LA CUISINE HUMAINE

How to cook like a human being

by

Norman Spinrad

Introduction

Most beings, sapient or otherwise, must eat. What they eat, in terms of raw materials, is determined by the requirements of their evolved biochemistry. Most species intelligent enough to have developed even the rudiments of a fire and tool using culture prepare, preserve, and combine these ingredients in a self-conscious manner.

It may be as rude and simple as charring animal parts over an open fire, allowing vegetables to ferment under controlled conditions, smoking, pickling, or drying victuals in order to preserve them for future use, or rotting them with bacteria or fungus, but the preparation of food, implying as it does at least the mastery of fire and the use of tools, has long been regarded as a universal criterion of sapience.

The point at which such food preparation attains the status of cuisine, like the point at which a species may be said to have evolved a true civilization, is more elusive of definition, and indeed the argument has often been made that they are one and the same.

While some strictly carnivorous or entirely vegetarian species have evolved both cuisine and civilization, it is generally fair to say that cuisine begins with the combination of ingredients. Meat and vegetable matter(if only for flavoring)or different species of vegetation are combined in the same dish, melded via heat, decomposition, or chemical processes to produce a whole which tastes different than the sum of its parts, and voila, cuisine, civilized dining, and with it civilization, are invented.

The point at which rudimentary cuisine attains the status of a true artform is a matter of critical judgment on the part of the diner, or, as the inhabitants of Earth themselves have it, "one man's meat is another man's poison."

Nevertheless, all civilized beings, given a sufficient degree of biochemical congruence, can recognize artful cuisine when they taste it, and within the fraternity of galactic gourmets, the cuisine of the planet Earth has certainly attained this status.

Indeed a certain mania for La Cuisine Humaine has been sweeping the galaxy ever since the recent discovery of the humans' otherwise not-terribly-noteworthy civilization, resulting in many pleasurable new dining experiences, but also, alas, the prevalence of all too many misconceived and loathsome concoctions that the humans themselves would rightly consider vile desecrations.

This cookbook, prepared after several months on Earth sampling its fare and discussing culinary matters with both master chefs and a sampling of ordinary humans is a modest attempt to remedy this unfortunate situation.

Since the humans have published thousands upon thousands of vast volumes of recipe books down through the centuries, the present work can hardly pretend to be definitive. What is instead presented here is an introductory work designed to initiate the neophyte into the philosophy, principles, and working methods of La Cuisine Humaine, rather than a definitive compilation of recipes.

It may not produce chefs to match the human masters, but hopefully it will at least allow its readers to more or less cook like human beings.

The Planet Earth

Earth is the third planet of an unpresupposing yellow star.

About three-quarters of its surface is ocean, the rest being seven large continents and numerous islands. The planet is still geologically active, and many ecospheres have therefore evolved and continue to evolve, resulting in a rich profusion of plants and animals, most of which are eaten, in one form or another, by one or more of the many human tribal subcultures, though, alas, the planetary mismanagement by the still rather primitive humans is presently resulting in a certain narrowing of this wonderful biological diversity.

Life on Earth is entirely based on the carbon-biochemistry quite prevalent galaxy-wide, so its cuisine is nourishing and palatable to the majority of sapient species. The humans themselves are omnivores, and have therefore evolved cuisines incorporating both flesh and vegetation.

I say "cuisines" rather than "cuisine" to point to the fact that human civilization has reached that delectable stage when the local cuisines which have evolved in isolation over the centuries have begun to merge, thanks to easy transportation and mass communication, but have not yet ossified into a single standardized planetary style.

In the major human cities, one may still find a profusion of restaurants dedicated to most of the folkloric "ethnic" styles, side by side with emporiums devoted to the free-form merging of same which has created the glories of the emerging cuisine humaine.

Which is to say that we are fortunate indeed to have discovered this planet at the very peak of its culinary Golden Age, hence the mania for La Cuisine Humaine presently titillating the jaded taste organs of more "advanced" civilizations. To judge by general galactic cuisinary evolution, such a Golden Age is usually fleeting, soon to be overwhelmed by contact with the so-called advanced cuisine of interstellar society.

Enjoy it while it lasts!

Basic Principles

Human biochemistry requires the consumption of ten basic amino acids, which may be obtained entirely from the flesh of terrestrial animals, or from various combinations of plant material. Human metabolism runs on the oxidation of sugars, which may be eaten directly as such, or which the human digestive mechanism may produce from carbohydrates.

As a result, while it is possible for humans to subsist on a sufficiently varied vegetarian diet, it is all but impossible for them to survive on meat alone, especially since their metabolism also requires traces of many elements not available to strict carnivores, and is unable to synthesize many necessary complex molecules.

In some human cultures, meat is cheap and easy to obtain, and forms the basis of the local cuisine, with vegetables and fruits serving as garnishes or "side-dishes." But, at least throughout most of human history, meat has been a comparatively scarce and expensive item in the majority of local cultures, serving in smaller quantities as a supplement to more vegetarian diets.

