The Culinary Triangle

TLDR

Abstract

Smoking is related to boiling, which requires a cultural means, the receptacle. The same type of paradox is implied by the problematics of smoking as formulated by the natives of Guiana. On the one hand, smoking, of all the modes of cooking, comes closest to the abstract category of the cooked; and—since the opposition between raw and cooked is homologous to that between nature and culture—it represents the most “cultural” form of cooking. Yet, on the other hand, its cultural means, the buccan, is to be immediately destroyed. In a culinary system where the category of the roasted is divided into roasted and grilled, it is the latter term which will be situated at the apex of the recipe triangle, the roasted then being placed, on the air-axis, halfway between the grilled and the smoked.