Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (2 page)

As for the orange juice, the technology behind it seems the simplest of all—take oranges, squeeze juice—but is probably the most complicated. Unlike the Edwardian housewife, who laboriously squeezed oranges in a conical glass squeezer, I usually pour my juice from a Tetra Pak carton (first launched as Tetra Brik in 1963). Although the ingredients list only oranges, the juice will have been made using a bewildering array of industrial techniques, the fruit crushed with hidden enzymes and strained with hidden clarifiers and pasteurized and chilled and transported from country to country, all for my breakfast pleasure. The fact that the juice does not pucker my mouth with bitterness is thanks to a female inventor, Linda C. Brewster, who in the 1970s was granted four patents for “debittering” orange juice by reducing the presence of acrid limonin.

This particular meal could only have been consumed in this particular way for a very short moment in history. The foods we eat speak of the time and the place we inhabit. But to an even greater extent, so do the tools we use to make and consume them. We are often told that we live in a “technological age.” This is usually a way of saying : we have a lot of computers. But every age has its technology. It does not have to be futuristic. It can be a fork, a pot, or a simple measuring cup.

Sometimes, kitchen tools are simply a way of enhancing the pleasure of eating. But they can also be a matter of basic survival. Before the adoption of cooking pots, around 10,000 years ago, the evidence from skeletons suggests that no one survived into adulthood
having lost all their teeth. Chewing was a necessary skill. If you couldn’t chew, you would starve. Pottery enabled our ancestors to make food of a drinkable consistency: porridgy, soupy concoctions, which could be eaten without chewing. For the first time, we start to see adult skeletons without a single tooth. The cooking pot saved these people.

The most versatile technologies are often the most basic. Some, like the mortar and pestle, endure for tens of thousands of years. The pestle began as an ancient tool for processing grain but successfully adapted itself to grinding everything from
pistou
in France to curry paste in Thailand. Other devices have proved less flexible, for instance, the 1970s chicken brick, enjoying a brief vogue only to end up on the junk heap when people tired of the food in question. Some tools, such as spoons and microwaves, are used the world over. Others are very specific to a place, for example, the
dolsot,
a sizzling hot stone pot in which Koreans serve one particular dish:
bibimbap,
a mixture of sticky rice, finely sliced vegetables, and raw or fried egg; the bottom layer of rice becomes crispy with the heat of the
dolsot.

This book is about high-tech gadgets, but it is also about the tools and techniques we don’t tend to think about so much. The technology of food matters even when we barely notice it is there. From fire onward, there is a technology behind everything we eat, whether we recognize it or not. Behind every loaf of bread, there is an oven. Behind a bowl of soup, there is a pan and a wooden spoon (unless it comes from a can, another technology altogether). Behind every restaurant-kitchen foam, there will be a whipping canister, charged with N
₂
O. Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli in Spain, which, until it closed in 2011, was the most celebrated restaurant in the world, could not have produced its menu without sous-vide machines and centrifuges, dehydrators, and Pacojets. Many people find these novel tools alarming. As new kitchen technologies have emerged, there have always been voices suggesting that the old ways were best.

Cooks are conservative beings, masters of quiet repetitive actions that change little from day to day or year to year. Entire cultures are
built around cooking food one way and not another. A true Chinese meal, for example, cannot be cooked without the
tou,
the cleaver-shaped knife that reduces ingredients to small, even morsels, and the wok, for stir-frying. Which comes first, the stir-fry or the wok? Neither. To get at the logic of Chinese cuisine, we have to go even further back and consider cooking fuel: a quickly made wok-cooked meal was originally the product of firewood scarcity. Over time, however, equipment and food become so bound together you can’t say when one starts and the other ends.

It is only natural that cooks should perceive kitchen innovation as a personal attack. The complaint is always the same: you are destroying the food we know and love with your newfangled ways. When commercial refrigeration became a possibility in the late nineteenth century, it offered great advantages, both to consumers and industry. Fridges were especially useful for selling perishable substances such as milk, which had previously been the cause of thousands of deaths every year in the big cities of the world. Refrigeration benefited traders, too, creating a longer window in which they could sell their food. Yet there was a widespread terror of this new technology, from both sellers and buyers. Consumers were suspicious of food that had been kept in cold storage. Market traders, too, did not know what to make of this new chill. In the 1890s at Les Halles, the huge central food market in Paris, the sellers felt that refrigeration would spoil their produce. And at some level, they were right, as anyone who has ever compared a tomato at room temperature with one from the fridge can confirm: the one (assuming it’s a good tomato) is sweetly fragrant and juicy; the other is woolly, metallic, and dull. Every new technology represents a trade-off: something is gained, but something is also lost.

Often, the thing lost is knowledge. You don’t need such good knife skills once you have a food processor. Gas and electric ovens and the microwave mean you need no knowledge of how to get a fire going and keep it ablaze. Until around a hundred years ago, management of a fire was one of the dominant human activities. That has
gone (and a good thing, too, if you think of all the tedious hours of the day it consumed, all the other activities it precluded). The larger question is whether the existence of cooking technologies that entail only minimal human input has led to the death of culinary skills. In 2011, a survey of 2,000 British young people from age eighteen to twenty-five found that more than half said that they had left home without the ability to cook even a simple recipe such as Spaghetti Bolognese. Microwaves plus convenience foods offer the freedom of being able to feed yourself with a few pushes of a button. But it’s not such a great advance if you lose all concept of what it would mean to make a meal for yourself.

