Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (3 page)

For every kitchen technology that has endured—like the mortar and pestle—there are countless others that have vanished. We no longer feel the need of cider owls and dangle spits, flesh-forks and galley pots, trammels, and muffineers, though in their day, these would have seemed no more superfluous than our oil drizzlers, electric herb choppers, and ice-cream scoops. Kitchen gizmos offer a fascinating glimpse into the preoccupations of any given society. The Georgians loved roasted bone marrow and devised a special silver spoon for eating it. The Mayans lavished great artistry on the gourds from which chocolate was drunk. If you walk around our own kitchenware shops, you would think that the things we are really obsessed with in the West right now are espresso, panini, and cupcakes.

Technology is the art of the possible. It is driven by human desire—whether the desire to make a better cupcake or the simple desire to
stay alive—but also by the materials and knowledge available at any given time. Food in cans was invented long before it could easily be used. A patent for Nicolas Appert’s revolutionary new canning process was issued in 1812, and the first canning factory opened in Bermondsey, London, in 1813. Yet it would be a further fifty years before anyone managed to devise a can opener.

The birth of a new gadget often gives rise to zealous overuse, until the novelty wears off. Abraham Maslow, a guru of modern management, once said that to the man who has only a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. The same thing happens in the kitchen. To the woman who has just acquired an electric blender, the whole world looks like soup.

Not every kitchen invention has been an obvious improvement on what came before. My kitchen cupboards are graveyards of passions that died: the electric juicer I thought would change my life until I discovered I couldn’t bear to clean it; the rice cooker that worked perfectly for a year and then suddenly burned every batch it made; the Bunsen burner with which, I imagined, I would create a series of swanky crème brûlées for dinner parties I never actually gave. We can all think of examples of more or less pointless pieces of culinary equipment—the melon baller, the avocado slicer, the garlic peeler—to which we can only respond: what was wrong with a spoon, a knife, or fingers? Our cooking benefits from much uncredited engineering, but there have also been gadgets that create more problems than they solve, and others that work perfectly well, but at a human cost.

Historians of technology often quote Kranzberg’s First Law (formulated by Melvin Kranzberg in a seminal essay in 1986): “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” This is certainly true in the kitchen. Tools are not neutral objects. They change with changing social context. A mortar and pestle was a different thing for the Roman slave forced to pound up highly amalgamated mixtures for hours on end for his master’s enjoyment than it is for me: a pleasing object with which I make pesto for fun, on a whim.

At any given time, we do not necessarily get the tools that would—in absolute terms—make our food better and our lives easier. We get those that we can afford and those that our society can accept. From the 1960s onward, a series of historians pointed out the irony that the amount of time American women spent on housework, including cooking, had remained constant since the mid-1920s, despite all of the technological improvements that came on the market over those four decades. For all the dishwashers, electric mixers, and automatic garbage disposals, women were working as hard as ever. Why? Ruth Schwartz Cowan, in her campaigning history
More Work for Mother,
noted that in pure technical terms, there was no reason America should not have communal kitchen arrangements, sharing out the cooking among several households. But this technology was never widely explored because the idea of public kitchens is socially unacceptable: most of us generally like to live in smaller family units, however irrational that may be.

Kitchen gadgets—especially the fancy, expensive kind that are sold through the shopping channels—advertise themselves with the promise that they will change your life. Often, however, your life is changed in ways that you did not expect. You buy an electric mixer, which makes it incredibly quick and easy to make cakes. And so you feel that you
ought
to make cakes, whereas before you acquired the mixer, making cakes was so laborious that you were happy to buy them. In fact, therefore, the mixer has cost you time, rather than saving it. There’s also the side effect that in making room for the mixer, you have lost another few precious inches of counter space. Not to mention the hours you will spend washing the bowl and attachments and mopping the flour that splatters everywhere as it mixes.

Just because a technology is there doesn’t mean we have to use it. There is almost no kitchen tool so basic that someone somewhere hasn’t rejected it as “not worth the trouble.” Yet it is true that most of our kitchens contain far more stuff than we need. When you reach the point where you can’t open the utensils drawer because it is so
jammed with rolling pins, graters, and fish slicers, it’s time to shed a few technologies. In extremis, a skilled cook could manage pretty well with nothing but a sharp knife, a wooden board, a skillet, a spoon, and some kind of heat source.

But would you want to? Part of what makes cooking exciting is how this eternal business of putting food in our mouths subtly alters from decade to decade. Ten or twenty years from now, I’m sure my breakfast will have changed, even if I cling to the same coffee, toast, butter, marmalade, and juice. If the past is anything to go by, some of the techniques that once seemed so right will suddenly seem out of kilter. I am already starting to regret the bread maker—such an ugly object, and there’s always a hole in the middle of the loaf from the paddle—and returning to the low-tech business of buying good sourdough from a baker or making my own by hand. My espresso machine finally broke while I was writing this book, and I’ve just discovered the AeroPress, an amazing, inexpensive manual device that makes inky-dark coffee essence using air pressure. With the marmalade, I am tempted to go electric and get an automatic jam maker.

