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

by Bee Wilson

WHY EGG TIMERS AND NOT CARROT TIMERS or stew timers? Because there is very little margin of error in achieving the ideal soft-boiled egg—flowing, orange yolk; set but not rubbery white.

Time alone becomes a stand-in for temperature plus time.

Until modern times, by contrast, the meals that took the most effort to make were highly processed.

highly refined food remained the norm on wealthy tables well into the twentieth century.

There was very little interest in attempting to save labor when the labor in question was not your own.

The earliest grinding implements go back around 20,000 years.

By the end of the Stone Age, mortars were sometimes incorporated into a house:

As late as 1823, Mary Eaton, a cookery writer, advised that the egg whites for a large cake would take three hours to beat adequately.

The nastiest idea was to take the egg whites and wring them repeatedly through a sponge, a method both ineffectual and rather disgusting, particularly if the sponge had already been used for some other purpose.

Colanders and sieves are another of those implements, like the mortar and pestle, that have not really altered in essentials since ancient times,

premodern cookery books were largely written for people who did not themselves do any of the hands-on cooking,

What tulips were to Holland in the 1630s and Internet startups were to Seattle in the 1990s, eggbeaters were to the East Coast of the United States in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s.

Between 1856 and 1920, no fewer than 692 separate patents were granted for eggbeaters.

When the Cuisinart launched in the United States in 1973, it was expensive. The initial retail price was $160. In today’s money, that is nearly $800

The KitchenAid is still the all-American mixer par excellence, a great chunk of metal, like a Humvee, but in pretty colors like a Cadillac (meringue, red, pearl gray);

the processor demystified many of the trickiest dishes in the repertoire of French haute cuisine,

we should be careful not to delude ourselves that it has really saved all labor. 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.

slow and difficult is not the only way to make delicious food.

There are fork cultures and there are chopstick cultures; but all the peoples of the world use spoons.

The first true fork on the historical record was a two-pronged gold one used by a Byzantine princess who married the doge of Venice in the eleventh century. St. Peter Damian damned her for “excessive delicacy” in preferring such a rarefied implement to her God-given hands.

Medieval and Tudor diners also had tiny “sucket” forks, double-ended implements with a spoon at one end and a two-pronged fork at the other.

Forks in our sense were considered odd until the seventeenth century, except among Italians.

Queen Elizabeth I owned forks for sweetmeats but chose to use her fingers instead, finding the spearing motion to be crude.

In the 1970s, real men were said not to eat quiche. In the 1610s, they didn’t use forks.

Forks change not just the how of eating but the what.

The earliest pair of surviving chopsticks are bronze, from the Ruins of Yin and dated around 1200 BC,

The Japanese came to chopstick culture later than the Chinese (from whom they borrowed the idea),

Japanese chopsticks tend to be shorter than Chinese ones (around 22 cm as against 26 cm), and they have pointed ends rather than flat ones,

For true politeness, in most cultures where food is handheld, only the thumb, forefinger, and middle finger are used.

In the countries of finger-eating, the food has evolved to fit,

The term spork is first recorded in a dictionary in 1909, though the first patent for one was only issued in 1970.

neither the Soviet Union—nor any country in the world, not Britain, not Germany—could match American domestic refrigerators in 1959.

The American fridge became a new focal point for the kitchen, taking over from the old hearth.

Medieval salty butter was far saltier than our “salted butter,” which is seasoned to suit our palate rather than for preservation.

according to a record of 1305, 1 pound of salt was needed for 10 pounds of butter, i.e., the butter was 10 percent salt.

To have access to ice in the summer—to flout the seasons—was a sure sign of wealth.

Unsold meat—known as the shambles—was left to rot on the streets.

Unless you were a country dweller with a kitchen garden, green vegetables were a rarity.

The basic device of adding salt to ice to lower its temperature was discovered around 300 AD in India.

In 1917, only 25 percent of households in the United States were on the electric grid. By 1930, that number was 80 percent.

in 1930, US sales of mechanized fridges overtook sales of iceboxes for the first time.

the introduction of the “two-temperature refrigerator” in 1939—the refrigerator-freezer.

Clarence Birdseye, who created the modern frozen-foods industry in the 1920s,

For a long time, Europeans actively rejected the technology of cold storage.

The fridge, they insisted, was like a mausoleum in which the true nature of a great cheese would be killed. And who is to say they were entirely wrong? A fridge-cold Brie is a dull thing compared to the oozing wonder of a Brie matured to its peak in an old-fashioned larder.

As of 1948, just 2 percent of British households owned a fridge.

2007 study from Japan found that when salmonella-infected eggs were stored at 50°F over six weeks, there was no growth in the bacteria. Even at 68°F, there was negligible bacterial growth. At temperatures of 77°F and above, however, salmonella growth was rampant. In Alabama, in July, an unrefrigerated egg could be lethal.

Before World War II, yogurt was hardly eaten in the West.

Why not use all your ingenuity and imagination?

Sous-vide is to modernist cooking what spit-roasting was to the Elizabethans: the default technology for cooking almost everything.