Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (5 page)

Making a usable pot is not just a matter of lumping wet clay into the relevant shape, like making a mud pie. The clay itself has to be carefully selected (too much grit and it won’t form easily; not enough grit and it won’t stand up to firing). The potter (who would often have been a woman) knows how to use just enough water to make the clay slippery, but not so much that the wet clay slides apart in her hands or cracks in the fire. The fire itself must be scorching hot—maybe 1652°F to 1852°F—something that can only be achieved with a custom-built kiln oven. As for making pots specifically for
cooking, this is even harder, because they need to be both watertight and strong enough to withstand thermal shock: in a poorly made pot, different materials expand at different rates as it heats up and the stress causes it to shatter.

Most cooks experience thermal shock at one time or other: the dish of lasagna that unexpectedly snaps in a hot oven, ruining your dinner plans; the supposedly “flameproof” earthenware bean pot that shatters on the stove, disgorging its contents on the floor. Food writer Nigel Slater observes that it is preferable for a pot to “shatter into a hundred pieces than sustain a deep crack. The Cracked Pot might still be a favourite, but it introduces an element of danger I can live without . . . that uneasy feeling when you open the oven door that the dish will be in two halves, macaroni cheese sizzling on the oven floor.”

We will never know exactly how the first pot was made. Pottery is one of those brilliant advances that curiously occurred to different people simultaneously in far-flung places. Pots suddenly become common around 10,000 BC, or a bit before, in South America and North Africa, and among the Jomon people of Japan. The Japanese word
Jomon
means “cord-marked.” Jomon pottery shows what artistry went into ceramics from a very early date. It wasn’t enough to make a good pot; it had to be beautiful. Having formed their pots, Jomon potters decorated the wet clay with cords and knotted cords, with bamboo sticks, with shells. Most of the very earliest Jomon pots seem to have been used for cooking: the surviving shards indicate deep, round-bottomed flowerpot-shaped pots, ideal for stewing.

Strangely, the Jomon adoption of pots for food was not echoed everywhere. It used to be assumed that people started to make pots specifically for the purpose of cooking. But now there are doubts. How can we know whether people cooked with pots or not? Fragments of cooking pots will bear signs of scorching or mottling from exposure to the fire; they may even contain traces of food; and they are likely to be made from heavily tempered or gritted clay, fired low to eliminate thermal shock.

In the Peloponnese in Greece there is a cave called the Franchti, from which more than 1 million pottery shards have been recovered, dating from 6000 to 3000 BC. This is one of the oldest agricultural sites in Greece. People here farmed lentils, almonds and pistachios, oats and barley. They ate fish. In other words, here were people who could really use some cooking pots. One might assume that those pottery fragments once belonged to cooking pots and storage jars. Yet when archaeologists examined the oldest fragments at Franchti, they found that they bore none of the telltale signs of being held over a fire. They were not sooty or charred, but highly burnished, glossy, fine ware, made in angular shapes that would not sit well on a fire. All the signs were that these pots were used not for food but for some kind of religious ritual. This is a puzzle. These Greek settlers had at their disposal all the technology they needed to make cooking pots, but they chose not to, preferring to put their clay to symbolic use. Why? Probably because no one there had ever used pots for cooking in the past, so it just did not occur to them to do so in this later era.

Cooking pots represented a huge innovation. It took many hundreds of years of using pots as decorative or symbolic objects for the Greeks at Franchti to think of cooking in them. It is only among the later fragments, toward 3000 BC, that cooking ware becomes the norm. The Franchti pots become rounded and coarser in texture and are made in a variety of handy shapes for different tasks: stew pots of various sizes, cheese pots, clay sieves, and larger pots in ovenlike shapes. At last, these people had discovered the joys of cooking with pots and pans.

