Creepy Uncle Sam's Gastronomy Guide For The Apocalypse

Introduction: What Is This Gastronomy Thing?

I'll go out on a limb as say you like food.

Some people don't, and that's okay! God will sort them out after the second coming. For us normal people who like to stuff our gullet with tasty things, it is imperative to understand how we came to have all-you-can-eat buffets and $1 burritos at 7-Eleven, as apocalyptic chefs-in-training that you are must understand the past in order to cook for the future.

Gastronomy is defined as the study of man's relationship with his diet, his environment and its surroundings. Basically, what he can eat, why we eat it, and what will happen if we suddenly stopped eating it. Every region, country, and local has its own gastronomy, which in turn affects the culture around it. Since the current culture is either Thunderdome or Radioactive Wasteland, it falls you to create an appropriate gastronomic profile with what you have available. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The history of cooking begins when people started to use fire for food preparation, which are easier to eat, more digestible and healthier. Before that, we would eat grass and raw meat which didn't sit well without tummies. Now we eat sushi, which is raw meat and grass, only fancier, which shows that humanity can only go so much forwards before reverting to our stick-wagging ways.

Thus we pass through Greece and its contributions of oils, wines and breads, through Rome and its spices, herbs, and sausages, until reaching to the middle ages which were a fusion of both empires, ushering the beginning to the middle ages and first vestiges of sophistication and refinement of the kitchen.

Already in the modern age with the French revolution, a before and after is marked in modern gastronomy, which manages to spread to the popular level, ceasing to be just a privilege of the ruling class. As a fun fact, you know those silly chef hats use that looks like that mushroom cloud the atomic bomb made before hitting [INSERT YOUR CITY HERE]? Those were created because medieval kitchens were normally under castles, in dank, ventless basements, and cooks would put water bags over their heads to avoid overheating. The hat was made to make it easier for cooks to hold it in place. Now it just holds rats.

The French Revolution encouraged many chefs to open their own businesses as a livelihood, seeing that their former employers were being too busy having their heads used as a football. And this, added to the abolition of guilds, provided the weapons necessary to express creativity and expose the talent of each chef giving beginning to the contemporary age and the advent of the "Restaurant" which was a place one could go eat and be "restored."

But gastronomy, as we know it today, came thanks to this dude called Georges-Auguste Escoffier (1847-1935), who was a cook, restaurateur, and French culinary writer, which popularized and updated the methods of traditional French cuisine.

Considered the best and greatest chef of his time, he remains revered by chefs and gourmets as the father of 20th-century cuisine. His two main contributions were:

1. the simplification of classical cuisine and the classic menu, and 2. kitchen rearrangement.

Escoffier rejected what he called the "general confusion" of the old menus, where a large amount of food seemed to be the most important factor. In change, he called for order and diversity and emphasized the careful selection of the dishes and delight to the taste with delicacy and simplicity.

The Escoffier Books and their recipes remain an important reference for professional chefs. The basic cooking methods and preparations that I will teach you are based on Escoffier's work.

Learning to cook, according to Escoffier, begins with learning the basic procedures and understanding the basic ingredients. Escoffier's second great achievement was the reorganization of the kitchen, installing staples such as the Chef(or the head of the kitchen), the Sous-chef, and so on.

Since we don't need those during a time of crisis, we will omit those.