Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (13 page)

In premodern times, Brace surmises that the main method of eating would have been something he has christened “stuff-and-cut.” As the name suggests, it is not the most elegant way to dine. It goes something like this. First, grasp the food in one of your hands. Then clamp the end of it forcefully between your teeth. Finally, separate the main hunk of food from the piece in your mouth, either with a decisive tug of your hand or by using a cutting implement if you have one at hand, in which case you must be careful not to slice your own lips. This was how our ancestors, armed only with a sharpened flint, or, later, a knife, dealt with chewy food, especially meat. The “stuff-and-cut” school of etiquette continued long after ancient times. Knives changed—from iron to steel, from wood-handled to porcelain-handled—but the method remained.

The growing adoption of knife-and-fork eating in the late eighteenth century marked the demise of “stuff-and-cut” in the West. We will return to the fork (and the chopstick and the spoon) in Chapter 6. For the moment, all we need to consider is this. From medieval to modern times, the fork went from being a weird thing, a pretentious object of ridicule, to being an indispensable part of civilized dining. Instead of stuffing and cutting, people now ate food by pinning it down with the fork and sawing off little pieces with the table knife, popping pieces into the mouth so small that they hardly required chewing. As knives became blunter, so the morsels generally needed to be softer, reducing the need to chew still further.

Brace’s data suggest that this revolution in table manners had an immediate impact on teeth. He has argued that the incisors—from the Latin
incidere,
“to cut”—are misnamed. Their real purpose is not to cut but to clamp food in the mouth—as in the “stuff-and-cut” method of eating. “It is my suspicion,” he wrote, “that if the incisors are used in such a manner several times a day from the time that
they first begin to erupt, they will become positioned so that they normally occlude edge to edge.” Once people start cutting their food up very small using a knife and fork, and popping the morsels into their mouths, the clamping function of the incisors ceases, and the incisors continue to erupt until the top layer no longer meets the bottom layer: creating an overbite.

We generally think that our bodies are fundamental and unchanging, whereas such things as table manners are superficial: we might change our manners from time to time, but we can’t be changed by them. Brace turned this on its head. Our supposedly normal and natural overbite—this seemingly basic aspect of modern human anatomy—is actually a product of how we behave at the table.

How can we be sure, as Brace is, that it was cutlery that brought about this change in our teeth? The short answer is that we can’t. Brace’s discovery raises as many questions as it answers. Modes of eating were far more varied than his theory makes room for. Stuff-and-cut was not the only way people ate in preindustrial Europe, and not all food required the incisor’s clamp; people also supped soups and potages, nibbled on crumbly pies, spooned up porridge and polenta. Why did these soft foods not change our bite much sooner? Brace’s love of Neanderthals may have blinded him to the extent to which table manners, even before the knife and fork, frowned upon gluttonous stuffing. Posidonius, a Greek historian (born c. 135 BC) complained that the Celts were so rude, they “clutch whole joints and bite,” suggesting that polite Greeks did not. Moreover, just because the overbite occurs at the same time as the knife and fork does not mean that one was caused by the other. Correlation is not cause.

Yet Brace’s hypothesis does seem the best fit with the available data. When he wrote his original 1977 article on the overbite, Brace himself was forced to admit that the evidence he had so far marshaled was “unsystematic and anecdotal.” He would spend the next three decades hunting out more samples to improve the evidence base.

For years, Brace was tantalized by the thought that if his thesis was correct, Americans should have retained the edge-to-edge bite for longer than Europeans, because it took several decades longer for knife-and-fork eating to become accepted in America. After years of fruitless searching for dental samples, Brace managed to excavate an unmarked nineteenth-century cemetery in Rochester, New York, housing bodies from the insane asylum, workhouse, and prison. To Brace’s great satisfaction, he found that out of fifteen bodies whose teeth and jaws were intact, ten—two-thirds of the sample—had an edge-to-edge bite.