Indeed, historically speaking, meat has not been readily available to great masses of poorer humans at all, leading to the evolution of "peasant cuisines" cunningly based on the combination of vegetables which, eaten together, supply both metabolic fuel and all ten essential amino acids.

On Earth, there are, generally speaking, two main groups of such plants; carbohydrate-rich plants called "grains" or "tubers," and legumatious plants which produce "beans" or "haricots" or "frijoles," seeds rich in the essential amino acids not obtainable from grain plants.

Thus basic human cuisine characteristically combines a "starch" ingredient (corn, wheat, potatoes, rice, etc.) combined with either some meat or a bean (of which there are a vast profusion) or frequently both, flavored with other vegetable products called "herbs" (leaves and stems) or "spices" (usually seeds or dried fruits or seed pods). In addition, humans tend to add sodium chloride to most foods which do not contain significant amounts of sugars, the only mineral they consume directly, and which, indeed, is taken to excess.

That is the alimentary basis of La Cuisine Humaine, the underlying biological necessities, but the art of it resides in the profusion of styles and methods humans have evolved to transform these basic nutritional combinations into esthetic delights.

Whole grains may be boiled into simple filler dishes or complex pilafs containing nuts, fruits, vegetables, spices, herbs, or even bits of meat, seafood and vegetables. Or they are ground into flour, combined with various liquids and fats, and baked into breads, or extruded into noodles and pastas (sometimes stuffed) which are then gently boiled, steamed, or fried.

Beans, depending upon type, are sauted, steamed or fried if they are tender, or boiled and baked in liquids for long periods if they are not. The soybean, which supplies all ten essential amino acids, is eaten as raw or cooked sprouts, or processed into "tofu" or "beancurd," a kind of vegetable cheese which may then be sauted, stir-fried, or steamed.

Vegetables, depending upon type, are eaten raw in so-called "salads," or baked, fried, steamed, boiled, sauted, roasted, or baked.

Meats are sometimes taken raw (particularly fish and certain coquillages), but are more characteristically cooked, using all of the possibilities utilized to process vegetables, as well as grilled and barbecued.

Sometimes meats, starches, beans, and vegetables are prepared separately, to be served sequentially or ensemble on a single plate, but they are frequently complexly combined in the same dish, boiled into a stew or beatpot, baked into a pilaf or paella, stir-fried into a delightful melange which sometimes includes a pasta as well, and fowls and fish are frequently stuffed with a complex mixture of vegetable ingredients to be roasted and served whole.

The genius of it all lies not only in the combination of the major ingredients but in the lavish and artful addition of herbs and spices which are used as a painter uses a palette and which magically transform meat, grains, beans, pasta and vegetables into masterpieces of the cuisinary art in a profusion of characteristic and interpenetrating "national styles."

And then of course there are the "sauces," liquid infusions of almost any combination of ingredients. Sometimes human food is cooked in these sauces (which is to say that the sauce is in part formed out of the food essences), sometimes the sauces are prepared separately and applied to grills, roasts, or even breads and pilafs, to bathe them in pure flavor, turning simple pasta into a whole meal, a piece of meat into a complex gustatory experience, or vegetables into a subtle delight.

You name it, and some human somewhere has turned it into haute cuisine, even certain organisms which in their raw form would be quite poisonous!

Equipment

Humans have developed a bewildering complexity of implements to cook their food, but it fortunately all boils down to a few basics obtainable in one form or another on any even marginally civilized planet.

First, of course, you need a heat source. This can be as simple as an open fire or as complex as a computerized stove. To reproduce the full range of La Cuisine Humaine, you will need something that provides a hot cavity in which to bake or roast, with an internal source of intense heat for grilling, and hot surfaces on which to set "pots" "pans" and "woks."

Pots are containers (usually metal) in which to heat volumes of liquid for boiling or steaming. Pans are flatter metal plates with low sides in which to fry or saute drier dishes in oils or fats. Woks are hemispherical compromises, ideal for stir-frying at extremely high temperature.

The only other equipment you need is something to cut the ingredients into the desired shapes and sizes and implements to stir and handle the hot contents of your pots and pans. The humans have evolved hundreds of specialized tools for these purposes, but these are a matter of ease, artfulness, and a certain mania for gadgets. You can easily enough make do with any sharp knife, a flat piece of wood for a spatula, and two long straight dowels held together in one hand as a pincer to form a set of "chopsticks."

A "stove" or even just a fire, containers to serve as pots, pans, and woks, a knife, three pieces of wood, and there you have it, all the equipment necessary to produce La Cuisine Humaine!

The Palette

But not all you need to create a working human kitchen!

A painter needs more than a canvas and a brush, he needs a palette of colors, and no human kitchen can be worthy of the name without a palette of herbs and spices.

Since there are hundreds of human spices and herbs presently flooding the galactic market, the task of assembling a coherent palette may seem impossibly daunting. How to pick and choose from this over-rich chaos?

