Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (7 page)

At E. Dehillerin, the oldest surviving kitchen shop in Paris, you can still worship at the temple of copper cookware. The green-fronted shop is replete with vessels you never knew you needed: a snail dish for cooking garlic snails, molds for the most fanciful patisseries, tiny sauce pans that really are intended tor sauce making, a press for making a very specific dish of pressed duck in which the carcass is crushed until the organ juices run out, lidded ragout pans, stockpots, and yes, even a copper turbotière that looks very like the one at Petworth. This place seems to be infused with the spirit of Julia Child, who began her
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
with a stern piece of advice: do not be a pot saver. “A pot saver is a self-hampering cook. Use all the pans, bowls and equipment you need.”

William Verrall was an eighteenth-century chef and the landlord of the White Hart Inn in Lewes, Sussex, who published a cookbook in 1759. Verrall had no time for those kitchens that attempted to make do with “one poor solitary stewpan” and a single frying pan “black as my hat.” For Verrall, it was obvious that “a good dinner cannot be got up to look neat and pretty without proper utensils to work it in, such as neat stew-pans of several sizes” and omelette pans and soup pots. Verrall tells the tale of “half of a very grand dinner” being entirely spoiled “by misplacing only one stewpan.”

This new fussiness about pans, from the eighteenth century onward, was fueled by a resurgence in the English copper industry. Previously, supplies of copper had been imported from Sweden. In 1689, however, the Swedish monopoly was canceled and English copper began to be produced—much of it in Bristol—in larger quantities and at a much lower cost. This paved the way for dressers heaving with copper pans. The French term
batterie
de
cuisine
—which became the universal way to refer to cooking equipment from the early nineteenth century on—harks back to copper pans.
A batterie
was copper that had literally been battered into shape.

The Victorian copper
batterie
is in its way the high point of the long history of pots and pans. The combination of craftsmanship, the quality of the metal itself, a preparedness to tailor the equipment to the requirements of cooking, and the existence of wealthy kitchens equipped with the battalion of cooks needed to keep track of the various vessels, would never be equaled, unless in the twentieth-century kitchens of French haute cuisine.

It is interesting, then, that despite their fabulously well-equipped kitchens, the Victorians have a reputation for having ruined British cooking, reducing everything to a mass of brown Windsor soup. Some historians have argued that this reputation is unjustified. But there is no getting away from the question of vegetables. Victorian and Regency recipes consistently tell us to boil vegetables for many times longer than we know they need. Broccoli: twenty minutes. Asparagus: fifteen-eighteen minutes. Carrots (this one is really criminal): forty-five minutes to an hour. What good is it having state-of-the-art pans in which to boil things if you have not worked out the basic method for boiling vegetables?

It is possible, however, that the Victorians did not abuse their vegetables quite as much as we suppose. The assumption has generally been that the Victorians overcooked their vegetables because they did not give the matter enough thought. But maybe the opposite was true: they overthought it. Nineteenth-century food writers were highly sensitive both to the texture of what they were cooking—like
us, they sought to cook vegetables until “tender”—and to the vigor with which they boiled things. It is true that they feared the indigestibility of undercooked vegetables—as cooks had for centuries: raw vegetables had been deemed harmful ever since the humoral medicine of the Greeks. But they no less feared spoiling vegetables by overcooking them. William Kitchiner, author of
The Cook’s Oracle
, noted that when cooking asparagus, “Great care must be taken to watch the exact time of their becoming tender; take them up just at that instant, and they will have their true flavour and colour: a minute or two more boiling destroys both.” These are not the words of someone who intends to produce vegetable mush. It also seems an odd thing to say, given that Kitchiner has just recommended that we boil our asparagus for twenty to thirty minutes. Then again, he ties it in a bundle, and it does take much longer that way than when boiled as individual stalks.

The long boiling times were not arrived at mindlessly. We sometimes patronizingly forget that great thought has always gone into how best to cook. Most nineteenth-century recipe writers were keen to offer advice based on “scientific” or at least “rational” evidence. The most important fact about boiling, so far as they were concerned, was that the temperature of boiling water never rose above 212°F—after that, it turns to steam, but it can never get hotter. Scientists such as Count Rumford lamented the fuel inefficiency of cooking food at a galloping boil: what was the point, when it did not raise the temperature of the water? It was just a waste of energy. In 1815, Robertson Buchanan, an expert on fuel economy, noted that once it has reached the boiling point, “water remains at the same pitch of temperature, however fiercely it boils”; cookery writers often quoted Buchanan on this point. William Kitchiner said he had experimented with placing a thermometer in water “in that state which cooks call gentle simmering; the heat was 212°F, i.e., the same degree as the strongest boiling.” The logic of this was that it was best to boil things at a slow simmer. In 1868, Pierre Blot, professor of gastronomy at the New York Cooking Academy, launched an attack on
those—housewives and professional cooks alike—who “abused” the art of boiling by boiling “fast instead of slowly”: “Set a small ocean of water on a brisk fire and boil something in it as fast as you can, you make as much steam but do not cook faster; the degree of heat being the same as if you were boiling slowly” When it came to meat cookery, this advice to simmer slowly rather than to boil rapidly was good (“The slower it boils,” said Kitchiner, “the tenderer, the plumper and whiter it will be”). But with vegetables—potatoes aside—the slow simmer was not such a boon. It resulted in vastly elongated cooking times, all the more so because cooks in possession of a fine
batterie de cuisine.
were inclined to boil food in the smallest pan possible. Here is Kitchiner again:

Kitchiner then quotes the maxim “A little pot is soon hot.” This saying, popular in Victorian times, is certainly true. But a little pan filled with a small amount of slowly simmering water takes far longer to cook carrots than a biggish pan of properly boiling water. The advantage of having only one or two large pans instead of a panoply of every size is that you do not have the option of fitting the food to the pot. You have to give it lots of room. The worst of all worlds are those kitchens with only a few pans, all of them too small, so that when you add food to the pan it takes an age before it returns to the boiling point.

