Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (40 page)

The modernist movement in cooking does not represent the only good way to make a meal. Even Nathan Myhrvold admits that some of the most delicious food now being served anywhere in America comes from the motherly kitchen of Alice Waters, the chef proprietor of Chez Panisse in Berkeley and great guru of the organic movement, whose cooking is of the old pots-and-pans variety. Waters does not own a microwave, never mind a sous-vide machine. Her approach to food starts not by asking “why not?” but by asking “what is fresh and good just now?” Waters does not feel the need to reinvent such things as corn on the cob, happily shucking the plumpest summer cobs and boiling for a few minutes in unsalted water. In 2011, Waters was asked on a radio program what she thought of the new wave of high-tech cooking. She replied that it didn’t “feel real” to her. “I think there are good scientists and crazy old scientists that can be very amusing but it’s more like a museum to me. It’s not a way of eating that we need.”

The disagreement between Waters and the modernists shows how different strategies for cooking can coexist in the kitchen now. In the distant past, the arrival of a new technology often wiped out an old one. Pottery supplanted pit ovens (except among the Polynesians). The refrigerator replaced the icebox. The case with the new modernist gadgets is different. Sous-vide will not kill off the griddle or the stockpot. We have countless options now available to us, both low-tech and high-tech. Do we wish to cook like a grandmother or like a mad scientist? Either way is possible. We might decide to splurge on a sous-vide machine. Or not. We might think we’d rather
have delicious cooking smells than the world’s juiciest steak. As Alice Waters says, there is no
need
to cook like the scientists. There are plenty of other ways to make a delicious meal in the modern kitchen. The thing that defines our culinary life now is not this or that technique, but the fact that we can choose from so many different technologies when we amble into our kitchens and ponder what to cook.

 

W
hen considering the high-tech kitchen, it’s easy to fixate on gadgets and to forget that the single biggest piece of technology on display in the modern kitchen is the kitchen itself, as a room. Many of our individual kitchen tools are ancient. In Pompeii, there were already familiar pots and pans, funnels, sieves, knives, pestles, and spoons. But there was nothing quite like our kitchens.

The majority of households, for most of history, have not possessed a separate, purpose-built room in which to cook. For the ancient Greeks, cooking went on in a variety of different rooms, as portable baking ovens and portable terracotta braziers were shunted from room to room. There was thus no kitchen in an architectural sense. A remarkable range of Greek kitchen utensils have been unearthed by archaeologists: casseroles and saucepans, cleavers, ladles, and even a cheese grater. But these impressive tools had no kitchen to house them. Most excavations have unearthed not the slightest trace of a fixed hearth or kitchen in Greek dwellings before the fourth century BC.

The Anglo-Saxons, too, often lacked kitchens, because many did their cooking outdoors, especially in the summer months. The kitchen ceiling was the sky; the ground was the kitchen floor. Odors and smoke dissipated in the open air. This was a freer, more open-ended way of cooking food than we have with our boxed-off kitchens, though it must have had considerable drawbacks in rainy
weather, or when there was ice, wind, or snow. During the winter, these kitchenless households would have relied a good deal on bread and cheese.

In the cottages of medieval Europe, on the other hand, there were usually fixed indoor hearths, but the room that housed the cooking fire was living room, bedroom, and bathroom as well as kitchen. In a one-room dwelling, cooking was just another activity to fit in amid the dirt and crowding. The pottage in the cauldron on the fire was part of the furnishing of the room. This continued to be the standard way for the poor to live for centuries; for millions, it still is. Several of the seventeenth-century paintings and etchings of Adriaen van Ostade depict the lives of Dutch peasants. Grimy families are shown clustered around a hearth. Dogs yap in the background. Babies are suckled. Pots and pans and baskets of clothes lie strewn on the floor. Men smoke pipes. A cleaver hangs on the wall. It looks nothing like any kitchen we would know. But here and there are hints of cooking activity; bowls with spoons in them; a coffee pot; something warming in a pan. It need hardly be said that the food produced in such a room cannot have borne much relation to the ambitious dinner-party constructions of the modern cook. Nor can it have been easy to perform simple tasks we take for granted: to chop an onion or beat an egg.

