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

by Bee Wilson

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.

From the 1960s onward, a series of historians pointed out the irony that the amount of time American women spent on housework, including cooking, had remained constant since the mid-1920s, despite all of the technological improvements that came on the market over those four decades. For all the dishwashers, electric mixers, and automatic garbage disposals, women were working as hard as ever. Why? Ruth Schwartz Cowan, in her campaigning history More Work for Mother, noted that in pure technical terms, there was no reason America should not have communal kitchen arrangements, sharing out the cooking among several households. But this technology was never widely explored because the idea of public kitchens is socially unacceptable: most of us generally like to live in smaller family

In the story called “Stone Soup” (which has many versions) some travelers come to a village carrying an empty cooking pot and beg for some food. The villagers refuse. The travelers produce a stone and some water and claim they are making “stone soup.” The villagers are so fascinated, they each add a little something to the pot—a few vegetables, some seasoning—until finally the “stone soup” has become a rich cassoulet-like hot pot, from which all can feast.

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.

For centuries, people have found lemon to be the ideal accompaniment to fish. But until the 1920s, and the invention of stainless steel, the taste of lemony fish was liable to be ruined by the tang of blade metal from the knife. The acid in the lemon reacted with the steel, leaving a foul metallic aftertaste that entirely overpowered the delicate flesh of the fish. This explains the production of fish knives made of silver in the nineteenth century.

What the orthodontists don’t tell you is that the overbite is a very recent aspect of human anatomy and probably results from the way we use our table knives.

Over subsequent years, Brace has analyzed many Chinese teeth and found that—with the exception of peasants, who often retain an edge-to-edge bite well into the twentieth century—the overbite does indeed emerge 800–1,000 years sooner in China than in Europe.

The original curfew was a kitchen object: a large metal cover placed over the embers at night to contain the fire while people slept.

of dog wheels, he several times found

Smoke jacks were only cheap, however, if fuel use was not taken into account. To keep the vane turning in the smoke, grotesque amounts of wood or coal had to be kept burning in the hearth. In 1800, it was calculated that you could use one-thousandth of the fuel needed to make a smoke jack work to power the spit with a small steam engine instead. Because spit-roasting was so central to British cooking, much intelligence was lavished on inventing improved methods of turning the spit.

More fuel is frequently consumed in a kitchen range to boil a tea-kettle than, with proper management, would be sufficient to cook a dinner for fifty men.” The author of these words was Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, one of the most skillful scientists ever to apply himself to the question of cooking.

Excessive smoke was not an accident, but inherent to the design of the English kitchen around the year 1800. To make room for all the pots that needed to be fitted over the fire, the range was built very long, which in turn necessitated an “enormously large” and high chimney that squandered much fuel and generated much smoke.

The average Third World open cooking fire—fueled by coal, dung, or wood—generates as much carbon dioxide as a car.

The World Health Organization has calculated that indoor smoke, chiefly from cooking fires, kills 1.5 million people every year.

When Pehr Kalm arrived in London from Sweden in the eighteenth century, he found the “coal-smoke” from cooking “very annoying,” and wondered if it was responsible for the high incidence of lung disease in England. He developed a terrible cough, which only abated when he left the city.

By 1901, one in three British households had a gas stove; by 1939, on the brink of World War II, three-fourths of households cooked with gas.

This technological stagnation reflects a harsh truth. There was very little interest in attempting to save labor when the labor in question was not your own.

The medieval housewife making pancakes in Le Ménagier de Paris stood face to face with the people she was wearying, whereas our servants have mainly been removed from view. We do not see the hands in the chicken factory that boned the breasts, never mind the chickens that gave their lives, nor the workers who labored to assemble the parts of our whizzy food processors. We only see a pile of ingredients and a machine ready to do our bidding. Alone in our kitchens, we feel entirely emancipated.

Soups and stews became chunky, which was a way of parading that no food processor had been used in their preparation. Fine-textured food lost almost all its previous cachet. Now it was the rustic and the irregular that was prized, because this showed that someone’s hand had been tired out making it.

