Consider the Fork Read online

  Table of Contents

  Also by Bee Wilson

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 - POTS AND PANS

  Chapter 2 - KNIFE

  Chapter 3 - FIRE

  Chapter 4 - MEASURE

  Chapter 5 - GRIND

  Chapter 6 - EAT

  Chapter 7 - ICE

  Chapter 8 - KITCHEN

  Acknowledgments

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  Also by Bee Wilson

  Sandwich

  Swindled

  The Hive

  For my Mother

  INTRODUCTION

  A WOODEN SPOON—MOST TRUSTY AND LOVABLE OF KITCHEN implements—looks like the opposite of “technology,” as the word is normally understood. It does not switch on and off or make funny noises. It has no patent or guarantee. There is nothing futuristic or shiny or clever about it.

  But look closer at one of your wooden spoons (I’m assuming you have at least one, because I’ve never been in any kitchen that didn’t). Feel the grain. Is it a workmanlike beech factory spoon or a denser maple wood or olive wood whittled by an artisan? Now look at the shape. Is it oval or round? Slotted or solid? Cupped or flat? Perhaps it has a pointy part on one side to get at the lumpy bits in the corner of the pan. Maybe the handle is extrashort, for a child to use, or extralong, to give your hand a position of greater safety from a hot skillet. Countless decisions—economic and social as well as those pertaining to design and applied engineering—will have gone into the making of this object. And these in turn will affect the way this device enables you to cook. The wooden spoon is a quiet ensemble player in so many meals that we take it for granted. We do not give it credit for the eggs it has scrambled, the chocolate it has helped to melt, the onions it has saved from burning with a quick twirl.

  The wooden spoon does not look particularly sophisticated—traditionally, it was given as a booby prize to the loser of a competition—but it has science on its side. Wood is nonabrasive and therefore gentle on pans—you can scrape away without fear of scarring the metal surface. It is nonreactive: you need not worry that it will leave a metallic taste or that its surface will degrade on contact with acidic citrus or tomatoes. It is also a poor conductor of heat, which is why you can stir hot soup with a wooden spoon without burning your hand. Above and beyond its functionality, however, we cook with wooden spoons because we always have. They are part of our civilization. Tools are first adopted because they meet a certain need or solve a particular problem, but over time the utensils we feel happy using are mainly determined by culture. In the age of stainless steel pans, it is perfectly possible to use a metal spoon for stirring without ruining your vessels, but to do so feels obscurely wrong. The hard metal angles smash your carefully diced vegetables and the handle does not grip so companionably as you stir. It clanks disagreeably, in contrast to the gentle tapping of wood.

  In this plastic age, you might expect that we would have taken to stirring with synthetic spatulas, especially because wooden spoons don’t do well in dishwashers (over many washes, they tend to soften and split); but on the whole, this is not so. I saw a bizarre product in a kitchenware shop recently: “wooden silicone spoons,” on sale for eight times the price of a basic beech spoon. They were garishly colored, heavy plastic kitchen spoons in the shape of a wooden spoon. Apart from that, there was nothing wooden about them. Yet the manufacturers felt that they needed to allude to wood to win a place in our hearts and kitchens. There are so many things we take for granted when we cook: we stir with wooden spoons but eat with metal ones (we used to eat with wood, too); we have strong views on things that should be served hot and things that must remain raw. Certain ingredients we boil; others, we freeze or fry or grind. Many of these actions we perform instinctively, or by obediently following a recipe. It is perfectly clear to anyone who prepares Italian food that a risotto should be cooked with the gradual addition of liquid, whereas pasta needs to be boiled fast in an excess of water, but why?1 Most aspects of cooking are far less obvious than they first appear; and there is almost always another way of doing things. Think of the utensils that were not adopted, for whatever reason: the water-powered egg whisk, the magnet-operated spit roaster. It took countless inventions, small and large, to get to the well-equipped kitchens we have now, where our old low-tech friend the wooden spoon is joined by mixers, freezers, and microwaves; but the history is largely unseen and unsung.