The Greeks are perhaps the most celebrated of all potters. It’s easy to focus on the archetypal red-on-black and black-on-red show pots, depicting battle scenes and myths, horsemen, dancers, and feasts. But we can learn just as much from their plainer cooking pots, whose story is less dramatic but no less interesting. Greek kitchen pots tell us what they ate and how they ate it, which foods they prized and what they did with them. The Greeks left behind numerous storage jars: for
cheese and olives, for wine, for oil, but above all for cereal, most likely barley: sturdy terracotta bins with lids to keep out the insects. Greek potters made frying pans, saucepans, and casseroles from coarse, gritty clay: the basic shape was the round, amphora-like
chytra
. They made little three-legged pots and handy combination-sets of casseroles and braziers, with the vessel and the heater designed in tandem. These were people who had more than one cooking strategy available to them.

Pottery changed the nature of cooking in radical ways. Unlike baskets, gourds, and coconut shells—or any of the other food containers used before—clay could be formed into any size or shape desired. Clay vessels hugely expanded the range of food that could be eaten. To sum it up in one word: porridge. With clay pots, cooks could easily boil up small grains, such as wheat, maize, and rice, the starchy staples that would soon form the mainstay of the human diet the world over. Pots thus worked in tandem with the new science of agriculture (which also emerged around 10,000 years ago) to change our diet forever. We went from a hunter-gatherer regime of meat, nuts, and seeds to a peasant diet of mushy grain with something on the side. This is a revolution whose effects we are still living with today. When we find our largest pot and boil up a pan of slippery spaghetti, or idly switch on the rice cooker, or stir butter and parmesan into a soothing dish of polenta, we are communing with those first farmers who learned how to fill their bellies with something soft and starchy, deliberately grown in a field and cooked in a pot.

In many cases, the clay pot enabled people to eat plants that would otherwise be toxic. An example is cassava (also known as manioc or yuca), a starchy tuber native to South America, which is now the third-largest source of edible carbohydrate in the world. In its natural form, cassava contains small amounts of cyanide. When inadequately cooked or eaten raw, it can cause a disease called konzo, a paralytic disorder. Once it was possible to boil cassava in a pot, it went from useless toxin to valuable staple, a sweet fleshy source of calcium, phosphorus, and vitamin C (though little protein). Boiled
cassava is a basic source of energy in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Ghana, among other countries, usually eaten simply by mashing the boiled root to a comforting paste, perhaps with a few spices. This is classic pot-cooked food: the kind that warms the belly and soothes the heart.

Casseroles are a pleasure to eat largely because of the juices: that heady intermingling of herbs and wine and stock. Right from the start, pots enabled cooks to capture juices that would otherwise be lost in the flames. Pots seem to have been especially valued among people who ate a lot of shellfish, because the clay caught the luscious clam liquor. Pottery is a great breakthrough for another reason: it is much harder to burn food than when it is cooked directly in the fire (though still not impossible, as many of us can testify). So long as the pot is not allowed to run dry, the food won’t char.

The earliest recipes on record come from Mesopotamia (the site of modern-day Iraq, Iran, and Syria). They are written in cuneiform on three stone tablets, approximately 4,000 years old, offering a tantalizing glimpse of how the Mesopotamians might have cooked. The vast majority of the recipes are for pot cooking, most of them for broths and court bouillons. “Assemble all the ingredients in the pot” is a frequent instruction. Pots made cooking a refined and subtle business for the first time; but pot cookery is also easier than direct-fire roasting. It was little trouble to boil up mutton and water and mash in some leeks, garlic, and green herbs, then leave it to bubble away in its own good time. The elementary pattern these Mesopotamian recipes took was: prepare water, add fat and salt to taste; add meat, leeks, and garlic; cook in the pot; maybe add fresh coriander or mint; and serve.

A whole range of techniques opened up with pottery. Boiling was the most important, but it also became possible to use ceramic griddles to cook thin maize cakes, cassava cakes, and flatbreads; to use large pots to brew and distill alcoholic drinks; and to use a dry, lidded pot to toast grains, the most notable example of this being the popped maize of Mesoamerica: popcorn!