First assemble a basic assortment of universal primaries:

At least one hot pepper, and preferably several, whole and dried, ground into powder (chilies, cayenne, poivre), or infused into a paste like sambal or hot garlic sauce.

Garlic too is a universal primary, either as a minced fresh clove, or dried and ground. And so is a comparatively bland ground red pepper called paprika, often used as a neutral browning agent.

Tumeric, a seed ground into a bright yellow powder, is used in diverse "national" cuisines, as is a ground bark called "cinnamon," a root called "ginger," mustard seed, and the cumin seed, whole or powdered.

Many, many herbs are used, fresh or powdered, but your range will be adequate if you have oregano, basil, thyme, rosemary, sage and dill.

That is a sufficient universal palette for the beginner. As you proceed through the specific styles in this book, you will naturally begin to add to it, as you begin to understand how certain combinations may be given a twist by other additions, or substituted for to provide new nuances. Every painter too must start out with an assortment of primary colors, and allow his palette to mature along with his own personal style.

Similarly, one should keep on hand an assortment of oils and fats. A light oil, such as peanut, soy or corn. One or two flavored oils like walnut or ideally dark sesame, and of course a bottle of virgin olive oil, the all-but-universal solvent that falls neatly between. Some butter, and bacon fat or lard completes the ensemble.

The only other things you need to begin cooking like a human are bottles of vinegar, liquid pepper such as tabasco, and soy sauce, a few cans of tomato paste and cornstarch for thickener. And, of course, plenty of salt and some sugar!

With these basics kept always at hand, you are ready to bring home any fresh produce and actually cook it like a human!

THE BASIC BEANPOT

Boil any dried beans in liquid long enough and you'll get something you can eat. Boil rice or wheat or corn into an edible mash, serve the beans over it, and you will have a diet a human can survive on indefinitely.

That's as basic as La Cuisine Humaine gets. The result will taste much better, of course, if the beans are boiled in a liquid containing a well-conceived mixture of herbs and spices. Garlic and pepper form a reliable base, and of course, salt. Tomato paste fits many combinations in modest quantities, and some wine or beer mixed in the boiling water never hurts.

Oil or fat is needed to give roundness to the flavor. Use something with a strong flavor, like sesame oil, olive oil, or bacon fat. Fry something in it before you put the beans and water in the pot, if only some onions and fresh sweet peppers. If you have some meat to fry in it too, all the better; fresh meat, smoked meat, sausage meat, anything will do as long as it isn't seafood, fowl or fish. Ideally, there should be a bone or two, preferably with some marrow, which you leave in with the meat to boil when you add the water, beans, and flavorings.

Boil it all together until it reaches a nice thick richness, serve it over a grain, and there you have it, the basic human beanpot which has sustained survival all over Earth down through the centuries.

But ah, the variations!

With kidney beans and smoked pork fried in bacon fat, add basil, oregano, bay leaf, a little tomato paste, a double-dose of red pepper, and perhaps cumin to the standard boiling liquid to make New Orleans Red Beans.

Substitute ground or diced beef, add more tomato paste and yet more pepper, fry with olive oil, and boil up into Texas chili.

Use black beans, pork, pork sausages, onions and sweet peppers fried in a mixture of sesame oil and bacon fat, add to the basic boiling liquid cumin and a bit of tumeric, and you have a Cuban variant. Serve much the same thing with rice, shredded toasted coconut, and orange slices, and it's Brazilian.

Lamb fried in butter or light oil, lentils, much more tumeric, plenty of ground red pepper, some coriander, leaves or seeds, cumin, and perhaps mustard seeds and thyme and certainly some sliced carrots will give you a nice Indian currypot.

Do what humans do. After you've sampled a few of the traditional styles, experiment with combinations and invent your own! Start with the basic recipe and add herbs, spices, and flavorings one by one, tasting the result before you commit to the next, bearing in mind that lamb goes well with thyme, lentils and tumeric, beef with tomato and green herbs, and pork not very well with olive oil.

Masses of humans have not only survived on such fare for millennia, but turned it into culinary art. It's easy! With a little courage to experiment you can do it too!

ROASTS, GRILLS, AND STEWS

In certain areas, notably parts of Europe and North America, meats and seafoods have long been sufficiently abundant to serve as primary food sources for the population at large, and of course rich humans everywhere have usually been able to afford to make such viands the mainstays of their diet.

In these happy circumstances, grains, tubers, beans and vegetables need only serve as flavorful garnishes, side-dishes, and complements to meats and seafood, which is to say that the cuisinary arts have been freed thereby to evolve under less constraint from the brute biochemical necessities.

The most basic human methods for cooking meats and fishes are to simply place them in a hot oven and roast them, grill them in same, or cook them over an open fire. They are then served with baked, fried, or grilled potatoes, boiled rice, or some other starch source, and perhaps a simple vegetable, or a melange thereof.