What about China, though? “Stuff-and-cut” is entirely alien to the Chinese way of eating: cutting with a
tou
and eating with chopsticks. The highly chopped style of Chinese food and the corresponding use of chopsticks had become commonplace around nine hundred years before the knife and fork were in normal use in Europe, by the time of the Song dynasty (960-1279 AD), starting with the aristocracy and gradually spreading to the rest of the population. If Brace was correct, then the combination of
tou
and chopsticks should have left its mark on Chinese teeth much earlier than the European table knife.

The supporting evidence took a while to show up. On his eternal quest for more samples of teeth, Brace found himself in the Shanghai Natural History Museum. There, he saw the pickled remains of a graduate student from the Song dynasty era, exactly the time when chopsticks became the normal method of transporting food from plate to mouth.

Over subsequent years, Brace has analyzed many Chinese teeth and found that—with the exception of peasants, who often retain an edge-to-edge bite well into the twentieth century—the overbite does indeed emerge 800—1,000 years sooner in China than in Europe. The differing attitude to knives in East and West had a graphic impact on the alignment of our jaws.

The knife as a technology goes beyond sharpness. The way a knife is used matters just as much as how well it slices. The
tou
that cut this Chinese aristocrat’s food a thousand years ago would not have been significantly sharper or stronger than the carving knives that were cutting the meat of his European counterparts at the time. The greatest difference was what was done with it: cutting raw food into tiny fragments instead of carving cooked food into large pieces. The cause of this difference was cultural, founded on a convention about what implements to use at the table. Its consequences, however, were starkly physical. The
tou
had left its mark on the Chinese student’s teeth, and it was there for Brace to see.

Probably the greatest [discovery],
excepting language, ever made by man.

CHARLES DARWIN, on cooking

O father, the pig, the pig, do come
and taste how nice the burnt pig eats.

CHARLES LAMB, “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig”

 

 

 

 

 

I
MAGINE DOING THIS IN AN UNLIT KITCHEN—SEE HOW dangerous it is!“ A man dressed in a black T-shirt and white chef’s apron is standing near a hot fire, thrusting a small piece of veal stuffed with sage leaves onto what looks like an instrument of torture. It is composed of five deadly iron spears, each several feet long and precariously joined together. This device looks like a five-pronged javelin. It is actually a rare type of spit called a
spiedo doppio
, an Italian device for roasting meats from the sixteenth century. The man holding it is Ivan Day. He may be the only person in the world who still cooks with one.

Day, a boyish man in his early sixties, is the foremost historian of food in Britain. He lives in the Lake District in a rickety seventeenth-century farmhouse, crammed with period utensils and antiquarian cookbooks, a kind of living museum where he gives courses on historic cookery. Day teaches groups of amateur cooks (as well as numerous chefs, scholars, and museum curators) how to cook historically. In an Ivan Day course, you might learn how to make a Renaissance pie of quinces and marrow bone; a seventeenth-century wafer flavored with rosewater; Victorian jelly; or medieval gingerbread, all made with the authentic equipment. Day’s greatest passion, though, is for spit-roasting, which he believes to be the finest technique ever devised for cooking meat. “People tell me my roast beef is the best they have ever tasted,” he observes in one of his courses. His hearth and all its spits enable him to roast vast joints, sometimes seventeen pounds at a time.

Standing on the uneven stone floor in Ivan Day’s kitchen, I am struck by how unusual it now is to have an entire house organized around an open hearth. Once, almost everyone lived like this, because a single fire served to warm a house, heat water for washing, and cook dinner. For millennia, all cooking was roasting in one form or another. In the developing world, the heat of an open fire remains the way that the very poorest cook.

But in our own world, fire has been progressively closed off. Only at barbecues or campfires, sitting around toasting marshmallows and warming our hands by the flames, do we encounter a cooking fire directly. Many of us proclaim a fondness for roast beef—and Ivan Day’s really was the best I’ve ever tasted—but we have neither the resources nor the desire to set up our homes in the service of open-hearth cookery. We have plenty of other things to do, and our cooking has to fit around our lives, rather than the other way around. It takes huge effort on Day’s part to maintain this kitchen. Day scours the antiquarian markets of Europe looking for spits and other roasting utensils, all of which got junked many decades ago when
kitchens were converted away from open hearths to closed-off stoves and cooktops.