Culinary Triangle

The culinary triangle is a framework proposed by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss for classifying cooking methods, built around three ways of preparing meat: boiling, roasting, and smoking. In his scheme, boiling is a cultured method that requires a container and was traditionally done by women in the home, roasting exposes meat directly to fire without a container and was historically associated with men and the entertaining of guests, and smoking is a slower, natural process, also done without a container, that sits between the other two. Lévi-Strauss used the triangle to place other techniques in relation to these three, for example locating grilling near roasting and steaming between boiling and smoking, treating cooking methods as a way of reading a culture's relationship to nature.