If this sounds rather dull, alas, it too often is. But it doesn't have to be. Humans have developed methods for turning even such seemingly simple fare into works of true cuisine.

The basic strategy is to marinate the meat or fish beforehand, that is, soak it in a liquid which imparts flavor and also gives the surface of the cooked result a delectable crisp and fragrant crust.

To crisp the roast or grill, an oil is required, as well as a so-called "browning agent," most typically soy sauce, sugar, ground paprika, or ground tumeric. The second liquid ingredient forms the bulk of the marinade, and could be simply water. Of course, a wine, vinegar, or alcoholic essence (such as sake, cognac, or whiskey) mixed with the water makes things much more interesting.

Soak your meat or fish in a marinade of oil, water, flavoring liquid, and browning agent, drain it, roast or grill it, laving with more marinade occasionally until it is done to taste, and there you have it.

What you have will be determined by the oil, flavoring liquid, and browning agent employed. And of course by the spices and herbs you add to them.

Use sesame oil, soy sauce, and sake or sherry wine, grate in some ginger root, add garlic and a bit of sugar, marinate fish or meat in it, grill, and voila, teriyaki. Add chopped scallions, coriander leaf, and pepper (paste, liquid, or powder), and give it a Korean accent. More sugar and lots of paprika instead of soy sauce, chopped onions, pepper, garlic, tomato paste, perhaps some basil and oregano, whiskey or wine instead of sake, and it's a Texas barbecue.

A light oil, plain water, tumeric and paprika, ground cumin, powdered red pepper, and a choice or two from a palette of coriander, cardomon, and mustard seeds, and you have a tandoori.

Olive oil, wine or vinegar, paprika, garlic, black pepper, and some robust green herbs (thyme and rosemary for lamb or fish , sage or coriander leaf for pork, basil or oregano for beef), and you have the marinade for a range of kebabs, in which chunks of meat are marinated, then skewered with vegetables to be grilled ensemble.

Once you understand the basic principle, it's easy. By altering the ingredients of the marinade artfully, human chefs are able to create infinite variations on what at first seems like an unpromising theme. If you can think like a human, you can do it too.

A stew is simply the peasant's old friend the beanpot, supplied with a sufficient amount of meat to supply all ten essential amino acids for the meal, so that beans are happily rendered merely optional.

Brown your meat in an oil or fat, add a bone or two, cover with a spiced, herbed, and flavored liquid, and boil till the meat is tender and the "pot-likker" thick and savory. At an intermediary stage, add your choice of vegetables, which take less cooking time, and enjoy an authentic human stew.

Humans have created many variations by simply varying the meat, vegetables, oil, and flavoring liquid, and so can you.

Beef browned in bacon fat or butter, stewed with carrots, onions, potatoes, and frequently mushrooms, is a widespread variant. The liquid usually contains garlic, pepper, and a few appropriately chosen herbs. If it's mostly water or beer, you have Irish stew. Omit the carrots, add more onions, boil in red wine, and make Beef Bourguignon. Dilute the wine with more water, add it bit of nutmeg, reduce the pot-likker way down, thicken it with sour cream stirred in at the end, and you've made Beef Stroganoff.

Fry an interesting mixture of pungent seed-spices like cumin, coriander, cardomon, and mustard, usually no more than two to a stew, in peanut oil or clarified butter with a generous amount of red pepper, add tumeric and salt, brown your meat in it, cover with water, simmer until the meat is tender and the sauce somewhat thickened, and you have a curry to serve over plain rice or a complex rice pilaf.

Many curries are as simple as that, but you can cook some ground lentils (dahl)with the meat in the curry sauce or add spinach, okra, peas, eggplant, potatoes, cauliflower, and so forth for a more complex effect and a better nutritional balance. Or you can cook up a vegetable curry that works quite well without any meat at all!

Do not surrender to the impulse to stock up on the so-called "curry powder" that is being foistered off on the innocent gourmet as a foolproof way of reproducing "perfect human curry." "Curry" is not a single dish but a whole family of stews created by a large palette of possible spices, and only the tumeric, salt, and pepper are common to all of them. A proper human cook will choose his own combination of curry spices according to what is being attempted, and so should you.

Another major variation is the Borscht. Use smoked porks and sausages browned in bacon fat, sesame oil, or a mixture of both. Use beer and water as the boiling liquid. Add sugar and vinegar to achieve the desired sweet-sour balance, pepper, salt, garlic, a pungent seed-spice like caraway, mustard, cumin, or coriander. For vegetables, some onions, perhaps an apple or two, and a large quantity of chopped or shredded cabbage.

"Red Cooking" is even easier. Simply fill a big pot with a mixture of water, sake, a bit of sesame oil, chopped garlic and ginger-root, and soy sauce. Bring it to a boil, and simply drop in a big piece of meat, a round of beef, a ham, even a whole fowl. Boil it gently for as long as it takes to make the meat tender, dropping in some vegetables towards the end, or serve them as a separate side-dish.

