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

by Bee Wilson

In many ways, the history of food is the history of technology.

It is easy to assume, therefore, that cooking with stones is simply an inferior technology, compared to boiling something in a pot. But is it?

If they had three legs, this was a sign they were designed to sit in the embers.

In Celtic myth, cauldrons are capable of summoning up both eternal abundance and absolute knowledge. To have a pot and nothing to put in it was the depths of misery.

One-pot cookery is a cuisine of scarcity: scarce fuel, scarce utensils, scarce ingredients.

By putting vegetables, potatoes, and pudding in separate muslin bags in the boiling water, it was possible to cook more than one thing at once in a single vessel. The pudding might end up tasting a bit cabbagey, and the cabbage rather puddingy, but at least it made a change from soup.

The downside is that these pans rust nastily if not dried and oiled carefully after use. They also leach small amounts of iron into the food (though this is a benefit if you are anemic).

But it takes a certain attentiveness to maintain a seasoned pan. It must never be scoured. The surface can also be ruined by acidic ingredients such as tomatoes or vinegar. When the seasoning on a cast-iron pan wears away, you have to start all over again.

It’s far better to buy a traditional metal like aluminum or steel or cast iron and season it with oil: that way, your pan gets better with use rather than worse. Each time you grease and cook with a cast-iron pan, it gets an extra patina. Whereas each time you cook with nonstick, the coating gets a little less slick.

Kitchens are places of violence.

Become the boss of a sharp knife, and you are the boss of the whole kitchen.

Even in a domestic setting, the basic hearth fire was not lightly put out.

Every attempt to poke the dull fire or prod the half-cooked meat only adds to the smoke.

Necessity is the mother of invention,

Of all the thankless, soul-destroying jobs in a rich medieval British kitchen—scullion, washpot, drudge—there can have been few worse than that of the turnspit or turnbroach, the person (usually a boy) charged with rotating the roasting spits. “In olden times,” wrote the great biographer John Aubrey, “the poor boys did turn the spits, and licked the dripping pans.”

To be a turnspit was deemed suitable work for a child well into the eighteenth century.

John Macdonald (b. 1741), a Scottish highlander, was a famous footman who wrote memoirs of his experiences in service. An orphan, Macdonald had been sacked from a previous job rocking a baby’s cradle and next found work in a gentleman’s house turning the spit. He was aged just five.

Thomas Somerville, who witnessed the use of dog wheels during a childhood in eighteenth-century Scotland, recalled that the dogs “used to hide themselves or run away when they observed indications that there was to be a roast for dinner.”