naturally when meat is seared, not something like a Snickers bar that can only be created through a tremendous amount of artificial processing using modern technology. This whole debate over whether cavepeople had the tools and insight to make toad shishkebobs is absurd. The basic question is settled: Humankind has unquestionably been exposed to the Maillard reaction ever since we started cooking, and has been deliberately exploiting it for a very, very long time.
The bottom line is that the products of the Maillard reaction are unhealthy for humans and taste better to humans that healthy alternatives. Whether or not the Maillard reactions were less concentrated (note, this does not mean non-existent) in our evolutionary path has bearing on a possible explanation of this bottom line, which we can directly observe in modern times.
A candy bar does involve more processing and is a greater superstimulus in absolute terms, though the Maillard reactions are in a way more insidious. Any adult human eating a candy bar will be aware that they are consuming an unhealthy desert, but most adults consuming browned meat will be under the false impression that they are eating something healthy.
I’m kind of stunned at your ability to jump to certainties based on extremely flimsy evidence. And the way you’re clinging to a hypothesis that has no historical support. This is strongly anti-rational behavior.
It doesn’t seem like continuing this discussion would be productive.
I think you’re missing part of JGWeissman’s argument, which is somewhat understandable as he hasn’t explicitly spelled it out.
The fact that the Maillard reaction was, most likely, present in ancient cooking does not imply that the results of that reaction are harmless. It’s evidence in that direction, but it’s not conclusive. In particular, the fact that the compounds caused by the Maillard reaction build up over time and lead to a somewhat earlier death, rather than being a faster-acting kind of poison, make it hard for evolution to select against liking those compounds. (It’s similarly hard for evolution to select against other things that happen after organisms are mostly done raising their offspring, such as Alzheimer’s.) Thus, it’s not particularly improbable that both ‘the Maillard reaction has been used by humans for many thousands of years’ and ‘the products of the Maillard reaction reduce human lifespan’ are true, and if there are studies that say the latter, they aren’t in conflict with the former.
Yeah, that’s a somewhat different topic than the question of whether the Maillard reaction can be described as a “superstimulus” in the way Eliezar defined the term here—if you read the link, you’ll see that he’s talking specifically about “a point in tastespace that wasn’t in the training dataset—an impossibly distant outlier on the old ancestral graphs. Tastiness, formerly representing the evolutionarily identified correlates of healthiness, has been reverse-engineered and perfectly matched with an artificial substance.” This description applies well to a Snickers bar, but does not apply at all to the Maillard reaction, which was in fact very present “on the old ancestral graphs.”
The question of whether cooking food makes it less healthy is one that applies to all food, not just meats and veggies that have undergone the Maillard reaction. One of the mistakes JGWeissman made was to do a quick Google search looking only to confirm his preconceptions, and to stop there, instead of trying to figure out how the research he’d found fits into the broader picture of truth (rather than how it could be twisted to score a point in a silly argument). In fact, the overarching question is one that’s being rather hotly debated, as you can figure out quickly if you Google terms like “raw food diet.” The food science on this is complicated, not at all settled, and I am not an authority on the subject so I’m not going to try to summarize it here—but suffice it to say that if we start wading into this we won’t be just talking about the Maillard reaction anymore.
My “preconceptions” were that this process I just read about which breaks down amino acids and carbohydrates (which makes them tastier) might be destroying the nutritional value of the amino acids and increase the amount of of simple sugars that cause blood sugar spikes. I was very uncertain about the size of the effect, expecting it to be somewhere in between this completely destroys the nutritional value of the affected meat, to this is a negligible affect that leaves most of the nutritional value in tact (and I should use this technique when cooking). I was surprised to learn (not from my own Google search, but from following links from Saturn’s comment), that the results of the reaction are actively harmful.
I posted a comment expressing my dissatisfaction with the amount of information I got from search, including the closest thing I found to an answer and further questions that I had.