Experiment with your own variations and train your taste-organs to be your guide to creating stews fit for humans. All you have to remember is to boil the meat longer than the vegetables, and try to conceive harmonious combinations. Start with one of the basic human boiling liquids, adding flavors one at a time, tasting the result, and stopping before they start clashing with each other.

Don't be afraid to trust your own judgment. Think like a human!

FRIED EVERYTHING

What if a human doesn't want to wait around for hours while a beatpot or stew simmers? What if he wants something tasty on the table toute suite?

No problem!

Fry it!

Learn the basic Chinese method and you can fry up anything into true cuisine humaine.

Cut up meat or seafood and your choice of vegetables in bite-size pieces. Marinate the meat in a mixture of soy sauce, sake, a little cornstarch, and a bit of sugar for a while, then drain off the liquid and reserve.

Heat up a bit of light oil until it is hot as you can get it. The Chinese favor the hemispherical wok for this, since it presents a large surface area and nicely contains the hot oil spatters, but if you stand way back and use a long pair of chopsticks, any big enough pan will do.

Drop some chopped ginger and garlic into the smoking oil. Add the meat. Stir vigorously until it is nicely browned and tender. It won't take long. Remove the meat, heat up a little more oil, add more chopped garlic and ginger, then the vegetables, stir-fry until done. Put the meat back in, along with the marinade you have reserved, mix it all together. The cornstarch will thicken the marinade into a sauce that enrobes the finished product.

At this point, you can add dashes of additional liquid flavorings--oyster sauce, various fermented bean pastes, liquid pepper or hot garlic paste, for examples--and perhaps coriander leaves and beansprouts which require only a moment's cooking.

That's all there is to it, and it takes perhaps twenty minutes!

The Chinese alone have elaborated this basic stir-fry into thousands of subtle dishes, and the Thais, Cambodians, Indonesians, and Vietnamese have added some Indian spices and French herbs to create even more. By now you should be cooking enough like a human to immediately grasp the possibilities.

Any harmonious combination of meats and vegetables may be cooked in this manner. Several vegetables may be used in the same dish; just cut the ones that take longer to cook into smaller of human culinary artist is that of the "sushi-chef," who garnishes little roles of spiced rice with elegant slivers of raw fish and seafood sliced in an artfully choreographed manner before the patron's eyes, and with a few pieces of dried seaweed and green sprig or two, turns each piece of "sushi" into a perfect little sculpture of visual and gustatory art.

And then there are the "salads."

That's what humans call assemblages of raw fruits and vegetables lightly covered in a kind of cold sauce called a "salad dressing." They can be simple little side dishes, or whole elaborate meals.

The starting point for most salads is some succulent leafy green. To this is usually added some sort of sliced onion, and, as often as not, pieces of tomato. The simplest salad dressing is a mixture of oil, vinegar, garlic and salt. Coat the basic salad with the dressing, and you have a modest little side dish, the so-called "dinner salad."

Of course you can add fresh herbs and spices to the dressing. Crumbled bits of pungent cheese. Capers. Mustard. Anchovies. A raw egg. Whatever strikes your fancy. And of course, the oil could be olive, sesame, walnut, corn, safflower, and the vinegar an acetic essence of herbs, wine, or spices. A salad dressing is, after all, a cold sauce, with all the room for improvisation that implies.

As for the salad itself, the basic dinner salad need only be the background, indeed in the end it can be pushed back into oblivion by the other ingredients. Humans will add almost anything to their salads, and not all of it need be raw by any means, though usually it will all be cold.

Still there are some general esthetic principles.

Start with the basic dinner salad as your foundation. Almost any soft enough raw vegetable can be added--carrots, turnips, celery, sweet pepper, cabbage, mushrooms, even flowerets of broccoli or cauliflower--thinner slices for the harder ones.

Next, feel free to add cooked, pickled, and preserved vegetables--olives, haricots, chick peas, pickled cucumber, radish, mushroom, corn grains, artichoke hearts in oil, preserved ginger, pickled peppers.

If you're going in the direction of smoked meats or charcuterie, or playing it vegetarian, throw in chunks of an interesting cheese. With a fish salad, better not, for most cheeses will clash with the fishy flavor

The tasty exception to this is the so-called "Greek Salad," in which olives, capers, pickled peppers, cucumbers, anchovies and tuna preserved in oil are added to the basic dinner salad, the whole nevertheless being perfected by the addition of chunks of a musky cheese called feta which actually goes well in this configuration, when dressed with olive oil, wine vinegar, garlic, pepper, salt, lemon, and a bit of some herb.

If you've added cheese, try some smoked meats, sliced salami, smoked duck, chicken, or turkey, or even a combination. If this is to be a fish salad, you might use freshly cooked shrimp, raw fish pickled in vinegar or citrus juice, sardines, tuna, salmon, herring, sprats, and so forth, smoked, pickled, or preserved in oil.

