Pure vegetarian evil

FOOD:It's an awful word 'mouthfeel', but big companies spend fortunes on it

NEXT TIME PEOPLE scoff at you for being a foodie, you can confidently retort that without ancient foodies, Homo sapiens may not have made it. According to Dr Richard Wrangham, the old saying “you are what you eat” is a lot more true in the literal sense, because what makes our species unique is that our food is so often cooked.

When you think about it, cooking is not only a basic function, but universal and unique to humans, and society as a whole. No other animal cooks, and although some food fascists try to survive on raw food alone, most of us cook. Ancient man had big guts and small brains. Some scientists believe that 1.8 million years ago, when Homo erectus made his debut on earth, their big ape-like guts were replaced with smaller guts, hinting at a shift from a plant-based diet to a meat-based one. Although meat has more calories than plants, Dr Wrangham argues that it was more than just a shift to a protein-based diet that helped us make the great leap forward in our quest to become Homo sapiens. He argues that man, if confined to raw food, would have starved.

A lot of the food ancient man ate was indigestible and provided little in the way of calorific value. Today, our brains consume 20 to 25 per cent of the energy we stuff into ourselves, but until we started cooking, it would have been hard to have ingested enough calories to supply our brains as well as our bodies. Dr Wrangham therefore believes that cooking and humanity go hand in hand.

As anyone who owns a frying pan knows, cooking alters food considerably. But scrape it back scientifically and you’ll find that it goes beyond making things taste good: cooking breaks down starches, denatures protein molecules, so that their amino-acid chains unfold and our digestive juices can break them down more effectively. Cooking also softens food, which makes it easier to digest. Cooking food means we consume food that’s easier to digest, so we burn up fewer calories. Our bigger brains get all the energy they crave and bingo, here we are.

The downside is that with all this soft food around us, we’ve gotten too fat! Highly processed food, full of empty calories, is what our brains really love. In fact, scientifically speaking, we prefer soft food. When we taste a juicy hamburger on a soft sesame bun, nerves from the taste buds send signals to the brain relating to how soft it is. Our brain makes a decision based on these signals and informs us whether our mouthful of meat is pleasant or not.

Don’t think for a moment that the big food companies don’t know this. They spend small fortunes ensuring mouthfeel is optimised, so we buy more of their soft and gooey cookies or smooth and creamy ice-cream.

With this is mind, here are two home-made soft and delicious recipes, adapted from Simon Hopkinson.

Potted smoked salmon (serves four)

75g unsalted butter

250g smoked salmon, finely diced

150ml sour cream

4 spring onions, finely chopped

Bunch of chives finely chopped

Bunch of tarragon, finely chopped

2 tsp horseradish sauce

zest of 1 lemon

black pepper

Another 100g unsalted butter

Heat the butter in a frying pan and sauté the smoked salmon till it is starting to go opaque. Add all the remaining ingredients (except for the extra unsalted butter) and mix gently so that the salmon doesn’t go completely mushy, but everything is mixed well. Check the seasoning and then spoon the mixture into four ramekins. Allow it to cool. Wrap well in cling film, and press down the mixture and top with cling film to pack it in. Refrigerate for a couple of hours.

Melt the unsalted butter, remove all the cling film from the ramekins and spoon melted butter on top of the salmon. You can set a tarragon leaf or other herb into each one if you want to be all fancy. Cover with cling film (but don’t let the cling film touch the butter) and chill for a few hours or overnight. Serve with melba toast and mixed leaves.

Gruyère puffs

Makes enough canapés, or a starter, for four to six people. Pure vegetarian evil.

75g flour

75g butter

400ml milk

200g Gruyère, grated

Salt and pepper

1 tbsp Dijon

2 egg yolks

1 bowl of seasoned flour, a couple of beaten eggs and about 100g of breadcrumbs, to coat

Sunflower oil

Make a béchamel by melting the butter in a saucepan, adding the flour and cooking out for a couple of minutes. Add the milk gradually, whisking away, and then add the cheese. Mix the hell out of it and take off the heat. Let it cool slightly, and then beat in the mustard and egg yolks. Season well and then pour into a baking tray that you have lined with loads of cling film. Cool fully then chill for a few hours.

Remove the slab of béchamel onto a board and cut into small rectangles. Then set up a conveyor belt and, working quickly, flour, egg bath and crumb them and place on a tray. You can freeze them at this stage, or chill for an hour.

Then to cook them, heat up the oil in a small saucepan or deep-fat fryer and cook for a minute or two until they are golden brown. They sometimes burst or ooze a bit, but who cares. Serve with some sort of relish or chilli jam.

dkemp@irishtimes.com; See also www.itsa.ie