Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (42 page)

The OXO peeler represents a great piece of lateral thinking. You might assume that the way to build a better peeler would be to focus on the blade. Farber saw that the key for the cook using it was really
the handle. The OXO’s blade is super sharp, and angled like the old carbon-steel swivel peelers. What makes it different, however, is the soft, chunky, slightly ugly, black handle. It is made from Santoprene, a sturdy but softish compound of plastic and rubber, with little fins along the top, similar to those on bicycle handles, to absorb pressure. The shape is a fat oval, to prevent it from spinning in your hand. It feels comforting. It also really works, taking off just a paper-thin outer layer of peel. No matter how hard you press against a fruit or vegetable as you whisk off its skin, it doesn’t hurt. With an OXO, you can even peel rock-hard butternut squashes, knobbly quinces, furry kiwifruits.

The OXO peeler was a game-changer. More than 10 million have been sold to date, and it threw open the entire market in peelers, causing numerous rivals to be invented: serrated fruit peelers, vegetable peelers with curved blades, Y-shaped and C-shaped and U-shaped peelers in any color you desire (and many you don’t). Thirty years ago, if you went into a high-class kitchenware shop, you might see twenty different melon ballers—round cut, oval cut, double-ended, fluted, from large to small—but probably just two peelers, the Rex and the Lancashire. Peelers were regarded as hardware, a relic of the old scullery, when peeling vegetables was drudge work. Now the situation is reversed. Melon ballers have largely been banished from the kitchen, rejected as pretentious, whereas peelers are offered in every possible permutation. The owner of one UK kitchenware shop told me recently that he stocked sixty different peelers, allowing for all the color variations.

Peelers that work without discomfort are part of a new ergonomics in the kitchen. In the non-electrical utensils department, there are now ergonomic spatulas and ergonomic colanders, cushy soft-handled whisks and silicone basting brushes. Ergonomics is the study of designing equipment that fits the limitations and abilities of the human body. All kitchen tools should be ergonomic, because their role has—in theory—always been to help humans cook. But it is striking how often traditional designs have hindered our movement
around a kitchen in small ways we do not even notice until a better way is shown. Until Microplane graters were launched in 1994—whose inspiration came when a Canadian housewife borrowed one of her husband’s wood rasps to grate the zest for an orange cake—we accepted the fact that grating citrus was an inherently vexing task: it consisted of mangling a lemon on the smallest holes of a box grater, then desperately scraping off the meager strands of zest with a spoon. It turns out that all we needed was a better, sharper tool. Microplaned zest falls out with the easy grace of dandelion fluff.

Many of these ergonomic tools seem to bring us closer to the old preindustrial ways, when people tended to make their own tools. The household wooden spoon felt just right because it was whittled just for you. So much high-tech gadgetry is alienating because—however impressive it may be on its own terms—it seems to be doing battle with the human body. Ergonomic peelers and graters, on the other hand, are part of a new friendliness in kitchen objects: a willingness to address not just culinary problems, but problems in the way we experience cooking. Like the modernists, the designers of these new ergonomic tools approach the kitchen in a spirit of “why not?” The difference is that the aim of the question is not to reinvent cooking, but to make it easier.

For most cooks, ergonomics is a more useful way of thinking about the modern kitchen than whether something is high-tech or not. In the end, what you want from tools is not that they should be advanced but that they should work: to perform the job as helpfully as possible and fit with your particular kitchen and body, whether you are cooking for one, two, or many. In a single person’s kitchen, this might mean one of those new boiling-water faucets (the Quooker) that enables you to make one portion of soothing pasta at the end of a long workday, very fast. For a big family, it might mean a steam oven, set on time delay to provide a tray of hot, nutritious food at a preordained time without any arguments over whose turn it is to make lunch. I recently visited a kitchen whose owners had tried to
build everything on virtuous green principles, minimizing waste and carbon output. The work surfaces were all reclaimed; the German induction range was super-energy-efficient; the food to emerge from the eco pans was vegetarian. In contrast to the kitchens of the past, no one was exploited here; the cooking was shared fairly and evenly between the couple. The most inventive thing about the design of this room was also the simplest: they asked their carpenter to make their storage cupboard for cans and jars much shallower than normal, to stop them wasting food.

The most ergonomic tool for a given kitchen may or may not be the most newfangled. The kitchen island is a recent addition to our cooking lives, whose aim was to prevent the cook from facing the wall, but whose effect in many kitchens is to obstruct movement and imprison the person cooking behind the stove. To my mind, a kitchen table is a far more useful and sociable work surface. But you may disagree. Tools justify themselves—or not—through use. I know someone, a friend of my late grandmother, who has just given up on electric kettles—which most in Britain regard as an utterly indispensable technology—after one too many fuses blew. After decades of disappointing electric models, she had had enough and bought herself an old-fashioned stovetop whistling teakettle instead. It suits her better, she says. This is why, to answer Herve This’s question, we still cook with whisks, fire, and saucepans as they did in medieval times. We do so because most of the time, in most kitchens, whisks, fire, and saucepans still do the job pretty well. All we want is better whisks, better fire, and better saucepans.