Finally, you must create an appropriate dressing to coat your salad. This is a matter of subjective esthetic judgment, but a few guidelines may be suggested.

You can never go wrong with a simple dressing of olive oil, wine vinegar, pepper, salt, and garlic, with a bit of fresh herb like dill or basil. You don't want cheese in the dressing for a fish salad and you certainly don't want anchovies with smoked meat or charcuterie except in the so-called "antipasto." Sweet pickles will probably be quite disgusting with smoked fish. Heavy oils like sesame drown out green herbs and most seed spices add little to dressings if they are not ground. Some humans add sugar, but the enlightened among them rightly deem this a barbarism.

Other than that, just about anything goes. Fruits can be added to salads with a little judicious judgment, and of course salads can be composed of fruits alone, though of course you would hardly dress a fruit salad with anything containing garlic, capers, or anchovies, or combine it with most fish.

To widen the parameters of the salad even further, the so-called tostada is a fried tortilla smeared with a hot savory bean paste to which may be added a cooked sausage called chorizo, which is then smothered with a cold salad of greens, tomatoes, cheese, onions, scallions, and peppers, which in turn is dressed with a mixture of oil, vinegar, and a spicy tomato sauce, and sprinkled with grated parmesan cheese. Fold the tortilla up, fry it into a pocket, stuff it with the other ingredients, and you have a taco. Roll it all in a soft steamed tortilla, and it's a burrito.

PASS THE PASTA!

Grind any grain into flour, add water, perhaps eggs or a little butter or oil, kneed the mash into a dough, squeeze it through an extrusion mold or roll and cut it by hand, and you have noodles, spaghetti, lo mein, chow mei fon, linguini, in short, some form of pasta, as ubiquitous a form of preparing grain for eating on Earth as bread, and culinarily much more interesting.

Some pastas are flavored with spices or vegetables, but most of them are rather bland and tasteless. They are commonly simply boiled to the point of edibility, though some may be fried or steamed. Is this as deadly-dull as it seems?

Hardly!

Pastas may have been developed as a basic universal metabolic fuel for impoverished mass populations, but the culinary ingenuity of the humans has long since made an artistic virtue of economic necessity by transforming this industrial fodder into the raw material for haute cuisine.

True, once you have boiled your pasta to tenderness, what you have is a soft, pallid, bland pot of noodles or dumplings, a pure starch, good only for keeping the metabolic furnace stoked up.

But that's not the way humans look at it. Humans see a neutral blank canvas upon which to paint a culinary masterpiece.

You can serve a stew over a pasta--Irish Stew, Beef Stroganoff, a curry. Certain pastas can be stir-fried in the Chinese manner with vegetables, meats, and the standard marinade and its variations to make lo meins, chow mein fons, and other noodle dishes that combine fried noodles with crisp savories. Just treat the pasta as another vegetable!

Just as commonly, pastas are served with a variety of rich, thick sauces, or sauced ingredients that turn them into nutritionally and esthetically satisfying meals.

One can, for example, simply saute a melange of fresh vegetables in olive oil, with garlic, salt, pepper, and an herb or two, smother the cooked pasta with it, and sprinkle the result with grated cheese. Or fry sausage, pepper, and onions in the same manner, add basil, a little tomato paste, and a splash of red wine, and serve it on a bed of spagetti.

Fry some diced bacon in olive oil, garlic, and black pepper, throw in your cooked pasta when it is done and still hot, mixing in a beaten egg, some fresh butter, sour cream, and grated parmesan cheese to make a carbonara.

Or saute onions and garlic in olive oil, add capers, liquid pepper, sliced smoked salmon and vodka. Simmer until the alcohol has evaporated, the salmon has pinkened, and the smoky flavor thereof infused into the liquid. Pour over hot pasta, mix in a little butter and sour cream, then garnish with black caviar.

Humans in Italy, where pasta has long been a universal staple, have developed a basic pasta sauce that may be altered to successfully encompass ingredients as diverse as spicy sausage, seafood, and fish. Fry garlic, onions, pepper and garlic in olive oil. Add water, red wine, and enough tomato paste to make the result thick and flavorful, along with basil and salt. Simmer until the alcohol has long since evaporated and the sauce tastes round and mellow.

The basic version may be a bit boring, but it is infinitely adaptable. Fry balls of chopped meat, sausages, or even ribs of pork, along with the basics in your olive oil, add mushrooms perhaps while you are at it, and complement the basil with oregano, for a hearty meat sauces for your pasta. Grated parmesan cheese is derigueur, except with the pork.

For seafood or fish, make a putanesca sauce. Add capers, anchovies, and black olives when you put in the tomato paste. Remove the sauce from the pot, saute your fish or seafood quickly in olive oil, pour the sauce over it, and serve it all on a bed of most any pasta. No cheese with this!

You can spice up any version of the basic pasta sauce with fiery pepper, lace it with an abundance of mushrooms, add diced eggplant, clams, or even certain hams; the basic theme is powerful enough to stand up to a wide range of variations.