Fitting things “into the broader picture of truth” sounds like a nice ideal, but I don’t see how to cash that out into a concrete action here.
The question of nutritional effects is what I have been primarily interested in here. It seemed appropriate to me to clarify that the hidden query I was really asking with “Is this a superstimulus?” was about nutritional values and what I should do about it, not the ancestral environment.
It usually works better to separate out a single question, and control other factors when conducting experiments to answer it. Trying to figure out the effects of advanced glycation end products, phytonutrients, killing bacteria, and pure veganism all at once is likely to cause confusion.
(The existing downvote isn’t from me. I’m probably not going to respond to this, but if I do it will be no sooner than tomorrow—I don’t have the time or energy to properly parse it right now.)
It’s not that much extra effort, and if I ate more meat at the time I would have discovered the (substantial) effect much sooner. Also, if I’d been taught to cook by a human being instead of teaching myself from cookbooks, I would never have made the faulty assumption about that step being skippable. The insight about browning meat fully is easy to discover, and once discovered is normally transmitted to other cooks as part of their training.
Respectfully, you seem to me to be clinging rather hard to an unevidenced theory.
Try cutting up the meat with a bone knife that you make and sharpen yourself, instead of your metal store-bought knife, and skewering it on a stick you find that is strong enough to skewer the meat, but small enough not tear apart the small pieces of meat, instead of browning in a metal pan or skewering on a metal skewer, and then tell our hunter-gatherer ancestors that it’s not that much extra effort.
That is speculation. What we know is that you didn’t discover it from the amount of meat you did in fact eat.
Hindsight bias.
I don’t accept your theory that humans have been cutting meat into small pieces and browning all the surface area since they invented cooking. Your theory has no evidence stronger than tenuous speculation based on modern cooking that doesn’t seem to take into account the differences of the ancestral environment.
How do you imagine that the hunter-gatherers are skinning and butchering the animal? With their fingernails?
Okay. I don’t claim to know that for certain or anything. You’ve already accepted that the technique is at least thousands of years old, which is as far as I can feel really sure—although I’ll admit that it seems to me much more likely that the technique of cutting meat into small pieces was discovered substantially earlier, given its utter simplicity.
Edit: quoted parent as when I responded, the 2nd part was added after
Of course they skinned and butchered the animal with knives. That doesn’t change the fact that producing and maintaining those knives is a lot of work for them, and they are more difficult to use than our modern knives, and this does have impact on the marginal costs of additional preparation of the meat.
Seriously, I found your reply to be sarcastic and unsubstantial.
Sorry. You may have seen it before I edited to add the less-sarcastic second half.
Would they be using bone knives or flint? How good are flint knives?
How early did people have knives that were good enough to make cutting meat into small chunks reasonably easy?
I couldn’t find it, but I would guess when we moved from bronze to iron.
Find a cookbook, which often contains more fleshed-out recipes, instead of searching online. You can of course evaluate a cookbook for this property before you buy one. I find watching Alton Brown (Good Eats) helpful, in that he covers things too simple to be a recipe (eggs), mentions specific problems you might have, explains such things, and of course you can see it being done, which helps. He also explains some of the science behind cooking, which is fun. I assume other cooking shows fix many of these same problems (Julia Child? I haven’t watched). I often cook Alicorn’s recipes, and can ask her for help if something is underspecified. Finding a somewhat experienced cook to help (preferably in person) might be useful?
German recipes are even worse. They don’t specify things like pans, oil, how to combine ingredients, or sometimes even baking temperatures. They’re basically a list of ingredients and assume you know… well, more than I do. Plus I don’t speak German very well, so I had a nightmare making the one recipe I properly translated.
Yes, this is part of what I am tring to get at. What’s needed are not cookbooks but cooking textbooks. Though apparently these exist now—I recently got one—but since I’ve not yet had time to actually start learning to cook I can’t personally vouch for it.