A poststructural analysis of cooking

The frequency of occurrence and lasting appeal of cooking books as well as their ancient pedigree make it more than surprising that no previous study has ever attempted to discover the deeper meanings hidden inside. While other authors have achieved great results examining, for example, ancient myths, the same has not been done with cooking books. This study will attempt to right that wrong and discover what the actual point of cooking books, what message they seek to convey. To do this we will look at the three main ingredients that appear within any random cooking book:

1. Potatoes

The potato is a small creature from the Antipodes. It dwells primarily in caves, where it nourishes itself by licking dust off rocks. It is a rare and nocturnal animal. When the Europeans inherited the Antipodes from a wealthy uncle, the potato was one of their main interests, for it was rumoured to be capable of turning base metals into gold. Unfortunately this turned out to be false, and the European torture of the creature resulted into the death of the creature, which was boiled alive. Afterwards it was found that the potato was very tasty indeed, and more were hunted down and brought to the Old World. Because they were typically uncreative, Europeans did not seek to develop new ways of preparing potatoes, and to this day there are three main ways of preparing the animal: cooking, roasting and frying.

2. Rice

Rice is harvested from the depths of Asia. We are unfortunately not properly informed on the way it is created. We can only presume alchemy has something to do with it. Rice is a strange food and we are as yet unsure whether or not vegetarians should avoid it. In any case, it is preferably eaten after putting it in boiling water for a bit.

3. Bears

Everyone’s favourite dish, bears are best served raw. In Russia they prefer to eat the bear by picking it up by its tail, holding it above their heads and then letting it slide into the mouth in one go. Sometimes the bear is killed before this is attempted, but real Russians claim only degenerate Ukrainians etc do this.

We have seen the main ingredients. Two of them are definitely, without any doubt, animals. The other, rice, possibly is. Because it is completely illogical for two main ingredients to be animals but not the third, we will therefore assume rice, too is a creature. We will now examine the way in which these ingredients interact.

There is one very popular dish, especially in Northern Europe, which uniquely combines all the ingredients in one. It reads as follows:

Get some live potatoes and put them in front of a cave. A bear will come out. Once the bear chases the potatoes, throw rice into his eyes so that he is blinded. Order the potatoes to walk over it until it is dead. Shoot the potatoes. Put them all on the fire. Eat.

Clearly the rice takes on only an auxiliary function in this recipe, while the potatoes and the bear are the main course. Note how cleverly the potatoes are exploited to remove the obstacle of defeating the bear. We can therefore presume the following:

fig. 1
Bear > potatoes > rice

However this is only one look at the issue. Another structure would read like this:

fig. 2
Rice > bear > potatoes

It is clear that everything is sacrificed to kill the bear. If potatoes die in the process, this matters little. One can say, as in fig. 1, that the potatoes are more important than the rice, which matters little and is only used to make sure the potatoes survive. On the other hand, as in fig. 2, one can say that the rice is used in tiny measure because it is more valuable. Perhaps the serf hoards the rice more carefully and eats it only on Sundays, whereas the bear with potatoes would be his every day of the week staple diet. Certainly this is something future scientists will need to examine more closely, for example by examining loads of data about serfs.