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

by Bee Wilson

Unlike art, food is not so easy to tear apart and reinvent.

there is no need to cook like the scientists.

The majority of households, for most of history, have not possessed a separate, purpose-built room in which to cook.

Except for the enclosure of the fire in a grate, not much changed in the culinary possibilities for the poor from ancient to modern times.

The phenomenon of people who live off nothing but takeout is not a new one.

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

From the 1940s onward, ideal kitchens were dangled above women’s noses as a treat: a compensation for a life of drudgery or part of a sleight of hand that told them how lucky they were to be unpaid “homemakers.”

good vegetable peelers are a very recent development. They have been in our lives only since 1990.

All kitchen tools should be ergonomic, because their role has—in theory—always been to help humans cook. But it is striking how often traditional designs have hindered our movement around a kitchen in small ways we do not even notice until a better way is shown.

Tools justify themselves—or not—through use.

In the grand kitchens of the past, when a new piece of equipment was adopted, it did not necessarily edge out the old. Successive tools were added on top, but the original ways of cooking could be glimpsed underneath, like a palimpsest.

Our kitchens are filled with ghosts. You may not see them, but you could not cook as you do without their ingenuity: