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

by Bee Wilson

sharp, serrated steak knives (pioneered in the southern French town of Laguiole),

If you had no silver fish knives, the only other option was to eat fish with two forks, or a single fork and a piece of bread, or suffer the taste of corroded steel.

It was only in the early years of the twentieth century that a successful stainless steel—strong and tensile enough as well as corrosion resistant—was made.

Noncorrosive cutlery was a happy by-product of the search for military advantage between Britain and Germany on the road to total war.

the overbite is a very recent aspect of human anatomy and probably results from the way we use our table knives. Based on surviving skeletons, this has only been the “normal” alignment of the human jaw for 200 to 250 years in the Western world.

Brace found, the change to the overbite occurred only in the late eighteenth century, starting with “high status individuals.”

From medieval to modern times, the fork went from being a weird thing, a pretentious object of ridicule, to being an indispensable part of civilized dining.

Our supposedly normal and natural overbite—this seemingly basic aspect of modern human anatomy—is actually a product of how we behave at the table.

just because the overbite occurs at the same time as the knife and fork does not mean that one was caused by the other. Correlation is not cause. Yet Brace’s hypothesis does seem the best fit with the available data.

the overbite does indeed emerge 800–1,000 years sooner in China than in Europe. The differing attitude to knives in East and West had a graphic impact on the alignment of our jaws.

The technology of roasting is far older than that of constructing buildings, and older still than agriculture.

this first act of cooking or roasting—around 1.8 to 1.9 million years ago—was the decisive moment in history:

The discovery of cooked food left us with surplus energy for brain growth.

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

how people often cling to kitchen technologies long after they have been proven to be lethal and inefficient.

Until well into the nineteenth century, there was a strict conceptual division in Western cookery between open fires—things that roasted; and closed ovens—things that baked.

we larded the raw sirloin. This consisted of sewing strips of cured pork fat into the meat using giant “larding needles,” the idea being that it would be basted, deliciously, from within.

simply keeping up with London’s appetite for bread and beer would have taken around 30,000 tons of firewood in the year 1300,

One of these long-handled instruments was the salamander, a utensil named after a mythical dragon that was supposed to be able to withstand great heat. It consisted of an elongated handle with a cast-iron paddle-shaped head. The head of the salamander was held in the fire until the iron glowed red hot, then maneuverd over a dish of food—mostly pastries, sugary creams, or dishes topped with cheese—to broil

With a big roast, the “sweet spot,” or optimum position for roasting without charring, will be as much as three feet from the fire.

In the 1690s, it was written that geese were better at turning spits than dogs because they kept going for longer at the treadmill, sometimes as long as twelve hours. There were signs that dogs were too intelligent for the job.

Dog wheels were still being used in American restaurant kitchens well into the nineteenth century.

The average Third World open cooking fire—fueled by coal, dung, or wood—generates as much carbon dioxide as a car. Around 3 billion people—half the world’s population—cook like this, with dreadful consequences, both for carbon emissions and individual health:

All cooking obeys the second law of thermodynamics: heat flows from hotter things to colder things. But this transfer of energy can happen in more than one way.

The first way is radiant heat.

The second type of heat transfer is conduction.

The third type of cooking heat is convection.

What makes the tandoor so unusual is that it combines all three forms of heat transfer in one.

The ovens of Western cooking were generally brick boxes. Heat transfer in this sort of oven is typically around 80 percent by convection and only 20 percent by radiation.

It was said that when stoves were first introduced in the United States in the 1830s, they inspired feelings of hatred: stoves might be an acceptable way to heat a public place such as a barroom or courthouse, but not a home.

A range was never just designed to cook food; it was needed to provide hot water for the whole household, to heat up irons and warm hands.

The medieval wood fire was really an indoor bonfire, with nothing but some andirons (or brand-irons) to stop the burning logs from rolling forward onto the floor.

Medieval coroners’ reports listing accidental deaths indicate that women were more likely to die accidentally in the home than anywhere else.

Electric cooking only became normal—both in Europe and the States—in the late 1920s,

Early electric ovens took ages to preheat—as much as thirty-five minutes in 1914

By 1948, 86 percent of households in Britain used electricity in some form. But only 19 percent owned an electric stove.

no cooking tool can do everything, no matter what the manufacturers may say.

In most kitchens, the microwave is not used as a form of cooking, but as a way of avoiding cooking,

No one sits around a microwave telling stories deep into the night. Its angular glass frontage cannot warm our hands or our hearts.

Measuring is a way of imposing order on a chaotic universe.

Good cooking is a precise chemical undertaking.

Recipes are an attempt to make dishes reproducible.

America’s attachment to cups really is odd

The United States is today one of only three countries not to have officially adopted the French metric system. The other two are Liberia and Myanmar (Burma).

Measurement is always a form of comparison

The handful method may not work as an absolute measure, but it works very well on the principle of ratio.

The “size of a walnut” has been used by cooks as far afield as Russia and Afghanistan; England, Italy, and France; and America. The comparison has been used at least since medieval times.

We can tell that kitchen timepieces were not the norm in medieval and early modern times from the number of recipes giving timings not in minutes but in prayers.

The first fully integrated gas oven with thermostat was marketed in 1915, and by the 1920s, electric stoves fitted with electromechanical thermostats were being produced.

Part of the scientific method is accepting that not everything is within the domain of science.