It is sometimes assumed that these waribashi are a modern Western in-flux, akin to polystyrene cups. But this is not so: they have been used ever since the beginnings of the Japanese restaurant industry in the eighteenth century, because giving a fresh pair of chopsticks to all customers was the only way a restaurateur could assure his clientele that what they put in their mouth was not defiled.

“In America, we like to make life easier for women,” noted Nixon. Khrushchev replied that “your capitalistic attitude to women does not occur under communism,” implying that instead of making life easier, these machines only confirmed the American view that the vocation of women was to be housewives (and perhaps he was partly right about this).

The fact was that neither the Soviet Union—nor any country in the world, not Britain, not Germany—could match American domestic refrigerators in 1959. The United States was the ice nation par excellence. Ninety-six percent of households owned fridges (compared to 13 percent for Britain). The American way of life was, to a very large extent, made possible by refrigeration. From the clink of ice cubes in a glass of bourbon to the easy luxury of a Chicago steak in New York City, from soda fountains and popsicles to frozen peas, the business of cooling food and drink was deeply American.

It has been said that the decade between the end of World War I and the start of the Depression saw the most “dramatic changes” in the patterns of household work in America of any decade in history.

So much of what we think of as personal taste is actually a consequence of technological change.

It would be exhausting to live like this, always questioning everything.

Christine Frederick,

Efficiency engineers went into factories and advised on ways the workers could do the same work in less time. Why couldn’t the same principles be applied in the kitchen?

Frederick came up with an ideal kitchen design, arranged such that the worker using it performed the minimal number of steps, without ever stooping.

Frederick suggested, women could improve their efficiency by around 50 percent, freeing up time for other activities,

Another rational kitchen of the early twentieth century was the Frankfurt Kitchen, created by the great Margarete Schütte-Lihotsky, the first female architecture student at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts. Between 1926 and 1930, every apartment in the city of Frankfurt’s public housing program was fitted with an identical kitchen built to Schütte-Lihotsky’s specifications.

It was based on how women actually moved around a kitchen, rather than on how a designer wanted them to behave.

Compare this with the Frankfurt Kitchen, which came equipped with a swivel chair (height adjustable, a rare acknowledgment from an architect that humans come in different sizes) so that women could easily glide from the plain wooden work surface by the window to the cupboards and back again.

Architects now speak of five basic arrangements for kitchens: L-shaped, U-shaped, island, one-wall, and galley.

The best part of the Frankfurt Kitchen was this: on the end of each drawer was a tapered scoop, so that whoever was cooking could lift out the drawer of rice, say, and pour the required amount—without spillage—straight onto the scales or into the pot.

Schütte-Lihotsky was a social revolutionary—the Nazis imprisoned her for four years for belonging to a Communist resistance group—and her kitchen had a feminist agenda. Schütte-Lihotsky was hopeful that the right kitchen design could help liberate women from their role as housewives, freeing up enough time so they could increasingly work outside the home.

Frederick knew that more space was a mixed blessing because it meant further for the person cooking to walk. The critical design factor was having tasks and equipment clustered together, encouraging a “chain of steps” around the room.

Frederick identified six distinct stages in cooking a meal: preparing, cooking, serving, removing, washing, putting away. Each stage needed its own tools. At each stage, the tools should be at the right height and in the right position for the worker: Too often the utensils are all hung together, or jumbled in a drawer. Why reach across the stove for the potato masher when it belongs over the table? Why walk to the cabinet for the pancake turner when you need it for the stove?

Many ideal kitchens were—and are—less about introducing greater efficiency into the life you already live and more about pretending to lead another life altogether.

Christine Frederick’s rational kitchen had been driven by efficiency: the fewest steps, the fewest utensils. The new ideal kitchens were far more opulent. These were dollhouses for grown women, packed with the maximum number of trinkets.

The aim was not to save labor but to make the laborers forget they were working.

In 1930, 50 percent of American women were in paid work; by 1950 this had dropped to 34 percent (as against 60 percent in 2000).

The luxury of the midcentury kitchen was also a way of compensating for—or forgetting—the hardship of war.