Cost of meat / cost of fuel

[Blether]

Conditions have been fairly stable for a long time. Right now, we can buy expensive cuts for short-time grilling / saute / roast, or cheap cuts for braise / stew / slow cooking.

Energy ain't going to tumble in price any time soon. Where is the trade-off in ingredient and fuel prices ? I've never seen a cookbook that says, 'sure this cut is cheap but you'll pay out on wood for the fire'. I'm guessing that what old-time cookbooks we have, come from prosperous houses where the cost of coal or wood wasn't such a big deal.

Where is the trade-off between meat and fuel prices ? Has anyone seen sensible analysis of this anywhere ?

[KarenDW]

I'm guessing that what old-time cookbooks we have, come from prosperous houses where the cost of coal or wood wasn't such a big deal.

Or, perhaps the fuel-usage is optimized by using for both cooking and heating. Slow-cooking methods would have been developed to take advantage of lower temperature coals from a standing fire. (i.e., an evolution from spit roasting over open flame)

[Peter the eater]

It's an important question. I don't think about cooking fuel unless I'm on a long camping trip, and then the question is how much is left, not how much does it cost.

Blether, the formula should also include cost of refrigeration.

[nakji]

This used to be a big question for me when I lived in Japan and fuel was quite expensive. Traditionally it has been so in Asia, right? Hence all the quick-cook recipes that involve stir-frying. Or is that just a myth...?

[Blether]

This used to be a big question for me when I lived in Japan and fuel was quite expensive. Traditionally it has been so in Asia, right? Hence all the quick-cook recipes that involve stir-frying. Or is that just a myth...?

I don't know about the historical cost in Asia, Nakji. How old is tradition ? I guess the quick stir-fry and the Japanese penchant for raw food point in that direction.

It's a few years since I discovered it, and now we're out of the 'Cooking' forum, I might as well link to this article on 'Peak Wood' in the Bronze-age Mediterranean, which I find fascinating, well-written and convincingly reasoned. There's much more, but as a sample,

"Egypt, which has practically no trees, was trading with Byblos (on the Lebanese coast) for cedar for shipbuilding, temple construction, and furniture-making as early as 3000 BC. But perhaps the most famous documentation of the shortage of wood around the ancient Mediterranean is the Epic of Gilgamesh … Stripped of sex and violence, the Gilgamesh epic is about deforestation...

Copper smelting needs a great deal of fuel, especially if the ore supply is dominantly sulfide. About 300 kg of charcoal are needed to produce 1 kg of copper by smelting 30 kg of sulfide ore. A tonne of charcoal needs somewhere between 12 and 20 cubic meters of wood, and for each cubic meter of wood a 100-year old tree has to be felled...

The tremendous tonnage of ancient copper slag on Cyprus suggests that the Cypriot copper industry collapsed around 300 AD simply because the island ran out of cheap fuel...

The landscape of Cyprus today (and Greece, and Turkey, and Lebanon, and in fact most of the Mediterranean seaboard) is quite unlike its appearance 5000 years ago. The magnificent cedar forests of Lebanon were felled largely for timber for buildings and ships, but copper smelting must take most of the blame in Cyprus. This Mediterranean ecological disaster used to be blamed on the Arab introduction of goats to the region several centuries AD, but the change was much earlier..."

... the “Peak Wood” problem was fatal. It was the proximate cause for the collapse of both Cahokia and the Hohokam. It nearly did in European civilization again in the 16th century...

The crisis of Peak Oil is precisely the kind of crisis that has always collapsed civilizations...

[David A. Goldfarb]

I used to visit a friend at his country home in the south of Poland, and they had an old brick stove and at the time no running water. I gather they've since dug a well, maybe in the 1990s. If I recall the story correctly, the house was originally purchased before WWII, burned down within a year or two, and was rebuilt, so I don't know if the stove dates from that period or if it survived the fire and was in fact much older.

The stove had an oven, holes for pots or frying pans, spaces in the back for pots on low heat, and a big well for a large stockpot that was used mainly to heat water for bathing and I suppose washing clothes and such, and the heat from the oven warmed the whole cottage. Everything in the stove was heated by the same fire essentially, but one could move the fuel around, say, to get more heat on the front burners or to regulate the temperature of the oven. In Escoffier and in nineteenth-century cookbooks there are often instructions to place a pot half off the fire or to prop a pot up with a wedge so the scum will collect on one side and will be easier to skim. And to think how obsessive we can be with our oven thermometers, Thermapens, infrared thermometers, PID controllers and modern ovens, ranges, and sous vide circulators. Managing the heat in a large wood-fired stove is really an art!

I would think that the slow braise and stockpot are ways of capturing the heat from other more heat-intensive operations, so they were ways of using heat more efficiently. Soups and stews could be kept on the back burner rather than refrigerated. This seemed to be a common practice in Poland when I was there for an extended period in the late 1980s, even among the vast majority of people who had gas or electric stoves.

[Mallet]

enter the pressure cooker.

[azurite]

My friend (lives in the west foothills of the Coast Range of OR) has a wood cookstove that sounds similar, although it doesn't have holes for the pots. It's definitely a learned cooking technique, using a wood cookstove, changing cooking utensil position instead of turning a control up or down, but it has its advantages. She is much less concerned w/spills on the cookstove surface than I am, and has room for many more working pots & pan than I do. Her baking is much closer to a clay wood-fired oven than anything I've got. Her cookstove (Amish made from Canada) can also be used as a source of hot water, but she has not been able to find anyone w/the skills or interest in doing the work needed to hook it up to her water system, etc. It has a compartment on the side that holds a fair amount of water (essentially a hot water tank), but you need someone w/some welding & plumbing expertise to hook it up to her existing plumbing.

Her stove is fairly effective at heating most of her house. If the house were better insulated, it would be more than fairly effective.

During the summers, she uses a portable convection oven & electric burner to do any cooking, as temperatures can get into the 80's & even the 90's during the day and that's too hot to build a fire in an indoor woodstove.

In terms of cost, a cord of cut alder firewood is around $100 and little over--although she's getting her wood from an old friend & there's some bartering going on as well, so I don't know how much actual cash is involved. I think she gets through around 6 cords/year, maybe a little more, but, at least during the colder months, quite a bit of the wood is for heat, not cooking. Unless it's summertime, I've never noticed her selecting meat based on how long it'll take to cook--mostly because when it's cool, she's going to build a fire anyway.

[nakji]

enter the pressure cooker.

Yes, I used to use a pressure cooker to make rice when I lived in Korea - it turned out a really nice bowl of rice, especially when I made rice blends with barley or red rice. Although, it did tend to terrorize my non-Korean friends when I'd haul it out.