  Traditional histories of technology do not pay much attention to food. They tend to focus on hefty industrial and military developments : wheels and ships, gunpowder and telegraphs, airships and radio. When food is mentioned, it is usually in the context of agriculture—systems of tillage and irrigation—rather than the domestic work of the kitchen. But there is just as much invention in a nutcracker as in a bullet. Often, inventors have been working on something for military use, only to find that its best use is in the kitchen. Harry Brearley was a Sheffield man who invented stainless steel in 1913 as a way of improving gun barrels; inadvertently, he improved the world’s cutlery. Percy Spencer, creator of the microwave oven, was working on naval radar systems when he happened upon an entirely new method of cooking. Our kitchens owe much to the brilliance of science, and a cook experimenting with mixtures at the stove is often not very different from a chemist in the lab: we add vinegar to red cabbage to fix the color and use baking soda to counteract the acidity of lemon in a cake. It is wrong to suppose, however, that technology is just the appliance of scientific thought. It is something more basic and older than this. Not every culture has had formal science—a form of organized knowledge about the universe that starts with Aristotle in the fourth century BC. The modern scientific method, in which experiments form part of a structured system of hypothesis, experimentation, and analysis is as recent as the seventeenth century; the problem-solving technology of cooking goes back thousands of years. Since the earliest Stone Age humans hacking away at raw food with sharpened flints, we have always used invention to devise better ways to feed ourselves.

  The word technology comes from the Greek. Techne means an art, skill, or craft, and logia means the study of something. Technology is not a form of robotics but something very human: the creation of tools and techniques that answer certain uses in our lives. Sometimes technology can mean the tools themselves; other times it refers to the inventive know-how that made the tools possible, or the fact that people use these particular tools and not others. Scientific discovery does not depend on usage for its validity; technology does. When equipment falls out of use, it expires. However shrewdly designed it may be, an eggbeater does not fully achieve its purpose until someone picks it up and beats eggs.

  Consider the Fork is an exploration of the way the implements we use in the kitchen affect what we eat, how we eat, and what we feel about what we eat. Food is the great human universal. Nothing is certain in this world except death and taxes, the saying goes. It should really be death and food. Plenty of people avoid taxes (not earning any money is one way, but certainly not the only one). Some live without sex, that other fact of life. But there is no getting beyond food, which is a fuel, a habit, a higher pleasure, and a base need, the thing that gives pattern to our days or that gnaws us with its lack. Anorexics may try to escape it, but for as long as you live, hunger is inescapable. We all eat. Yet the ways in which we have satisfied this basic human need have varied dramatically at different times and places. The things that make the biggest difference are the tools we use.

  Most days, my breakfast consists of coffee; toast, butter, marmalade ; and orange juice, if the children haven’t drunk it all. Described like this, as bare
ingredients, it is a meal that could belong to any moment of the past three hundred and fifty years. Coffee has been consumed in England since the mid-seventeenth century; oranges for the juice and the marmalade since 1290. Toasted bread and butter are both ancient. The devil, however, is in the details.

  To make the coffee, I do not boil it for twenty minutes and then clarify it with isinglass (fish bladder), as I might have done in 1810; I do not make it in a “scientific Rumford percolator,” as some did in 1850; I do not make it in a jug with a wooden spoon, pouring cold water over the hot grounds to make them fall to the bottom in the Edwardian style; I do not make it in an electric coffeemaker, as I might still if I lived in the States; I do not pour hot water over an acrid spoonful of instant as in student years; and I do not generally make it in a French press cafetière, though I did in the 1990s. I am an early twenty-first-century coffee obsessive (but not obsessive enough, yet, to have invested in a state-of-the-art Japanese siphon brewer). I grind my beans (fair trade) superfine in a burr grinder and make myself a “flat white” (an espresso, steamed milk poured over the top), using an espresso machine and a range of utensils (coffee scoop, tamper, steel milk pitcher). On good mornings, after ten minutes or so of concentrated effort, the technology works, and the coffee and milk meld into a delicious foamy drink. On bad mornings, they explode all over the floor.