Most peoples’ cooking lives were entirely untouched by all the great innovations in kitchen technology of the eighteenth and nineteenth century: the clockwork jack, the automatic knife cleaner, the Dover eggbeater; all these passed them by. Why would you want an eggbeater if you never beat eggs? Except for the enclosure of the fire in a grate, not much changed in the culinary possibilities for the poor from ancient to modern times. Well into the twentieth century, poor Scottish and Irish cottagers still cooked their meals on a frying pan balanced over a grate, alongside wet boots and drying laundry. Tenement living in the towns could be even worse. Charlie Chaplin grew up in a derelict attic room shared with his mother and brother. The entire “stifling” room measured twelve feet square. In one corner
was an old iron bed, shared by the three of them. Dirty plates and teacups crowded on a table. Chaplin recalled the stench, the “air . . . foul with stale slop and old clothes.” The only means of cooking was a “small fire-grate” between the bed and the window.

In such one-room dwellings, the kitchen was both nowhere and everywhere. Nowhere, because the inhabitants lacked most of the things we would consider necessary for cooking: a sink for doing dishes, work surfaces, and storage. Everywhere, because there was no escape from the stink and the heat of the fire. Cooking is my favorite activity, but under such circumstances, I’d rather not cook at all. The phenomenon of people who live off nothing but takeout is not a new one. Beginning in medieval times, pie sellers were always a feature of British towns, serving those living in cramped one-up, one-down cottages where there was no kitchen as such.

Part of the luxury of having a kitchen is the ability to distance yourself physically from cooking when you choose. In rich European medieval houses, this was taken to an extreme by building wooden kitchens that were entirely detached from the main house. All of the food requirements of the household—the baking and cheese making as well as the roasting—could be carried out in this single, specialized building. Those living in the main house could enjoy the benefits of food cooked in a large kitchen without having to endure any of the fumes or grease, or the fear that the kitchen would catch fire and burn the house down. When these kitchens did burn down, as happened periodically, new ones could be built without disturbing the main structure of the house. The one great drawback of such outhouse kitchens was that food cooled down as it was ferried through into the dining room.

In other great medieval establishments, there were vast high-ceilinged stone-floored kitchens built as part of the main house. The biggest practical difference between these kitchens and the ones we have today was that they were communal, like the famous Abbot’s Kitchen at Glastonbury, an octagonal room with a hearth vast enough to roast an entire ox. This was a space whose equipment
needed to be able to answer the appetites of an entire community of monks. Our own built-in kitchens, aimed at feeding a single family, or in many cases a single person, look individualist by comparison.

But one room was seldom enough to contain the multiple culinary activities of the grand residences of centuries gone by. As of the 1860s, a British country house typically contained numerous rooms, each devoted to different aspects of kitchen work. It was like having an entire block of food shops under one roof. There was a pantry, or dry larder, for storing bread, butter, milk, and cooked meat: this room needed to be kept cool and dry; architects had to ensure that no hearths were built in adjacent walls. The wet larder was where raw meat and fish were kept, along with fruits and vegetables. In larger houses, there was a further game larder, with hooks for hanging the game and a marble dresser for preparing it. Other culinary rooms included the dairy for churning butter, making cream and cheese; the bakehouse, containing a brick oven to supply the household with bread; a smokehouse; and perhaps a salting room for salting bacon and making pickles; and another room for pastry, with a well-lit table for crimping pasties together or making ornate pie toppings. The existence of the pastry room reflected the aristocratic love of architectural raised pies and fancy tarts.

