Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

by Bee Wilson

Often, inventors have been working on something for military use, only to find that its best use is in the kitchen.

Technology is not a form of robotics but something very human: the creation of tools and techniques that answer certain uses in our lives.

Scientific discovery does not depend on usage for its validity; technology does.

In the 1890s at Les Halles, the huge central food market in Paris, the sellers felt that refrigeration would spoil their produce.

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.

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.

The Origin of Table Manners

French cooks are fond instead of braising vegetables such as carrots in a tiny amount of water with butter, or stewing them like ratatouille, or baking them with stock or cream in a gratin to concentrate their sweetness; boiling is—perhaps rightly—regarded as the dullest way.

The Maori of New Zealand who lived close to the boiling pools of Whakarewarewa traditionally used them for cooking.

Shells have often been spoken of as one stage on the route to man-made pots.

Cooking in a turtle shell is certainly a romantic notion. Whether anything was cooked in turtle shells except for turtles themselves is another matter.

Cooking rocks were heated as hot as 932°F, hotter than a pizza oven.

Hot-rock cookery is still practiced in the clambakes of New England, in which sweet clams, just harvested, are cooked right there on the beach, layered up in a pit of hot stones, driftwood, and seaweed, which keep the clams juicy.

There is a kind of magic to the process of pottery, and indeed, early potters often had a second role as shamans in the community.

Whereas archaeologists tend to encounter clay pots in the form of shards, they sometimes unearth cauldrons in their entirety,

Battersea cauldron

One-pot cookery is a cuisine of scarcity: scarce fuel, scarce utensils, scarce ingredients. Nothing is wasted. It is no coincidence that food for the relief of poverty has almost always taken the form of soup. If there is not enough to go around, you can always add some more water and bubble it up one more time.

“a place for everything and everything in its place,” as the cookery writer Mrs. Beeton said.

modern seed varieties and growing methods tend to yield more tender plants.

Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management,

According to Dr. Nathan Myhrvold, the outlay for top-of-the-range pans may not be worth it. Myhrvold, who was the chief technology officer for Microsoft before turning to food, is the main author (along with Chris Young and Maxime Bilet) of Modernist Cuisine (2011), a six-volume, 2,438-page work that aspires to “reinvent cooking.” Working in a state-of-the-art cooking laboratory near Seattle at his company, Intellectual Ventures (which deals in patents and inventions), Myhrvold and his team of researchers questioned the thinking behind numerous cooking techniques that had previously been taken for granted.

The knife is the oldest tool in the cook’s armory, older than the management of fire by somewhere between 1 million and 2 million years, depending on which anthropologist you believe.

I met one chef who said he used a large serrated bread knife for absolutely everything. He liked the fact that he didn’t have to sharpen it.

There’s a joke about a man who tested his blade using his tongue: sharp blades taste like metal; really sharp blades taste like blood.

Almost everyone had a personal eating knife in a sheath dangling from a belt.

Turn it on its side and you can use it to pulverize garlic to a paste with coarse salt: good-bye, garlic press!

Proof that bronze does not make good knives is confirmed by the fact that during the Bronze Age, cutting devices continued to be made from stone, which was, in many respects, superior to the newfangled metal.

The Japanese santoku is another multitasker, currently regarded as one of the most desirable all-purpose knives for the home kitchen.

It is the technique, above all, that makes a meal Chinese or not. The Chinese cook takes fish and fowl, vegetable and meat, in all their diverse shapes and renders them geometrically exact and bite-sized.

The tou and the chopsticks work in perfect symbiosis: one chops, the other serves.

Again, this is a more frugal way of doing things than the classical French approach, where, despite all that laborious slicing with diverse knives in the kitchen, still further knives are needed to eat the meal.

Carving was seen as so important at court that it evolved into a special office, “the Carvership,” which was held by designated officials and even included members of the nobility.

Unlike modern carvers, whose task is the equitable distribution of food as they preside over a Sunday roast or a Thanksgiving turkey, the medieval European carver was not in charge of the whole table but served only a single lord. His task was not sharing food fairly but rather taking the best of what was on the table for his particular master.

A big part of the job was preventing the lord from consuming any “fumosities”—in other words, gristle, skin, feathers, or anything else that might prove indigestible. Beyond

broad spatula-like serving knives for lifting the meat onto the trencher; and thin, blunt-bladed credence knives for clearing all crumbs from the tablecloth. Yet

“Take a heron, and raise his legs and wings as a crane, and sauce him,”

But the job of carver was more about serving than cutting.

Richelieu’s mandate against double-edged knives went along with a transformation of table manners and table implements.

Wrangham writes that “cooking was a great discovery not merely because it gave us better food, or even because it made us physically human. It did something even more important: it helped make our brains uniquely large, providing a dull human body with a brilliant human mind.”

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The hearth that supplied every meal was always the focal point of the house. Indeed, the Latin word focus translates as “fireplace.”

As for cooking itself, it was largely the art of fire management.