People loved clay pots for another reason: the way they made the food taste. In modern times, we have more or less discarded the idea of a pot’s surface mingling with its contents. We want pots to be made from surfaces that react as little as possible with what is inside: this is one of the many virtues of stainless steel. With a few theatrical exceptions—the 1970s chicken brick, the Thai clay-pot—we do not consider the possibility that the cooking surface could react with the food in beneficial ways. But traditionally, cultures that cook with porous clay appreciate the flavor it gives to the food, a result of the free soluble salts in the clay leaching out. In the Kathmandu Valley in India, a clay pot is considered essential for pickle jars, adding something extra to mango, lemon, and cucumber pickles.

Clay’s special properties may explain why many cooks resisted the next great leap forward: the move from clay pots to metal pots. Metal cauldrons are a product of the Bronze Age (circa 3000 BC onward), a period of rapid technological change. They belong to roughly the same era as early writing systems (hieroglyphics and cuneiform), papyrus, plumbing, glassmaking, and the wheel. Cauldrons started to be used by the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians, and the Chinese, by at least 2000 BC. The expense of manufacturing them meant that their use was limited at first to special feasts or the food of the afterlife.

Metal cauldrons have a number of highly practical advantages over pottery. A cauldron can be scrubbed clean with sand or ash, unlike unglazed earthenware, which tends to hold the residue of the previous meal in its pores. Metal conducts heat better than clay, and therefore food cooks more efficiently. Most significant, a cauldron can be placed directly over fire without fear that it will shatter from thermal shock or get chipped. It might even survive dropping. Whereas archaeologists tend to encounter clay pots in the form of shards, they sometimes unearth cauldrons in their entirety, such as the Battersea cauldron in the British Museum, a splendid Iron Age specimen from 800-700 BC, which was pulled
out of the River Thames in the nineteenth century. It is a magnificent pumpkin-shaped vessel, constructed from seven sheets of bronze riveted together like a shield, that has survived in 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 is—added yet another dimension to kitchen life. Fats reach much higher temperatures than water, and food cooks quicker in oil than water, browning deliciously at the edges. This is the result of the Maillard reaction, an interaction between proteins and sugars at high heats that is responsible for many of the flavors we find most seductive: the golden crust on a French fry, a dark spoonful of maple syrup. A frying pan is a good thing to have around.

The Romans also had beautifully made metal colanders and bronze chafing dishes, flattish metal patinae, vast cauldrons of brass and bronze, pastry molds in varying ornate shapes, fish kettles, frying pans with special pouring lips to dispense the sauce and handles that folded up. Much of what has remained looks disconcertingly modern. The range of Roman metal cookware was still impressing the chef Alexis Soyer in 1853. Soyer was particularly taken with a very high-tech sounding two-tiered vessel called the
authepsa
(the name means “self-boiling”). Like a modern steamer, it came in two layers, made of Corinthian brass. The top compartment, said Soyer, could be used
for gently cooking “light delicacies destined for dessert.” It was a highly valued utensil. Cicero describes one
authepsa
being sold at auction for such a high price that bystanders assumed the thing being sold was an entire farm.

Technologically speaking, Roman metal utensils have had few rivals until the late twentieth century with the advent of pans made from multilayered metals. They even addressed themselves to the problem of avoiding hot spots when cooking, which remains a bugbear for saucepan designers. A metal pan has survived from Roman Britain with concentric rings in its base, whose purpose, it seems, was to create slow, steady heat distribution. Experiments with corrugated cooking pots versus smooth ones have shown that texturing the bottom of a pan reduces thermal stresses (the rings make it less susceptible to warping over high heat, strengthening the pan’s structure) —and also gives more cooking control: heat transfer happens more slowly with a textured pan, so there is less chance of annoying boilovers. A similar pattern of concentric rings appears on the base of Circulon cookware, launched in 1985, whose “unique Hi-Lo” grooves are said to reduce the surface abrasion and enhance the durability and nonstick qualities of the pan. As with aqueducts, straight roads, arched bridges, and books, this was a technology in which the Romans got there first.