The least desirable room to work in would have been the scullery (hence the term scullery maid), which was the place for doing all the unpleasant pedestrian jobs: peeling vegetables, gutting fish, and washing dishes, no easy job when your only tools were boiling water, grimy rags, and soap. The scullery was dominated by a vast copper boiler for supplying wash water, and capacious stone sinks and plate-drying racks. It would have smelled of stale food and greasy suds. The floor needed to be angled so that the constant splashes of dirty water flowed off into a drain.

With the most unpleasant tasks confined to the scullery, the rich country house kitchen itself could be very pleasant. It was a room whose function was purely cooking, with none of the laundry work/dishwashing/food storage that we tend to cram into our
kitchens. It tended to be a large stone-floored room—perhaps twenty by thirty feet—with expansive windows and whitewashed walls, dominated by a wooden kitchen table in the center on which were placed various work boards. Doors led off to the scullery and the larders. The kitchen would contain a dresser for utensils, and gleaming copper pots on shelves. There was plenty of room for the various cooks and cooks’ maids to bustle about their business, cooking over the multiple heat sources, baking in the oven, making sauces over the stewing stove, steaming in a bain-marie, or roasting at the fire. When you visit a stately home and stand in such a kitchen, it is easy to feel a twinge of envy for all the spacious scrubbed wood, and to compare it with your own cramped galley kitchen at home and sigh. But sigh no more. These kitchens might be beautifully appointed, but they did not belong to the people doing the cooking: this was a place of work, not leisure. “Waste Not Want Not” was emblazoned on the walls of many of these kitchens, a reminder not to pilfer the food, because it was not yours. In the cities, Victorian kitchen drudges worked in more cramped conditions. The kitchen was often placed in a dank, beetle-infested basement, so that the unseemly business of cooking could be kept out of view, while the poor cooks sweltered unseen, hunching over their cast-iron kitcheners. Such Victorian kitchens had more in common with a professional restaurant kitchen than with our own home-cooking areas.

The great change of the twentieth century was the creation of new middle-class kitchens aimed at the people who were actually going to be doing the eating as well as the cooking. These new spaces were different from either the squalid one-room kitchen/living rooms of the preindustrial masses or the servant-run kitchens of the privileged. They were hygienic, floored with linoleum and powered by gas and electricity. The biggest change was that they were designed specifically around the needs of the people who used them. In 1893, Mrs. E. E. Kellogg (wife of the breakfast-cereal magnate) wrote that it was a “mistake” to think that just any room, “however small and
unpleasantly situated is ‘good enough’ for a kitchen.” Kellogg was part of a new “scientific” women’s movement that sought to dignify the kitchen as a “household workshop.”

The kitchen, thought Kellogg, was the key to the happiness of an entire family: it was the heart of a home. This idea is now so obvious to us, it is hard to register that it was not always so. Food has been a constant need in our lives, but the room from which it emanates has only existed in its current form since around the time of World War I. Humans have always cooked, but the concept of the “ideal kitchen” is a very modern invention.

 

T
he “kitchen of tomorrow” was a staple of twentieth-century life. There is a certain poignancy in looking back at photos of the futuristic kitchens of the past. You see people gazing in wonder at appliances that would now be considered rickety and archaic: tiny split-level electric ovens, miniscule fridges. Yesterday’s future is tomorrow’s junk. Or else you see that the vision of the future never took off. What seemed to be a new beginning was really a blind alley. One of the proudest exhibits at the British Ideal Home Exhibition in 1926 was a curious contraption consisting of a stovetop kettle with two saucepans joined on either side, so that three things could be cooked at once: a miracle energy-saving device that now looks like a joke. Gadgets that counted as futuristic on the eve of World War I included a thermos coffee pot that allowed coffee to be made hours in advance; potato ricers; revolving Lazy Susans (also known as Silent Waitresses because they saved women the trouble of waiting on their family at dinner); slaw cutters (mandolins for shredding raw cabbage); food choppers; cake mixers; ovens with glass doors to check the progress of food as it cooked; and above all, a heat source with modern fuel, whether kerosene, oil, or gas.