  Toast, butter, and marmalade were known and loved by the Elizabethans. But Shakespeare never ate toast such as mine, cut from a whole-grain loaf baked in an automatic bread maker, toasted in a four-slot electric toaster, and eaten off a white dishwasher-safe china plate. Nor did he know the joys of spreadable butter and high-fruit marmalade, both of which indicate the presence in my household of a large and fully functioning refrigerator. Besides, Shakespeare’s marmalade would probably have been made with quinces, not oranges. My butter is not rancid or too hard—as I remember almost all butter being when I was a child in the 1970s and 1980s. I spread it with a stainless steel knife, which leaves no metallic tang and does not react with the fruit sugars in the marmalade.

  As for the orange juice, the technology behind it seems the simplest of all—take oranges, squeeze juice—but is probably the most complicated. Unlike the Edwardian housewife, who laboriously squeezed oranges in a conical glass squeezer, I usually pour my juice from a Tetra Pak carton (first launched as Tetra Brik in 1963). Although the ingredients list only oranges, the juice will have been made using a bewildering array of industrial techniques, the fruit crushed with hidden enzymes and strained with hidden clarifiers and pasteurized and chilled and transported from country to country, all for my breakfast pleasure. The fact that the juice does not pucker my mouth with bitterness is thanks to a female inventor, Linda C. Brewster, who in the 1970s was granted four patents for “debittering” orange juice by reducing the presence of acrid limonin.

  This particular meal could only have been consumed in this particular way for a very short moment in history. The foods we eat speak of the time and the place we inhabit. But to an even greater extent, so do the tools we use to make and consume them. We are often told that we live in a “technological age.” This is usually a way of saying : we have a lot of computers. But every age has its technology. It does not have to be futuristic. It can be a fork, a pot, or a simple measuring cup.

  Sometimes, kitchen tools are simply a way of enhancing the pleasure of eating. But they can also be a matter of basic survival. Before the adoption of cooking pots, around 10,000 years ago, the evidence from skeletons suggests that no one survived into adulthood having lost all their teeth. Chewing was a necessary skill. If you couldn’t chew, you would starve. Pottery enabled our ancestors to make food of a drinkable consistency: porridgy, soupy concoctions, which could be eaten without chewing. For the first time, we start to see adult skeletons without a single tooth. The cooking pot saved these people.

  The most versatile technologies are often the most basic. Some, like the mortar and pestle, endure for tens of thousands of years. The pestle began as an ancient tool for processing grain but successfully adapted itself to grinding everything from pistou in France to curry paste in Thailand. Other devices have proved less flexible, for instance, the 1970s chicken brick, enjoying a brief vogue only to end up on the junk heap when people tired of the food in question. Some tools, such as spoons and microwaves, are used the world over. Others are very specific to a place, for example, the dolsot, a sizzling hot stone pot in which Koreans serve one particular dish: bibimbap, a mixture of sticky rice, finely sliced vegetables, and raw or fried egg; the bottom layer of rice becomes crispy with the heat of the dolsot.

  This book is about high-tech gadgets, but it is also about the tools and techniques we don’t tend to think about so much. The technology of food matters even when we barely notice it is there. From fire onward, there is a technology behind everything we eat, whether we recognize it or not. Behind every loaf of bread, there is an oven. Behind a bowl of soup, there is a pan and a wooden spoon (unless it comes from a can, another technology altogether). Behind every restaurant-kitchen foam, there will be a whipping canister, charged with N2O. Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli in Spain, which, until it closed in 2011, was the most celebrated restaurant in the world, could not have produced its menu without sous-vide machines and centrifuges, dehydrators, and Pacojets. Many people find these novel tools alarming. As new kitchen technologies have emerged, there have always been voices suggesting that the old ways were best.

