Consider the Fork: How Technology Transforms the Way We Cook and Eat

Consider the Fork: How Technology Transforms the Way We Cook and Eat

Bee Wilson

Language: English

Pages: 353

ISBN: 2:00237776

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Since prehistory, humans have striven to tame fire and ice, and have braved the business ends of mashers, scrapers, and razor-sharp knives—all in the name of creating something delicious (or, at least, edible). The technology of food matters even when we barely notice it is there, but in recent years kitchen technology has become increasingly elaborate and eye-catching, transforming the old-fashioned home kitchen into a bristling stainless steel laboratory. Far from a new development, however, the modern kitchen is only the most recent iteration of an ancient lineage of food technology, as acclaimed food historian Bee Wilson reveals in Consider the Fork.

Many of our technologies for preparing food have remained strikingly consistent for thousands of years. The Greeks and Romans already had pestles and mortars. Knives—perhaps mankind’s most important gastronomic tool—predate the discovery of that other basic technology, fire. Other tools emerged quite suddenly (like the microwave, whose secrets were unlocked during radar tests conducted during World War II) or in fits and starts (like the fork, which had to endure centuries of ridicule before finally gaining widespread acceptance). For every technology that has endured, others have fallen by the wayside. We no longer feel the need for andirons and bastables, cider owls and dangle spits, even though in their day these would have seemed no more superfluous than our oil drizzlers and electric herb choppers.

The evolution of food technology offers a unique window into human history, and Wilson blends history, science, and personal anecdotes as she traces the different technologies that have shaped—or slashed, pounded, whisked, or heated (and reheated)—our meals over the centuries. Along the way she reveals some fascinating facts—showing, for instance, how China’s cuisine, its knives, and its eating utensils are all the product of the country’s historically scarce fuel supply. To conserve energy, chefs rendered their ingredients quick-cooking by using large, multi-purpose chopping knives to reduce food to small, bite-sized morsels. This technique, in turn, gave rise to the chopstick, which cannot cut. What’s more, the discovery of the knife—in Asia and elsewhere—was likely what gave humans our distinctive overbite. Before humans learned to fashion knives out of sharpened rocks, many of us cut our food by clamping it in our front teeth, which gave us perfectly aligned rows of teeth.

But Wilson shows that, far from being adventurous innovators, cooks are a notoriously conservative bunch, and only adopt new technologies with great reluctance. The gas range revolutionized cooking when it was first introduced in the 19th century by promising to end “hearth deaths,” a constant danger for women wearing billowing, flammable clothing. But indoor gas cooking—safer and more efficient—was nevertheless greeted with widespread suspicion when it was first introduced. Many chefs feared it would taint their food or poison their guests. The same hold true for the refrigerator, which was initially condemned as an unnatural technology that risked changing the fundamental “essence” of food. Perhaps the one exception to this technophobia, says Wilson, was the egg beater, new patents for which proliferated so astonishingly in late 19th-century America.

In this fascinating history, Wilson reveals the myriad innovations that have shaped our diets today. An insightful look at how we’ve changed food and how food has changed us, Consider the Fork reveals the astonishing ways in which the implements we...

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All its glory. It is an awe-inspiring piece of equipment. Looking at it, you can see why cauldrons were often passed on in wills; they were weighty pieces of engineering. Once metal cookware was possible, it wasn’t long before all the basic pots and pans were established. The Romans had a patella— a metal pan for shallow-frying fish that gave its name to the Spanish paella and the Italian padella—little different from our frying pans. The ability to boil things in oil— which is really what frying.

Scalded to death, the woman must do penance for her negligence but the man is acquitted of blame.” Aside from the injustice of this, it speaks of a world in which children of two or three were at high risk of toddling into hot fires and cauldrons. Women were at risk, too, because of their long, trailing dresses. Medieval coroners’ reports listing accidental deaths indicate that women were more likely to die accidentally in the home than anywhere else. Little girls died at open hearths playing.

And the ale gallon, all representing different amounts. The ale gallon was bigger than the wine gallon (around 4.62 liters as opposed to 3.79 liters), as if reflecting the fact that ale is usually drunk in bigger quantities than wine. It’s all too easy to succumb to this kind of unhinged logic when thinking about how to measure things. It’s like Nigel, the rock star in the film This Is Spinal Tap, who believes that to make music louder you need to create an amp that goes up to eleven instead of.

Take three hours to beat adequately. When I was young, my mother used to bake old-fashioned British tea-time cakes—Madeira or cherry or Dundee—always preparing the batter with a wooden spoon in a homely ceramic mixing bowl. We creamed the butter and sugar by hand before adding the eggs. I can still remember the dull throb in my arms, the feeling of sheer enervation that came upon us by the time the butter and the sugar were fully creamed. Yet the whole process took no longer than ten minutes,.

Electric mixers were industrial, with a dimension of eighty quarts. In 1919, however, Hobart launched an offshoot, KitchenAid, providing a scaled-down countertop version for restaurants, weighing sixty-nine pounds. This was then scaled down still further for the home kitchen. The KitchenAid is still the all-American mixer par excellence, a great chunk of metal, like a Humvee, but in pretty colors like a Cadillac (meringue, red, pearl gray); such a mixer turns the airy layer cakes and frostings so.

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