And, to quite close the circle, in the end, you can make good use of your universal Italian pasta sauce without even eating pasta!

Spoon some of the meaty version over fried eggplant slices, cover with slices of mozzarella cheese, sprinkle on parmesan, and grill yourself Eggplant Parmigiana. Steam shellfish in a diluted version of putanesca sauce, or simmer shellfish, squid, and fish in same to make a cioppino, which, by de-emphasizing the tomato paste, emphasizing the garlic, and adding saffron, becomes a passable French Bouillabaisse. You can even bake a "spaghetti squash" in the oven, scoop out the strands, and serve your pasta sauce over a pasta-like vegetable!

LA CUISINE HUMAINE

To pretend that this modest treatise has now exhausted the possibilities of La Cuisine Humaine would of course be ludicrous.

We have hardly touched, for example, on the possible variants of the burrito, tostada, and taco, which may be filled with virtually anything. Peanut butter (or other nut-pastes) may be simmered with sesame oil and hot pepper to make a "satay sauce" which goes well over kebabs and grills of meat and fowl, though not very well with most fish, and which may also be served over certain pastas with slivers of roasted pork and fresh coriander leaf. In America, a "hamburger" may be simply a fried patty of chopped beef slapped between two pieces of palled bread slathered with an odious sweetened tomato sauce called "ketchup," or it may be covered with melted cheese, bacon, mushrooms, green chilies, satay sauce, taco sauce and entire salads to reach the status of culinary art.

And the simple boiled rice or wheat that accompanies many stews, beatpots, and stir-frys may be turned into a complex and tasty pilaf. Fry some onions and garlic in oil or butter in the boiling pot as you begin(you can fry the rice with it too!), then add spices such as tumeric, cumin, cardomon, and so forth to the boiling water, cover, and steam in the pot till done. Nutmeats, dried fruit, diced vegetables, and even cubes of cooked meat, sausage, seafood or fowl tossed in near the end of the process can turn your pilaf into a complete meal, a biriani or jambalaya. Or try a "paella," in which tomato paste, saffron, pepper, olives, pimento, chicken, and sausage are added to the rice boil, which is then placed in an open pan somewhat underdone, and larded with shellfish to be bake-steamed open in the oven.

Then too, you may hollow out most any sturdy vegetable of a sufficient size--eggplant, zucchini, sweet pepper, tomatoes, potatoes, even cucumber--stuff it with a savory mixture of ground meat and spices, put it in a pan, pour over basic Italian pasta sauce, or something of your own invention, and bake it in the oven. Raw ground beef is even quite palatable when mixed with raw egg, pepper, raw onion, garlic, anchovies, and a bit of olive oil, to make "Steak Tartare."

La Cuisine Humaine contains so many possibitiles for variation on its basic themes that thousands of voluminous recipe books have been quite unable to exhaustively preserve it for posterity, let alone this modest little volume.

Nevertheless, once you have assembled your human kitchen equipment, laid out your basic palette of herbs, spices, oils, and flavorings, and added to it stepwise by experimenting with beatpots, stews, roasts, grills, frys, salads, and pastas, you will be cooking like a human.

For the purpose of this cookbook has not been to present an exhaustive or even truly representative collection of human recipes, which would be quite impossible, but to enable an adventurous cook on any planet to think like a human, at least in the kitchen.

This is not the same thing as slavishly reproducing a detailed recipe. Any halfway-decent kitchen robot can do that better than you can. But that same robot will become quite perplexed when faced with the need to improvise on a human recipe to fit available local ingredients.

But you won't be. Not if you think like a human instead of like a robot. Recipes are useful in learning your way around the methods and palette, but once you have grasped the essentials, your own educated sense organs are your best guide. They may not care to broadcast the fact to their audiences, but human cooks taste what they are preparing constantly.

Humans also have a music form called "jazz" in which groups of musicians spontaneously improvise upon a previously composed score, and if you think of the recipe as the score, and the chef as a performing artist improvising upon it, you will indeed have grasped the ultimate secret of La Cuisine Humaine.

And if this concept seems illusive, well, perhaps it is, for it took the humans themselves centuries of culinary evolution to conceive it.

Up until a century or two ago, neither travel nor the importations of produce from distant shores was rapid or easy, meaning that even the best human chefs had to make do with that of the local ecosystem. As a result, "national styles" evolved. The ordinary cooks followed recipes handed down by long national and family tradition, and the culinary artists developed sophisticated but conservatively classical styles, with, in many areas, schools and textbooks to teach them.

Of course there had always been some transnational influences. The cuisines of Indonesia, Thailand, Burma, and so forth combined elements of Chinese and Indian styles. Pilafs were to be found in a long broad belt from Eastern Europe and the Middle East clear through India and into the South Pacific, simpler and blander at the western end, picking up fruits, nuts, meats, pepper, and curry spices as they marched eastward.