 

S
ometimes, you see mock-ups of historic kitchens. They might be part of an exhibition on ancient food or may be a bit of promotion for a kitchen appliance firm: a colorful look back at the history of our ovens! These mock-ups almost always make the same subtle mistake. It’s not anachronism that’s the problem: no Elizabethan televisions or 1920s computers. It’s that these rooms are
too
authentic. Everything is made to fit the period in question; like a showroom
kitchen, everything matches. A mock-up 1940s kitchen, for example, will include no item that wasn’t made in the 1940s: there will be a 1940s toaster, 1940s pots and pans, a 1940s gas oven, a 1940s radio and 1940s chairs. Real kitchens aren’t like that. In the kitchens we actually inhabit, old and new technologies overlap and coexist. A thirty-year-old housewife of 1940 would have had parents born in the nineteenth century; her grandparents would have been high Victorians, toasting bread by a grate with a fork; are we really to suppose that these earlier lives left no trace on her kitchen? No salamander? None of grandmother’s cast-iron pans?

In the kitchen, old and new stand side by side as companions. In the grand kitchens of the past, when a new piece of equipment was adopted, it did not necessarily edge out the old. Successive tools were added on top, but the original ways of cooking could be glimpsed underneath, like a palimpsest.

Calke Abbey is an old Derbyshire house whose inhabitants, the Harpur family, hardly threw anything away. It now belongs to the National Trust and remains in a state of considerable decrepitude. The large old kitchen is really a series of kitchens, one on top of the other, each representing a slice of time. This stone-flagged room was first fitted as a kitchen in 1794 (before that, it may have been a chapel). The kitchen clock was bought in Derby that year. Also original to 1794 is a vast old roasting hearth, with a clockwork spit-jack on top. In front of this fire, beef would once have turned on its spits. But sometime in the 1840s, roasting must have been abandoned, as a closed-off cast-iron oven was shoved into this hearth. Later, this oven, too, must have failed to meet the household’s needs, for in 1889, a second hearth was added with an additional cast-iron stove. Meanwhile, along another wall there is an eighteenth-century-style stewing stove set in brickwork, used for stewing and sauces. Finally, in the 1920s the inhabitants installed a modern Beeston boiler for hot water alongside the old ranges. At no stage did anyone think to remove any of the previous cooking tools. In 1928, with the number of servants in the house suddenly reduced, the room was abruptly
abandoned; a new, more functional kitchen was set up elsewhere in the house. The old kitchen remains now as it was in 1928. A dresser still stands, filled with rusting pots and pans. The spit-jack and the kitchen clock still hang on the walls, just where they were first placed.

Of course, most households are more ruthless about discarding things when they fall out of use. But kitchens remain extremely good at accommodating both old and new under a single roof. There is something sad as well as wasteful about the current impulse to start a kitchen from scratch: to rip out every trace of the cooks who came before you. It feels forgetful. Kitchens in general have never been so highly designed; so well equipped; so stylish; or so soulless. In the 1910s, the ideal was the “rational” kitchen; later, in the 1940s and 1950s, it was the “beautiful” kitchen. Now, it is the “perfect” kitchen. Everything must match and fit, from ivory ceiling to limestone floor. Every element must be “contemporary.” Anything shabby or out of place is discarded (unless you’ve gone for “shabby chic” as your vibe).

It’s an illusion, of course. In the most highly designed modern kitchen, we are still drawing on the tools and techniques of the past. As you grasp your shiny tongs to whip up a modern dish of wok-fired squid and greens or linguini with butternut squash and red chili, you are still doing an old, old thing: using the transformative power of fire to make something taste better. Our kitchens are filled with ghosts. You may not see them, but you could not cook as you do without their ingenuity: the potters who first enabled us to boil and stew; the knife forgers; the resourceful engineers who designed the first refrigerators; the pioneers of gas and electric ovens; the scale makers; the inventors of eggbeaters and peelers.

The food we cook is not only an assemblage of ingredients. It is the product of technologies, past and present. One sunny day, I decide to make a quick omelette for my lunch, a puffy golden oval in the French rolled tradition. On paper, it consists of nothing but eggs (free range); sweet, cold butter; and sea salt, but the true components
are many more. There is the fridge from which I fetch the butter and the old battered aluminium frying pan in which I cook it, whose surface is seasoned from ten years of use. There is the balloon whisk that beats the eggs, though a fork would do just as well. The countless cookery writers whose words warned me not to
over
beat. The gas burner that enables me to get the pan hot enough but not so hot the eggs burn or get rubbery. The spatula that rolls the golden-brown omelette onto the plate. Thanks to all these technologies, the omelette has on this occasion, for this particular solitary lunch, worked. I am pleased. The entire mood of an afternoon can be spoiled or improved by lunch.

There is still one more component to this meal, however: the impulse to make it in the first place. Kitchens only come alive when you cook in them. What really drives technology is the desire to use it. This omelette lunch would never have been made without my mother, who first taught me that the kitchen was a place where good things happen.