Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (25 page)

It would be several more thousand years, however, before stone grinding tools became common. Their use seems to have intensified
during Neolithic times (10,300—4500 BC), which makes sense because this was the period when cereals began to be domesticated. Men started to settle down and deliberately plant grain, staying around in the same place long enough to harvest it. Now that their wives had settled in the same place, too, they had a ready pair of hands to perform the grinding of the grain. Several surviving ancient Egyptian figurines depict women at work, grinding cereals (probably barley) against a stone. Processing the necessary grain for that day’s food became the larger part of many women’s lives all over the world. Among the Lugbara people of Uganda, a woman is still typically buried with the smaller of her two grindstones. It symbolizes the fact the majority of her existence has been expended on the mindless, repetitive—but essential—action of grinding cereals for her family’s nourishment.

What form did the first grinding tools take? The most basic method of crushing grain was through some type of quern: one flattish rock pounding relentlessly against another rock. Over time, better querns were devised in different shapes: saddle shaped or oval. The big breakthrough was the rotary quern, first seen in Iron Age Britain (c. 400—300 BC), a giant bagel-shaped stone atop a circular quern. Unlike the back-and-forth motion of earlier querns, the rotary quern used a circular motion to grind the cereal, which was more effective. Grain was poured through the hole in the top circle. Some kind of peg was then placed horizontally in a socket and used to turn the quern around and around. This whirling mechanism was a big improvement on quern still took two the basic quern, but a large rotary women to operate, one to feed in the grain and one to keep turning it. T. Garnett, who visited the Highlands of Scotland in 1800, watched as two women ground grain in a rotary quern, “singing some Celtic songs all the time.”

Alongside querns, from ancient times, there were mortars and pestles. What came first was the receptacle: round, hard, and abrasive. The oldest
mortars are as old as the oldest querns: the earliest known deep mortars have been found in the Levant and are around 20,000 years old. By the end of the Stone Age, mortars were sometimes incorporated into a house: there are giant basalt mortars set in the ground, as part of a courtyard where women or servants would have sat for hours grinding, grinding. It is easy to romanticize this way of life, but Middle Eastern burial sites indicate that using these grinding tools put a heavy strain on women’s bodies: female skeletons show signs of acute arthritis, with the knees, hips, and ankles all severely worn by kneeling down and rocking back and forth to crush grain against stone.

One of the astonishing things about the mortar and pestle is how early its basic form and function were set. If you look at pictures of surviving ancient mortars and pestles, they would not look entirely out of place in a modern kitchenware shop: they might be a bit primitive, perhaps, somewhat rough around the edges; but some people like that look. The mortars and pestles surviving from Pompeii look entirely modern; in some ways, they are more sophisticated than the craggy Thai mortar on my shelf. Mortars underwent various refinements. Some were built with a lip for pouring out the finished product. Some sprouted legs, like a tripod, and some had a swelling base, forming a stand to stabilize the mortar during all the pounding. Fashions in shapes came and went. The Greeks and Romans favored a goblet shape (which became popular again in the nineteenth century) and in China they were fat and squat, whereas in the Muslim world of the Middle Ages, the most popular mortars were more cylindrical, veering toward the conical, and made from bronze, with many ornate Moorish patterns, a style that traveled to Spain.

The importance of the mortar and pestle goes beyond food. For centuries, it was the single most important utensil in the making of medicines and remains the international symbol of pharmacies. It was also used to crush pigments and tobacco. Still, its culinary use was probably the most vital one to ancient wielders of the pestle. The foods crushed in ancient mortars were diverse: in Mesopotamia, they
ground everything from pistachios to dates. But its most important job was processing grains, creating the possibility of a staple food, something the hunter-gatherers had never known. Both querns and mortars were vital though bone-aching tools necessary to the task of generating enough belly-filling calories to get you through the day.

Over time, the emergence of professional millers freed most people from the need to grind their own grain. In a medieval village, the miller tended to be the most detested individual. Why? Because of the feeling of dependence he engendered, with his monopoly over the local flour. His mill—whether wind- or water-powered—was the essential tool without which no bread would be made. Instead of feeling gratitude, his customers felt resentment, and suspicion that he was overcharging for his services. As the “jolly” miller says in the nursery rhyme: “I care for nobody, no not I, if nobody cares for me.”

The mortar, meanwhile, took up a permanent place in the kitchen as a pounder of mixtures. The biggest difference between querns and mortars is this: Both can grind food. But only the mortar can be used as a mixing bowl as well as a grinder. It is still used in this way to create Spanish
romesco,
a heady mixture of peppers, nuts, oil, vinegar, bread, and garlic. Such pastes had their counterpart in the cooking of the Middle Ages, when an entire genre of mortar-and-pestle cookery emerged, operated by large troops of strong-armed subordinates. It was believed that ingredients needed “tempering” to be put back into balance, and the mortar was the ideal vessel for this: in its embrace, honey tempered vinegar and wine tempered fish; foods were hammered into submission. If the noise-scape of a modern kitchen is largely electrical whirring sounds—the spinning of a washing machine, the buzz of a blender—that of a medieval kitchen was constant pounding.

