Not Boiled

In his famed “culinary triangle” (see Food and Culture: A Reader) Claude Levi-Strauss suggested a triple classification of food: raw, cooked, and rotten. Raw is the natural state; cooked is a cultural transformation of nature, and rotten is a natural transformation.

Those formed the corners of a triangle. Along the sides were specific practices of food preparation: Boiling was nearest the “rotten” and roasting nearest the “raw.” 

Roasting and boiling paralleled nature and culture respectively. To boil, you need a pot, with water; the pot creates interior/exterior zones, and thus preparation by boiling is associated with interiors, with homes and enclosed spaces, as well as enclosed communities like the family and the tribe.

Roasting is closer to nature. It requires no pot; hunters can roast over a fire in the field. Roasting is thus also open, suggesting an open community.

As Levi-Strauss puts it, there are two grounds for linked nature/culture and roast/boiled: “literally, because boiling requires the use of a receptacle, a cultural object; symbolically, in as much as culture is a mediation of the relations between man and the world, and boiling demands a mediation (by water) of the relation between food and fire which is absent in roasting.”

Now, in the light of this, what are we to make of the Passover requirement that the meat by roasted and not boiled (Exodus 12:9)? In part, roasting is required because of Israel’s haste: They have to flee Egypt, and can’t wait for water to boil. 

But if Levi-Strauss is correct, then the Passover is a “nature” meal rather than a “culture” meal. It is not a closed meal, but an open one, a meal in which Israelites invite their neighbors, no doubt many of them Egyptians, to share. It’s a nature meal also in the sense that it makes a new beginning. It corresponds to the evacuation of leaven; to roast is to scour away the culture of Egypt.

Later biblical imagery of besieged cities as boiling pots fix here as well: Egypt has become a boiling pot, the Egyptians are the meat. Israel is not going to remain in the enclosure of Egypt, which is roasting the Egyptians alive. It’s time to depart, to leave the pots of Egypt behind with all their delectable foods. It’s time to begin anew. Which is to say, it’s time to roast.