Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (6 page)

 

D
espite the ingenuity of the Romans, most domestic cooks from the Bronze Age until the eighteenth century had to make do with a single big pot: the cauldron (often called a kettle or kittle). It was by far the largest utensil in the Northern European kitchen, and the one around which culinary activity was focused. Once the Romans had fallen, the range of cookware shrank back to basics. From a pot for every occasion, the one-pot meal was once again the dominant mode of cooking. The cauldron tended to decide for you how you could eat. Boiled, stewed, or braised was usually the answer (though a covered pot could also be used to make bread, which baked or steamed under the lid). The contents of the cauldron could
be fairly repetitive: “Pease porridge hot / Pease porridge cold / Pease porridge in the pot / Nine days old,” as the rhyme goes. A typical modest medieval household owned a knife, a ladle, an earthenware pan, perhaps a spit of some sort, and a cauldron. The knife chopped the ingredients to go in the cauldron along with water. Several hours later, the ladle poured out the finished soup or “pottage.” Supplementary pots took the form of a few cheap earthenware pots, and perhaps a skillet, which is a long-handled pan much smaller than the cauldron, used for heating up milk and cream.

If further kitchen tools were owned, they were most likely accessories to the cauldron. Iron pot cranes or sways, some of them beautifully ornate, were designed to swing the heavy pot and its contents on its hook over the fire and off again, a form of temperature control as instant as flicking a switch, if rather more dangerous. Those who could not afford such elaborate machinery might own a brandreth or two, ingenious little three-legged stands designed to lift the cauldron above the direct heat of the fire. Flesh-hooks and flesh-forks were other cauldron accessories, used for suspending meat over the bubbling liquid or for retrieving things from its depths.

Cauldrons came in many shapes and sizes. In Britain, they were usually “sag-bottomed” (as opposed to pot-bellied) and made of bronze or iron, so that they could withstand the heat of the fire. If they had three legs, this was a sign they were designed to sit in the embers. Iron cooking pots, which tended to be smaller, were round-bellied, with handles for hanging over the fire. Sticks or tongs were used to manipulate the handle, which would become prohibitively hot. Cooking with a single pot could give rise to strange combinations of ingredients, all jumbled together. It is not clear how often the cauldron was cleaned out, in the absence of running water and dish detergent. Mostly, the scrapings of the previous meal were left in the bottom to season the next one.

European folklore is haunted by the specter of the empty cauldron. It is the old equivalent of the empty fridge: a symbol of outright hunger. In Celtic myth, cauldrons are capable of summoning up both
eternal abundance and absolute knowledge. To have a pot and nothing to put in it was the depths of misery. In the story called “Stone Soup” (which has many versions) some travelers come to a village carrying an empty cooking pot and beg for some food. The villagers refuse. The travelers produce a stone and some water and claim they are making “stone soup.” The villagers are so fascinated, they each add a little something to the pot—a few vegetables, some seasoning—until finally the “stone soup” has become a rich cassoulet-like hot pot, from which all can feast.

Acquiring a cauldron required a sizable outlay. In 1412, the worldly goods of Londoners John Cole and his wife, Juliana, included a sixteen-pound cauldron worth four shillings (the cost of an earthenware pot at this time was around a penny, with twelve pennies to the shilling). Once bought or bartered, a metal pot might be repaired many times to prolong its life; if it sprang holes, you would pay a tinker to solder them. A bronze cauldron was dug up in County Down in a bog in 1857. It showed six areas of repair; small holes had been filled in with rivets; larger ones were mended by pouring molten bronze onto the gap.

A cauldron might not be the ideal vessel for every dish. But once acquired, it was likely to be the one and only pot (supplemented, if at all, by a small earthenware vessel or two). Every culture has its own take on the one-pot dish, as well as variations on the specific pot that was used to make it: pot au feu, Irish stew, dobrada, cocido. One-pot cookery is a cuisine of scarcity: scarce fuel, scarce utensils, scarce ingredients. Nothing is wasted. It is no coincidence that food for the relief of poverty has almost always taken the form of soup. If there is not enough to go around, you can always add some more water and bubble it up one more time.

Cooks devised some crafty ways around the limitation of the single pot. By putting vegetables, potatoes, and pudding in separate muslin bags in the boiling water, it was possible to cook more than one thing at once in a single vessel. The pudding might end up tasting a bit cabbagey, and the cabbage rather puddingy, but at least it
made a change from soup. In
Lark Rise to Candleford,
Flora Thompson describes how “tea” was made for the men coming home from the fields:

In the 1930s, the Nazis borrowed the frugal image of the one-pot meal, putting it to ideological use. In 1933, Hitler’s government announced that Germans should put aside one Sunday, from October to March, to eat a one-pot meal: Eintopf. The idea was that people would save enough money in this way to donate whatever was saved to the poor. Cookbooks were hastily rewritten to take account of the new policy. One recipe collection listed no fewer than sixty-nine Eintopfs, including macaroni, goulash, Irish stew, Serbian rice soup, numerous cabbagey medleys, and Old German potato soup.

The Nazi promotion of the Eintopf was a shrewd piece of propaganda. Many in Germany already viewed the Eintopf as the ultimate frugal meal, a dish of sacrifice and suffering. It was said that Germany had managed to beat the French in 1870 in part because the armies had filled their bellies with Erbswurst, a one-pot mixture of pea meal and beef fat, a kind of pease pudding. The Eintopf came with a sea of nostalgic memories.

The Nazis’ celebration of the Eintopf was actually a sign of how most kitchens—in Germany, as elsewhere—had moved beyond one-pot cookery. Like many other fascist symbols, it harks back to the archaic. You could only see the Eintopf as a money saver in a society in which most meals were cooked using more than one pot. By reviving
the fairy-tale peasant ideal of a single cauldron hung on a single pothook, the Nazis inadvertently showed that the days of the cauldron were over. Even though times were tough in 1930s Germany, most cooks—which meant most housewives—expected to have an assortment of pots and pans to cook with, not just one.

