Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (38 page)

The internal dimensions of the fridge continue to evolve. In the 1990s, the internal shelving in British refrigerator-freezers tended to be boxy and geometrical, reflecting the fact that large sectors of the population were living off neat rectangular boxes of precooked meals. In recent years, an appliance expert told me, this has changed. People want multiple vegetable and salad crispers and
more varied shelving, a reflection of the fact that they are returning to “scratch cooking” (which is “cooking” to you or me). Internal wine racks have also become common.

Refrigerators started as devices for helping us to feed ourselves safely. Yet they have become insatiable boxes, which themselves demand to be fed. Many foods now considered staples principally came into being in order to give people something to put in their new fridges. I don’t just mean the obvious things, like fish fingers and frozen French fries. Take yogurt. Before World War II, yogurt was hardly eaten in the West. Although a traditional food in India and the Middle East, where it was made fresh as needed and kept in a coolish place, fermenting and clotting over time, yogurt had zero commercial potential in Britain or the United States. Without fridges, people consumed their dairy desserts mostly in the form of homemade milk puddings, made fresh and served warm: rice pudding, sago, tapioca (which British schoolchildren referred to as frog spawn, on account of its texture). From the 1950s onward, consumption of milk puddings fell dramatically year after year. Meanwhile, yogurt was growing into a multi-billion-dollar global industry. Why? You could say tastes had changed, but this still doesn’t explain why warm rice pudding with a dollop of strawberry jam should suddenly be spurned and why cold strawberry yogurts in plastic containers should suddenly be embraced.

So much of what we think of as personal taste is actually a consequence of technological change. Yogurt manufacturers were capitalizing on the fact that, having bought a shiny new fridge, the owners wanted plenty of things to put in them. Those neat little pots looked good lined up on the split shelving; how they tasted was almost irrelevant (some yogurts were nice enough, but many were blander and more sugary than the traditional puddings they replaced). For the first time in history, almost everyone had access to ice all year round. Sometimes we just didn’t know what to do with it.

I think it is a sad reflection on our civilization
that while we can and do measure the
temperature in the atmosphere of Venus we
don’t know what goes on inside our soufflés.

NICHOLAS KURTI, 1968

 

 

 

 

 

I
N THE EARLY YEARS OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM, DESIGNERS liked to joke that a house was just a kitchen with a few rooms attached. In 2007, before the Great Recession, the
New York Times
identified a new cultural malaise: professionals suffering from “post-renovation depression” when their kitchen project is finally done and they have to stop obsessing over the minutiae of faucets and backsplashes. “People said it would be a great relief when it was over,” commented one homeowner whose elaborate kitchen refit nearly doubled the size of her house. When the room was finished, she complained, it “left a huge hole in my life.” Such unhappiness might seem strange to the Victorian housemaid embarking on the wearying daily chore of cleaning and blacking a cast-iron stove. The expensive kitchens of the present speak of a degree
of comfort, particularly for women, that is historically unprecedented. The technology of the kitchen is both cause and consequence of that comfort. Our lives are comfortable because we have upscale fridges and toasters. We buy the fridges and the toasters to fit with our comfortable lives.

The luxury and sheen of the modern showroom kitchen would have been a foreign land to our forebears a hundred years ago, when electric refrigerators were unknown and the gas stove an exciting novelty. How futuristic these rooms would surely seem to them: the panoply of “clever storage” devices, the hissing espresso machine, the cavernous refrigerator-freezer, the color-coordinated cabinets and mixers. How could you explain to an Edwardian newlywed just getting to grips with her mahogany cabinet refrigerator and her case of silver-plated knives that the day would come when people—men as well as women—would treat kitchen remodeling as a hobby, when perfectly good electric blenders would be thrown away because they didn’t quite match the slate blue of a new set of kitchen cabinets? How has it become normal that on moving to a new house, you would rip out the entire kitchen put in by the previous owners—perhaps only a few years earlier—and install your own from scratch, with all new fixtures and fittings: new range, new floor, new kitchen sink?