  Cooks are conservative beings, masters of quiet repetitive actions that change little from day to day or year to year. Entire cultures are built around cooking food one way and not another. A true Chinese meal, for example, cannot be cooked without the tou, the cleaver-shaped knife that reduces ingredients to small, even morsels, and the wok, for stir-frying. Which comes first, the stir-fry or the wok? Neither. To get at the logic of Chinese cuisine, we have to go even further back and consider cooking fuel: a quickly made wok-cooked meal was originally the product of firewood scarcity. Over time, however, equipment and food become so bound together you can’t say when one starts and the other ends.

  It is only natural that cooks should perceive kitchen innovation as a personal attack. The complaint is always the same: you are destroying the food we know and love with your newfangled ways. When commercial refrigeration became a possibility in the late nineteenth century, it offered great advantages, both to consumers and industry. Fridges were especially useful for selling perishable substances such as milk, which had previously been the cause of thousands of deaths every year in the big cities of the world. Refrigeration benefited traders, too, creating a longer window in which they could sell their food. Yet there was a widespread terror of this new technology, from both sellers and buyers. Consumers were suspicious of food that had been kept in cold storage. Market traders, too, did not know what to make of this new chill. In the 1890s at Les Halles, the huge central food market in Paris, the sellers felt that refrigeration would spoil their produce. And at some level, they were right, as anyone who has ever compared a tomato at room temperature with one from the fridge can confirm: the one (assuming it’s a good tomato) is sweetly fragrant and juicy; the other is woolly, metallic, and dull. Every new technology represents a trade-off: something is gained, but something is also lost.

  Often, the thing lost is knowledge. You don’t need such good knife skills once you have a food processor. Gas and electric ovens and the microwave mean you need no knowledge of how to get a fire going and keep it ablaze. Until around a hundred years ago, management of a fire was one of the dominant human activities. That has gone (and a good thing, too, if you think of all the tedious hours of the day it consumed, all the other activities it precluded). The larger question is whether the existence of cooking technologies that entail only minimal human input has led to the death of culinary skills. In 2011, a survey of 2,000 British young people from age eighteen to twenty-five found that more than half said that they had left home without the ability to cook even
a simple recipe such as Spaghetti Bolognese. Microwaves plus convenience foods offer the freedom of being able to feed yourself with a few pushes of a button. But it’s not such a great advance if you lose all concept of what it would mean to make a meal for yourself.

  Sometimes, though, it takes a new technology to make us appreciate an old one. The knowledge that I can make hollandaise in thirty seconds in the blender enhances the pleasure of doing it the old way, with a double boiler and a wooden spoon, the butter added to the yolks piece by tiny piece.

  The equipment of the kitchen can seem unimportant compared to the history of food itself. It is all very well fussing over the niceties of table settings and jelly molds, but what does this matter compared to a basic hunger for bread? Perhaps this explains why kitchen tools have been so neglected in histories of food. Culinary history has become a hot subject over the past two decades. But the focus of these new histories, with a few notable exceptions, has overwhelmingly been ingredients rather than technique: what we cooked rather than how we cooked it. There have been books on potatoes, cod, and chocolate, and histories of cookbooks, restaurants, and cooks. The kitchen and its tools are more or less absent. As a result, half the story is missing. This matters. We change the texture, the taste, the nutritional content, and the cultural associations of ingredients simply by using different tools and techniques to prepare them.

  Beyond this, we human beings have been changed by kitchen technology—the how of food as well as the what. I don’t just mean this in a “my dream kitchen changed my life” kind of way, though it is true that changes in kitchen tools have gone hand in hand with vast social changes. Take the relationship between labor-saving devices and servants. The story here is one of technological stagnation. There was very little interest in eliminating the grind of cooking for the many centuries when well-off kitchens came with an abundance of human labor to take the strain. Electric food processors and blenders are genuinely liberating tools. Arms no longer have to ache to produce kibbe in Lebanon or ginger-garlic puree in India. So many meals that were once seasoned with pain are now trouble free.