 

P
etworth House in Sussex is one of the grandest residences in England. It has descended through the same aristocratic family, the Egremonts, since 1150, though the current building dates to the seventeenth century: a stupendous mansion set in a seven-hundred-acre deer park. It is now managed by the National Trust. Visitors to the kitchen can marvel at the gleaming copper
batterie de cuisine.
on display, more than 1,000 pieces in all: rows of saucepans and stewpans, plus multiple matching lids, all immaculately lined up, from large to small, from left to right, on several vast dressers. The kitchen at Petworth gives you a sense of what it meant to have “a place for everything and everything in its place,” as the cookery writer Mrs. Beeton said. The Petworth cooks would have had exactly the right pot for cooking each dish.

The equipment at Petworth includes stockpots with taps at the bottom to release hot water (like tea urns); multiple stewpans, saute pans, and omelette pans in every size you could wish for; a large braising pan, with an indented lid designed to hold hot embers, so that the food was cooked from above and below at the same time. The pans devoted to fish cookery are a world unto themselves. In the grand old days, there would have been excellent fish from the Sussex coast, and the Petworth cooks were expected to do it justice. The house’s kitchens contain not just fish kettles (with pierced draining plates inside so that a fish could be lifted from its poaching water without disintegrating) and a fish fryer (a round open pan with a wire drainer) but a special turbot pan (diamond shaped to mimic the shape of the fish) and several smaller pans specifically for cooking mackerel.

The kitchen at Petworth was not always so well-equipped. Historian Peter Brears studied inventories of the kitchen, documenting “every single movable item” used by the cooks; every pot, every pan. The first inventory took place in 1632; then 1764; then 1869. These documents offer a snapshot, century after century, of what cooking equipment was available in the richest British kitchens. The most telling detail is this. In 1632, during Stuart times, for all its wealth, Petworth owned not a single stewpan or saucepan. The devices for stewing or boiling at that time were: one large fixed “copper” (a giant vat that held boiling water, used to supply hot water for the whole house, not just for cooking); nine stockpots (or cauldrons); an iron cockle pan and a few fish kettles; and five small brass skillets, three-legged to stand in the fire. This is not a kitchen in which you could concoct an hollandaise or an espagnole sauce. You could stew, poach, or boil, but not with any great finesse. The focus of this kitchen was roasting not boiling: there were twenty-one spits, six dripping pans, three basting ladles, and five gridirons.

By 1764, this had all changed. Now, Petworth had shrugged off some of its spits (only nine remained) and acquired twenty-four large stewpans, twelve small stewpans, and nine bain-maries and saucepans. This massive increase in the number and variety of pans reflects new styles of cooking. The old heavy spicy medieval ways were on the way out, to be replaced by something fresher and more buttery. An aristocrat in 1764 was familiar with many foods that simply were not known in 1632: with frothy chocolate and crisp cookies; with the sharp, citrusy sauces and truffley ragouts of French nouvelle cuisine. New dishes called for new equipment. Hannah Glasse, one of the most celebrated cookery writers of the eighteenth century, felt it was important to get the right pan when melting butter (a kind of thickened melted butter was starting to be served as a universal sauce to go with meat or fish): a silver pan was always best, she advised.

By 1869, the Petworth kitchens had even more pans. Peter Brears suggests that Victorian cooks would have found the ample equipment of 1764 to be “totally inadequate.” The focus of the kitchen was finally moving away from spit roasting. The real action was now happening in copper pans, resting on steam-heated hotplates. There were also now three steamers, for food that needed gentler water-cooking than boiling. The number of stewpans and saucepans had gone up from forty-five to ninety-six, a sign of the sheer volume and variety of different sauces, glazes, and garnishes required by Victorian cuisine.

Incidentally, what is the difference between a stewpan and a saucepan? Not much, is the answer. In the eighteenth century, saucepans tended to be smaller, suitable for the furious whisking of emulsions and glazes. They did not necessarily have a lid, because they were often used simply for warming up sauces and gravies that had already been made in a stewpan and strained through a sieve. Stewpans were bigger and lidded; they might hold multiple partridges or an assortment of ox cheeks, red wine, and carrots; a chicken fricassee or a delicate liaison of lamb’s sweetbreads and asparagus. The stewpan was what got dinner on the table. Over time, however, the saucepan gained ground. In 1844, Thomas Webster, author of
An Encyclopaedia of Domestic Economy
, wrote that saucepans were “smaller round vessels for boiling, made with a single handle,” whereas stewpans were made with a double handle, one on the lid and one on the pan. He added that stewpans were made of a thicker metal and tended to have a rounded, less angular bottom, which made them easier to clean. We no longer speak of stewpans, using the grand term “saucepans” for all our basic pans, lidded or otherwise, even when we use them for nothing more elevated than heating up a can of beans.

Many kitchens still allude, in a modest way, to the
batterie
de
cuisine,.
It might be a trio of enameled pans stacked in a pot holder; or an orderly row of Le Creuset, arranged from small to large. The
batterie de cuisine.
was one of many new ideas to come out of the
eighteenth century, era of enlightenment and revolution. The thinking behind the
batterie
was the exact opposite of the limitations of one-pot cooking. The idea—which still has fierce believers among the practitioners of haute cuisine—is this: every component of a meal requires its own special vessel. You cannot saute in a sloping-sided frying pan or fry in a straight-sided saute pan. You cannot poach turbot without a turbot kettle. You need the right tool for the job. In part, this reflects the new professionalism of cooking in the eighteenth century and the influence of France.