Sometimes, though, it takes a new technology to make us appreciate an old one. The knowledge that I can make hollandaise in thirty seconds in the blender enhances the pleasure of doing it the old way, with a double boiler and a wooden spoon, the butter added to the yolks piece by tiny piece.

The equipment of the kitchen can seem unimportant compared to the history of food itself. It is all very well fussing over the niceties of table settings and jelly molds, but what does this matter compared to a basic hunger for bread? Perhaps this explains why kitchen tools have been so neglected in histories of food. Culinary history has become a hot subject over the past two decades. But the focus of these new histories, with a few notable exceptions, has overwhelmingly been ingredients rather than technique:
what
we cooked rather than
how
we cooked it. There have been books on potatoes, cod, and chocolate, and histories of cookbooks, restaurants, and cooks. The kitchen and its tools are more or less absent. As a result, half the story is missing. This matters. We change the texture, the taste, the nutritional content, and the cultural associations of ingredients simply by using different tools and techniques to prepare them.

Beyond this, we human beings have been changed by kitchen technology—the
how
of food as well as the
what.
I don’t just mean this in a “my dream kitchen changed my life” kind of way, though it is true that changes in kitchen tools have gone hand in hand with
vast social changes. Take the relationship between labor-saving devices and servants. The story here is one of technological stagnation. There was very little interest in eliminating the grind of cooking for the many centuries when well-off kitchens came with an abundance of human labor to take the strain. Electric food processors and blenders are genuinely liberating tools. Arms no longer have to ache to produce kibbe in Lebanon or ginger-garlic puree in India. So many meals that were once seasoned with pain are now trouble free.

Kitchen tools have changed us in more physical ways. There is good evidence to suggest that the current obesity crisis is caused, in part, not by what we eat (though this is of course vital, too) but by the degree to which our food has been processed before we eat it. It is sometimes referred to as the “calorie delusion.” In 2003, scientists at Kyushu University in Japan fed one group of rats hard food pellets and another group softer pellets. In every other respect the pellets were identical: same nutrients, same calories. After twenty-two weeks, the rats on the soft-food diet had become obese, showing that texture is an important factor in weight gain. Further studies involving pythons (eating ground cooked steak, versus intact raw steak) confirmed these findings. When we eat chewier, less processed foods, it takes us more energy to digest them, so the number of calories our body receives is less. You will get more energy from a slow-cooked apple puree than a crunchy raw apple, even if the calories on paper are identical. Food labels, which still display nutritional information in crude terms of calories (according to the Atwater convention on nutrition developed in the late nineteenth century), have not yet caught up with this, but it is a stark example of how the technology of cooking really matters.

In many ways, the history of food is the history of technology There is no cooking without fire. The discovery of how to harness fire and the consequent art of cooking was what enabled us to evolve from apes to
Homo erectus.
Early hunter-gatherers may not have had KitchenAids and “Lean, Mean Grilling Machines,” but they still had their own version of kitchen technology They had stones to pound
with and sharpened stones to cut with. With dexterous hands, they would have known how to gather edible nuts and berries without getting poisoned or stung. They hunted for honey in lofty rock crevices and used mussel shells to catch the dripping fat from a roasting seal. Whatever else was lacking, it was not ingenuity.

This book tells the story of how we have tamed fire and ice, how we have wielded whisks, spoons, graters, mashers, mortars and pestles, how we have used our hands and our teeth, all in the name of putting food in our mouths. There is hidden intelligence in our kitchens, and the intelligence affects how we cook and eat. This is not a book about the technology of agriculture (there are other books about that). Nor is it very much about the technology of restaurant cooking, which has its own imperatives. It is about the everyday sustenance of domestic households: the benefits that different tools have brought to our cooking and the risks.

We easily forget that technology in the kitchen has remained a matter of life and death. The two basic mechanisms of cooking—slicing and heating—are fraught with danger. For most of human history, cooking has been a largely grim business, a form of dicing with danger in a sweaty, smoky, confined space. And it still is in much of the world. Smoke, chiefly from indoor cooking fires, kills 1.5 million people every year in the developing world, according to the World Health Organization. Open hearths were a major cause of death in Europe, too, for centuries. Women were particularly at risk, on account of the terrible combination of billowing skirts, trailing sleeves, and open fires with bubbling cauldrons hung over them. Professional chefs in rich households until the seventeenth century were almost universally men, and they often worked naked or just in undergarments on account of the scorching heat. Women were confined to the dairy and scullery, where their skirts didn’t pose such a problem.

One of the greatest revolutions to take place in the British kitchen came with the adoption of enclosed brick chimneys and cast-iron fire grates, over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A whole new set of kitchen implements emerged, in tandem
with this new control of the heat source: suddenly, the kitchen was not such a foul and greasy place to be, and gleaming brass and pewter pots took over from the blackened old cast iron. The social consequences were huge, too. At last, women could cook food without setting fire to themselves. It is no coincidence that a generation or so after enclosed oven ranges became the norm, the first cookbooks written by women for women were published in Britain.

Kitchen tools do not emerge in isolation, but in clusters. One implement is invented and then further implements are needed to service the first one. The birth of the microwave gives rise to microwave-proof dishes and microwavable plastic wrap. Freezers create a sudden need for ice cube trays. Nonstick frying pans necessitate nonscratch spatulas. The old open-hearth cookery went along with a host of related technologies: andirons or brand-irons to stop logs from rolling forward; gridirons for toasting bread; hasteners—large metal hoods placed in front of the fire to speed up cooking; various spit-jacks for turning roasting meat; and extremely long-handled iron ladles, skimmers, and forks. With the end of open-hearth cookery, all of these associated tools vanished, too.