Nineteenth-century vegetables were probably far less overcooked than you might guess from the cooking times alone, especially when you take into account the fact that the vegetables themselves were different: modern seed varieties and growing methods tend to yield more tender plants. Victorian asparagus would have been stalkier, as a rule; greens and carrots would have been tougher. Even with our
tender modern vegetables, the Victorian method of boiling does not result in total sogginess. I’ve tried slowly simmering sliced carrots crammed in a little pan for forty-five minutes. Amazingly, they still have some bite to them, though not as much as when they are thrown into a large stainless steel pan of water at a rolling boil for five minutes, or, better still, steamed in a steamer.

The Victorian mastery of boiling technology was flawed. It’s perfectly right that at normal pressure you can never get water hotter than 212°F (at higher pressures, it can get much hotter, which is why a pressure cooker cooks food so fast). But this is not the only factor determining how fast food boils. Also important is ebullition—the extent to which boiling water bubbles. In basic terms, heat transfer in cooking is determined by the difference in temperature between the food and the source of heat. On paper, therefore, the Victorian logic looks sound: once you have gotten cooking water at or near 212°F, it shouldn’t really make much of a difference whether the water is vigorously bubbling or only simmering. Yet our eyes and taste buds tell us that it does. The reason is that properly boiling water moves chaotically and transfers heat to the food several times faster than simmering water. The heat transfer also works quicker when there is more water in the pan in proportion to the food. A large pan with plenty of water and not too many vegetables in it will cook far faster than a perfectly tailored little copper pan crammed to capacity. This explains why even when Victorians advise boiling vegetables “briskly,” as Isabella Beeton sometimes does in
Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management,
the cooking times are still long.

We of the pasta generation know this instinctively. We may not be able to rustle up a meat glaze or a charlotte russe. If you gave us a copper turbot kettle, we would have no idea what to do with it, not that this matters, because the fillets of fish we mostly consume are fine when poached in a normal pan. But we mostly understand how to fast-boil far better than the Victorians: we take a package of fusilli, get out our largest pot, and boil it as fast as we can in an abundance of water for ten minutes until perfectly al dente, before tossing with
butter or a rich tomatoey sauce. The single thing we look for in a pasta pot is large volume. Having mastered this skill, we can easily transfer it to vegetables: four minutes for broccoli, six for green beans, anoint with sea salt and a spritz of lemon and eat. Victorian cooks performed many feats far more daunting: jellies shaped like castles, architectural pies. But the simplicity of boiled vegetables was beyond them.

Victorian boiled food had another drawback: the pans themselves. Copper is a wonderful conductor of heat; the only pan metal more conductive is silver. But pure copper is poisonous when it comes into contact with food, particularly acids. Copper pans were thinly lined with neutral tin, but over time the surface of the tin wore down, exposing the copper beneath. “Let your pans be frequently retinned” is common advice in cookbooks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If human beings then were anything like human beings now, cooks must often have postponed retinning the pans and ended up poisoning those they cooked for. Cooks ignorant of the ill effects of copper actually sought out its greening powers, using unlined copper pans to make pickled green walnuts and green gherkins. In short, copper pans are great, apart from the fact that they potentially make food taste bad and poison you. Suddenly, those shiny Victorian
batteries de cuisine.
do not look quite so desirable.

 

T
he search for the ideal cooking pot is not easy. There is always a trade-off. As the great food writer James Beard once put it: “Even in this best of all possible worlds, there is no such thing a perfect metal for pots.”

We expect many things of a good pan, and not all of them are to be found in a single material. First and foremost, it should be highly conductive, so that it heats food quickly and distributes heat evenly across the base (no hot spots!). It should balance well in the hand and be light and easy to maneuver on the stove top, with a handle you can use without burning yourself. But we also want it to be dense and solid enough to withstand high heat without buckling, chipping, or
cracking. The ideal pan should have a surface that is nonreactive, nonstick, noncorrosive, easy to clean, and long lasting. It should have a pretty shape and sit well on the burner. Oh, and it shouldn’t cost a fortune. Over and above all this, a truly great pot has some quality—impossible to quantify—that makes it not just functional but lovable:
Hello, old friend,
you think, as you haul it out once again.

Traditionally, cookbooks started with a list of equipment required. As the author runs through the range of materials from which a pan might be constructed, there is a constant air of ambivalence, of “Yes, but . . . ” Ceramic, for example, is great until it cracks. Ditto, glass ovenware or Pyrex, which is fine in the oven but fragile over a flame. Aluminum is good for omelettes, but you can’t put acidic foods in it. Silver is said to be excellent except for the deluxe price tag (and the subsequent pain when it is lost or stolen); but silver-cooked foods taste of tarnish unless the pans are kept scrupulously clean. Heavy black cast-iron pans are the favorites of many cooks. Cast-iron vessels have been used for hundreds of years and are still the choice for such homely dishes as tarte tatin in France and cornbread in the United States. “Put on the skillet, put on the lead / Mamma’s goin‘ to make a little shortnin’ bread,” sings Paul Robeson. If well seasoned, a cast-iron skillet has excellent nonstick properties, and because it is so heavy, it can withstand the high heat needed for searing. The downside is that these pans rust nastily if not dried and oiled carefully after use. They also leach small amounts of iron into the food (though this is a benefit if you are anemic).