2 - Between Earth and Sky : The Cook as Environmental Mediator in Paradise Lost

Summary

Abstract

To examine the cook's mediating power, this chapter turns to the vitalist, monist universe of Paradise Lost to explore how cooking relies on, emerges from, and interacts with the poem's environments of Heaven, Earth, and Hell. Focusing on Eve, who relies on the environmental cookery of ripening to create her dishes, and the fallen angels, who use kitchen techniques to pursue their destructive work of mining, I suggest that both the processes (concoction, fermentation, and adustion) and products of cookery (Eve's meal, Pandemonium and the cannon) reflect the environmental contexts and associated ethics of their makers.

Keywords: concoction, fermentation, fruit, ripening, fire cookery, mining

When we cook, we put our hands amid the produce of the Earth. Vegetables and fruits, nuts and seeds, the bodies of animals: we transform them into dishes, combining flavour and texture, substance and taste; we feed them to others, uniting human and nonhuman within the shared space of the table. As Michael Pollan reminds us, ‘cooking implicates us in a whole web of social and ecological relationships: with plants and animals, with the soil, with farmers, with the microbes both inside and outside our bodies […] cooking connects’. While the ways in which cooking and dining connect humans to each other is a popular topic of investigation, cooking's role as an environmentally relational practice is less so. Claude Lévi-Strauss's famous suggestion that ‘culinary operations [are] mediatory activities between heaven and earth, life and death, nature and society’ has compelled more interest in the transformation of nature into culture than it has into the relational nexus between cooking, heaven, and earth. To examine the mediating power of the cook, as one whose work brings them into close relationship with the environment, this essay will take as a case study the monist, vitalist universe of Paradise Lost. In worlds as alive as Milton’s, we can easily investigate how cooking relies on, emerges from, and interacts with the poem's environments of Heaven, Earth, and Hell.