As for the rest, who can say if comfortable breakfasts like mine will exist a few years from now? Oranges from Florida may become unaffordable as wind farms replace citrus farms to meet rising energy needs. Butter may go the same way (I pray this never happens) as dairy land is diverted to more efficient use growing plant foods. Or perhaps in the techno-kitchen of the future, we will all be breakfasting off “baconated grapefruit” and “caffeinated bacon,” as Matt Groening imagines in an episode of
Futurama.

One thing is sure. We will never get beyond the technology of cooking itself. Sporks may come and go, microwaves rise and fall. But the human race will always have kitchen tools. Fire, hands, knives; we will always have these.

Cook, little pot, cook.

THE BROTHERS GRIMM, “Sweet Porridge”

Boiled food is life, roast food death.

CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS,
The Origin
of
Table Manners

 

 

 

 

 

T
HE COOKING POT I USE MOST OFTEN IS NOTHING amazing. I got it mail order on special offer as part of a ten-piece set from a Sunday supplement in the early days of married life, when owning our own set of gleaming pans, all matching—as opposed to the assorted chipped-enamel vessels of student days—seemed mysteriously grown-up. The set was stainless steel. “Order now and save $$$$ plus receive a free milk pan!” said the ad. So I did. They have seen us good, these pans. We even used the free milk pan for a long time, to warm milk for my daughter’s morning cereal, though annoyingly, it lacked a pouring spout, so a bit of the milk sometimes sloshed out onto the work surface. And then, one fine morning, the handle fell off. Still, they are trusty pans, on the whole. Thirteen years later, I haven’t managed to
destroy a single one outright. They have withstood burnt risotto, neglected stews, sticky caramels. Stainless steel may not conduct heat as well as copper; it may not retain warmth as well as cast iron or clay; it may not be as beautiful as enameled iron; but it comes into its own at the dishwashing stage.

In particular, we have gotten stalwart service from a medium-sized lidded pan with two small looped handles. The technical term for it, I believe, is a sauce pot, though a better word for it would be the French
fait-tout
because it really does do everything. It gets dragged onto the cooktop for morning porridge and again for evening rice. It has known the creamy blandness of custards and rice puddings; the spicy heat of curry; and numberless soups, from smooth green watercress to peppery minestrone. It is my workaday pan. Too small for pasta or stock making, it does the boiling jobs I don’t think twice about. Switch on electric kettle; pour heated water into saucepan; add salt; throw in broccoli florets/green beans/cobs of corn; lid on or off depending on my mood; boil for a few minutes; drain in a colander ; job done. There is nothing challenging or groundbreaking about this process. The French generally deride such cooking, calling the method
“à l’anglaise
,” which we know to be an insult, given what the French think of English food. One French scientist—Hervé This—goes so far as to accuse the method of “intellectual poverty.” French cooks are fond instead of braising vegetables such as carrots in a tiny amount of water with butter, or stewing them like ratatouille, or baking them with stock or cream in a gratin to concentrate their sweetness; boiling is—perhaps rightly—regarded as the dullest way.

As a form of technology, however, boiling is far from obvious. The pot transformed the possibilities of cooking. To be able to boil something—in a liquid, which may or may not impart additional flavor—was a big step up from fire alone. It’s hard to imagine a kitchen without pots and therefore hard to appreciate how many dishes we
owe to this basic form of equipment. Pots enabled consumption of a far wider range of foods: many plants that had previously been toxic or at least indigestible became edible, once they could be boiled for several hours. Pots mark the leap from mere heating to cuisine: to the calm, considered intermingling of ingredients in a man-made vessel. Historically, the earliest cooking was roasting or barbecuing. Evidence of roasting goes back hundreds of thousands of years. By contrast, clay cooking pots date back only around 9,000 or 10,000 years. Large stone cooking pots from the Tehuaca Valley in Central America have also been found from sometime around 7000 BC.

Roasting is a direct and unequivocal form of cooking: raw food meets flame and transforms. Boiling and frying are indirect forms. In addition to fire, they require a waterproof and fireproof vessel. The food only takes on the heat of the fire through a medium, whether oil for frying or water for boiling. This is an advance on crude fire, particularly when cooking something delicate such as an egg. When you boil an egg, it is removed from the onslaught of the fire by three things: its own shell, the wall of the cooking vessel, and the bubbling water. But boiling water is not something encountered in nature very often.

Geothermal springs can be found in Iceland, Japan, and New Zealand. They are sufficiently rare, however, that they still have the status of a natural wonder. In preindustrial times, living near hot springs must have been like having a samovar the size of a lake in your backyard: an improbable luxury. The Maori of New Zealand who lived close to the boiling pools of Whakarewarewa traditionally used them for cooking. Food of various kinds—root vegetables, meats—would be placed in flaxen bags and suspended in the water until cooked. A similar technique has been practiced in the geothermal regions of Iceland for hundreds of years. Today in Iceland, a kind of dark rye bread is still made by placing the dough inside a tin and burying it in the hot earth near to the springs until it is fully steamed (which usually takes around twenty-four hours).