This represented a continuity with the wealthy kitchens of ancient Rome. The food-processing implements that have survived from Pompeii include colanders and sieves, ladles, and mortars and pestles. The most famous Roman cookbook—by Apicius—contains
a class of dishes called “mortaria,” which are heady compounds specifically made in the mortar and pestle, consisting of various herbs and seasonings. This is how Apicius’s mortaria are made:

Everything was pounded, pounded, pounded, until it was impossible to tell where the coriander began and the fennel ended. But not pounded by Apicius himself, and certainly not by whoever paid him. Professor Frederick Starr, one of Apicius’s translators, writing in 1926—a time when many professional families were finding to their distress they could no longer afford servants, or not as many as their Victorian forbears—was very struck by the arduous quality of Apicius’s food:

I wouldn’t call Apicius’s slave-dependent cuisine so enviable. Nowadays, in the age of electric blenders and food processors, it is very easy to recreate an approximation of Apician mortaria. The only tricky part—other than figuring out the quantities—is the shopping. Rue and lovage are not exactly supermarket fodder, but if you are willing to search a bit, they are perfectly obtainable in plant form from a good garden center. Once you have the ingredients, mortaria can be made in seconds. Just feed everything down the chute of a processor and blitz: five, four, three, two, one, done. What you have is a greenish-brown slurry. The taste is sour-sweet, and muddy, with a rather unpleasant bitterness from the rue. It is like a much less
appealing version of Italian salsa verde. Apart from food historians, it is hard to imagine anyone seeking out this strange amalgam, now that it is no trouble to make. Mortaria can never taste as good to us as they did to Apicius and the rich Romans he cooked for. They lack the seasoning of hard labor.

 

O
ne of the greatest innovations of Renaissance cooking in Europe was the discovery that eggs could be used as a raising agent when baking (what the clever cooks didn’t know was that it worked because the stable protein foam of beaten eggs holds the bubbles in the cake’s structure as it cooks). This was the birth of the cake. Previously, cakes—insofar as they were made at all—were raised with ale barm or yeast, which gave a bready texture and yeasty taste. The discovery of beaten eggs made possible a vast array of sweet dishes in which the primary component was air. Beaten eggs were now used to make pillowy cakes with a much lighter sponge. British Elizabethan cooks also made yellow tarts from creamy beaten yolks, and white tarts from stiff whites, sweetened with sugar and cream. There was a vogue for syllabubs, frothed from wine, cream, and egg whites. Whites of eggs were also the crucial ingredient in that wonder, a “dishful of snow.” These were a theatrical component in the banqueting course after a feast. To make a dishful of snow, multiple egg whites like seas of uncooked meringue were frothed with thick cream, sugar, and rosewater, then piled on a platter.

The trouble was, the culinary innovation of using masses of beaten egg whites was not matched by any technical breakthrough in equipment or techniques for beating them. The taste for fluffy egg whites was matched only by the arm-aching slog of working in a grand Renaissance kitchen. Without electricity to take the labor away, it was hard to beat whites enough to become a frothy, stable foam—which only happens when the egg’s protein molecules have partly unfolded under contact with air, reforming as an air-filled lattice: stiff peaks. Wire balloon whisks—of the kind we still use today, usually made from stainless steel—were not common until the late eighteenth century.
It is possible that individual households in Europe made their own versions of these whisks, though none have survived: an illustration in Bartolomeo Scappi’s
Opera
(1570) looks remarkably like a metal balloon whisk. What is certain, however, is that such whisks were not common. If they had been, Renaissance cooks would have had no need to resort to the range of the much more unwieldy techniques they did when they attempted to get air into egg whites.

A 1655 recipe for “cream with snow” advises using “a bundle of reeds” rolled between your hands. The standard implement for whisking eggs until well into the nineteenth century was a bunch of stripped twigs tied together—usually birch (or less commonly, feathers). The advantage of these makeshift twig-whisks was that they could be used to impart flavorings to the cream or egg whites: recipes talk of tying the twigs together with peach branches or strips of lemon peel, giving the cream a peachy or lemony bouquet. The disadvantage was that twig whisks were extremely slow. A recipe from 1654 by Joseph Cooper—“chiefe cook to the late king”—stipulates “half an hour or more” for the beating of eggs for pancakes. As late as 1823, Mary Eaton, a cookery writer, advised that the egg whites for a large cake would 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, perhaps a little less if we remembered to get the butter out of the fridge before we started. The degree of tiredness that must descend after three hours of whisking egg whites with nothing but some twigs simply does not compute. These were surely recipes to weary one person, or two, or three. To add insult to injury,
due to superstition, it was often insisted that a cream or egg whites be beaten
all in one direction,
as if changing direction would break the spell and stop the mixture from frothing. Perhaps this superstition arose from the sheer difficulty of achieving a froth with such limited machinery—worries were also expressed that egg whites would become bewitched and not get stiff enough on “damp days.”