If you look beyond the granite and the glass and the recessed LED lighting, however, there is surprising continuity between the technology of today’s kitchens and those of the past. In the 1890s, French chemist Marcelin Berthelot predicted that by the year 2000, cooking would be finished and human beings would subsist on pills. This meal-in-a-pill idea has been a perennial feature of our space-age fantasies. Yet despite all the encroachments of industrial food—despite Slim-Fast and “breakfast-in-a-bar”—the business of cooking persists. Even the food eaten on the early space missions did not generally come in pill form. The further they got from Earth, the more it seemed astronauts craved the tastes and textures of home. The meals may have been freeze-dried, but they were approximations of the stews and puddings of normal kitchens. According to
Jane Levi, a historian of space food, one of the key discoveries of Project Gemini—the ten manned space flights that NASA conducted between 1965 and 1966—was that astronauts don’t like cold potatoes.

However radical we may think we are in our everyday beliefs, when we step into a kitchen, most of us become (small “c”) conservatives. We chop food with knives, stir it with spoons, and cook it in pots. As we stand in our modern kitchens, we still use the colanders, the pestles, and the frying pans of the ancients. We do not start from first principles every time we want to produce a meal but draw on the tools and ingredients we have at hand, governed by the rules and taboos and memories we all carry in our heads about cuisine.

Some people don’t like this. For French scientist Herve This, one of the inventors of the term “molecular gastronomy,” our cooking is guilty of “technical stagnation.” In 2009, This asked:

So why are we so resistant to change in the way we cook? One reason is that experimenting with new foods has always been a dangerous business. In the wild, trying out some tempting new berries might lead to death. A lingering sense of this danger may make us risk-averse in the kitchen. But our attachment to certain ways of cooking goes beyond self-preservation. Many tools have endured because they work so well. Nothing does the job of a wooden spoon better than a wooden spoon. There’s also the fact that when we pick up a certain utensil to cook a certain dish in the traditional way—
whether it’s a Valencian paella made in its wide shallow pan or a Victoria sponge made in old-fashioned sandwich cake pans—we are enacting a ritual that binds us to the place we live and to those in our family, both living and dead. Such things are not easily shrugged off. As we have seen, every time a new cooking technology has been introduced, however useful—from pottery to the microwave to the smokeless stoves of the developing world—it has been greeted in some quarters with hostility and protestations that the old ways were better and safer (and sometimes, in some ways, they were).

Hervé This says that there are two types of technological change: local and global. The small local changes in kitchen machinery are the easiest to accept. The example This gives is an improvement to a balloon whisk that adds more wires to whip eggs more efficiently. New gadgets feel safest when they remind us of other objects that we already know. This explains why early refrigerators looked like heavy wooden Victorian kitchen cabinets and why lemon squeezers of the 1860s were often clamped on the table like hulking iron meat grinders. In the 1950s, countless utensils took the form of a continental Mouli food mill with a rotating handle: suddenly, there were rotary cheese graters and rotary herb mills and they were greeted with enthusiasm. Although—unlike the Mouli itself—neither is really a very good tool on its own terms: the herbs get mashed and the cheese grater always leaves a thin slice behind in the rotary drum. But at this time, a rotating mechanism felt natural and this was what mattered. Hands and brains were accustomed to the action of processing food through a drum with a circular motion.

It is far harder to accept a technology that is entirely new. This is what This calls “global” change: the sort of shift that came about when our ancestors decided to start cooking things in pottery or when
Count Rumford rejected the idea that an open hearth was a good way to heat food. Such changes disturb our natural conservatism.

Take egg whites. Instead of just tinkering around the edges by adding more wires to a preexisting whisk, a global shift in technology would call into question why a whisk is used for beating egg whites at all. This is what Dr. This wants to know. “Why not use, instead, a compressor and a nozzle that can introduce air bubbles into the egg white?” Or why not come up with some entirely new device that no one has thought of yet? Why not use all your ingenuity and imagination?