Hi I'm wondering if cooking is all about to warm up food like example: to fry food, to put it in the oven etc.

Or can it also be to mix food? Can I "cook" by mixing different ingredients in a sallad, and can cooking be about just making different kinds of sallads varying from vegetables to fruits?

It's also chemistry--for example, when you heat eggs, it denatures the protein with a resulting change in consistency.

The verb "to cook" usually means that something is heated as part of its preparation for eating.

But if you said, "Stella is interested in cooking and cookery" that would include all manner of preparing food, hot, cold, frozen, fried, boiled, baked, steamed, poached, grilled, and roasted. And including cutting and preparing and mixing raw vegtables for salads and the like.

At one time all girls learned "Cookery" at school, then they changed its name to "Domestic Science," then to "Home Economics" and now I hear it's called something like "Food Technology."  But the way of boiling an egg has remained the same.

I think that this "cooking"section could include warming up cooked food and mixing together raw foods without cooking them eg. salads.

I thought, more to ask:

Is the forum topic "Cooking" considered as containing mostly things that are heated?

or is it generally about food and the way food affect human health?

It's intended, I think, as a  light-hearted space for the exchange of recipes, methods, and ideas for meals and food preparation, ancient and modern.

As far as I've come to understand the concept, "cooking" can be seen as encompassing everything from heating up a pre-cooked meal ("I cooked the TV-dinner in the microwave oven") to preparing a salad ("I used my superior cooking skills to make a lovely shrimp salad") to pan-frying a steak and then eating it ("I cooked the steak by frying it for 5 minutes on low heat"). Cooking is thus not restricted only to the preparation of hot foods or to cooking methods involving actual heat. Rather, I think it can just as easily involve making an ice-cream dessert or, as stated above, a salad.

I think one of the things that defines "cooking" as a concept is that it somehow involves the evolution of food into a more prepared, ready-to-eat state. If you, for instance, would start out with a raw steak and some vegetables and then use your cooking skills to make these "raw materials" into a well-fried steak and a nice salad to go along with it, then I'd say what you had done would be classified as "cooking". On the other hand, if you had a frozen TV-dinner and you had to warm it up in your microwave oven, then I'd say that would also be classified as "cooking".

The key elements is that the process of cooking transforms food into either a more prepared state or, in the case of the above TV-dinner, into a state in which the dish in question is ready to be eaten.

Curiously, I do not think "making a sandwich" would qualify as cooking. You'd still be using raw materials (bread, butter, trimmings) to make a finished product, but since those raw materials could already be eaten in their disassembled state, I do not think simply assembling them into a sandwich would count as "cooking" them. Maybe if you heated them up to make french toast, or toasted the bread. Someone else may have different opinions about this than I do, though.

It includes my latest interest - the different sorts of dried, cured meats such as salami, dry cured hams, Swedish elk sausage, South African biltong and boerewors, and dried boar meat sausage, which I haven't tried yet, but think about a lot.  I like to eat these meats with black rye bread or even German pumpernickel and sunflower seed bread with lots of sweetish unsalted butter.

Sounds absolutely delicious! I've never tried biltong or boerewors, myself. Are they any good? What is the taste like?

Peter, I've had a small piece of the dried biltong, which has a flavour rather like strong beef, but haven't been able to try the boerewors yet.

The biltong was often kept in a pocket by the voortrekkers, and they would shave slices off it with a knife when hungry, as I have seen Lapps/Sames do with dried reindeer meat.  The dried boerewors ("farmer sausage") was first prepared by the voortrekkers and is, I believe, one of  choice meats at a typical South African barbecue today.

I have found an Italian website that sells wild boar sausage (a sort of salami by the look of it) , but as I don't have a credit card, or much money, I am not likely to be trying it soon. My worry about an Italian recipe for wild boar sausage is that it might contain too much spice, pepper, and garlic which would interfere with the enjoyment of the flavour of the basic meat.

Stella, whilst you are searching for dried meat you should look out for another Southern African speciality:

http://www.nfi.org.za/inverts/BIG12/mopani.html

(my partner ate some at a party without knowing what they were and thought that the 'mutton was very nice', not a bad comparison)

Sounds wonderful! I will definetely look into this if I find a store which should sell it here in Sweden. Thank you very much for the tip!

Also, in case you're curious; the reindeer meat prepared by the Lapps as you describe above is called Renskav. As far as dried meat goes, it's very tasty indeed! But I'm sure you knew this already, having travelled in Lappland earlier.

Peter, a South African woman shewed me how to cut the biltong, which is very dark brown and quite hard, so that only  thin pieces can be shaved from it with a  sharp pocket knife.

I believe it is the meat of a wildebeest which has been seasoned and then dried by hanging it in the sun and wind.

But the renskav is tastier  :smile:

I've never had wildebeast, myself, so I can't say for certain which is the tastier of the two. I'll take your word on the renskav, though! :smile:

Sounds similar to the Spanish jamon serrano, which is basiclly a dead pig left in a dry room for 3 months til it's gone hard, and smells revolting. The Spanish consider it a delicousy, but the stuff overpowers me and makes me feel sick just being within several feet of a joint - apaprently normal people can't smell anything unusual, so I guess it's an aspie overload (Which is funny because no other smells effect me)