When the more technologically advanced peoples of the Eastern Hemisphere "discovered" the Americas, they found the "primitives" enjoying chocolate, tomatoes, potatoes, corn, and chili peppers, which is to say that the so-called national cuisines of Italy, Spain, Germany, Ireland, Austria, and so forth were actually based upon products imported from foreign ecospheres.

Still, humans were not quite yet ready for the great conceptual leap forward. Chefs incorporated the new ingredients into their national styles, indeed transforming many of them beyond recognition, but the resulting culinary golden age was still classical in spirit, with perfected recipes enshrined in print, a canon of dishes, and clear-cut culinary boundaries at the cultural borders.

It took the easy travel, rapid cheap transport of produce, and food storage and media technology of the human's so-called "Twentieth Century" to create the "culinary jazz" that is the crowning glory of today's Cuisine Humaine.

With hordes of humans traveling everywhere and produce from all over the planet more or less available anywhere, the cultural boundaries and arbitrary combination taboos began to seem, well, rather silly.

Why couldn't you put Caribbean mango and Chinese roast duck in a Mexican taco? Was there a law against it? Why couldn't you add a curry spice or two to a Chinese stir-fry or tumeric to an Italian pasta sauce or ginger to a bouillabaisse or sesame oil to a Borscht or wasabi radish to a salad dressing?

If it tastes good why not, you've made a culinary discovery, and if it doesn't, well, culinary evolution is a matter of trial and error too. As the humans have it, you can't have a culinary revolution by inventing omelets unless someone is willing to try cracking the first egg!

And once having freed oneself from the artistic constraints of cultural chauvinisms to this extent, why not go all the way to the true culinary revolution?

Why not an entirely free-form cuisine where the stylistic variants are completely individual and personal rather than bounded by anything but the entire ecosphere of the planet itself?

Instead of just importing a few variations into a classical style, why not create dishes with no discernible national origin, why not take all the Earth's produce as the theoretical range of your palette, and, as the humans have it, rock and roll?

Human musicians have done just this when it comes to their art, assembling elements from all over the world into a cross-cultural montage called "World Music," and so have human chefs liberated themselves from cultural restraints and classical canons to create a cuisine that spans their entire planet, a cuisine both universal and quite personal, the cuisinary jazz of La Grand Cuisine Humaine.

Of course there are still rules and guidelines, but they are those of practical esthetics, not classical cultural tradition, to be followed by the educated sense-organ, not the scholarly intellect. You certainly wouldn't pour American chocolate sauce all over an Indian tandoori or dip sushi into an Italian tomato sauce or serve kebabs swimming in thousand island dressing!

Then again, who knows, how can anyone really be sure unless someone has tried it?

Take something as unlikely as so-called Duck and Corn salad. Take some cooked America corn, roasted sweet peppers, crumbled walnuts, onions, and perhaps minced Chinese pickled garlic, mix in a salad bowl with Chinese sesame and Italian olive oils, and let stand an hour. Put in some French wine vinegar, mix it all up. Spoon it out over a green and some sliced tomatoes, and put strips of French smoked migrate de canard atop it.

Is it French? Italian? Chinese? American?

Who cares? It's delicious!

Caribbean bananas go well in a sandwich with American peanut butter. So does English bacon. Excellent sushis can be made with Mexican chili powder or French mustard. Or slices of sashimi can be added raw to a Chinese stir-fry of rice noodles and vegetables. Oriental shiitaki mushrooms are a nice addition to Russian Beef Stroganoff and grilled German sausages go well with Indian curried cabbage.

You can fry up some Chinese mai-fon noodles in sesame oil and Indian curry spices, form them into baskets for raw French oysters, and sprinkle on some English malt vinegar. Spread creamcheese on a warm baked crust, put some preserved fish eggs on it, and have yourself a nice caviar pizza!

Consider the mathematics of the situation. On the planet Earth, there must be several tens of thousands of available food ingredients, and just as many spices and herbs to flavor them with. Then too, the same natural raw material may be processed in any number of ways--pickled, dried, salted, rotted, chemically-preserved, smoked, turned into a paste or essence.

A dozen or more of these ingredients may be combined in the same dish, and then be boiled, fried, baked, steamed, grilled, roasted, or eaten raw.

Mathematically speaking, the theoretical possibilities are almost literally unlimited, even without considering the fact that the proportions of the ingredients in any dish may be varied infinitely.

True, this means that an infinite number of truly loathsome concoctions lurk out there in theory to be invented and imposed upon the unwary experimental subject.

But true too that an infinite number of new culinary masterpieces will also always be out there for you to discover!

Don't knock it till you've tried it, as the humans put it. Good advice to the galactic sophisticate from this relatively primitive race of backplanet anthropoids!

When it comes to politics, economics, science, philosophy, or how to manage a planetary ecosystem, this immature civilization may indeed have nothing to teach us, but when it comes to the culinary arts, we could all certainly enhance our galactic kitchen-culture and interstellar dining-room civilization by learning to cook like human beings.

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