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Often, inventors have been working on something for military use, only to find that its best use is in the kitchen.
a quickly made wok-cooked meal was originally the product of firewood scarcity.
A patent for Nicolas Appert’s revolutionary new canning process was issued in 1812, and the first canning factory opened in Bermondsey, London, in 1813. Yet it would be a further fifty years before anyone managed to devise a can opener.
Just because a technology is there doesn’t mean we have to use it.
AeroPress, an amazing, inexpensive manual device that makes inky-dark coffee essence using air pressure.
In many cases, the clay pot enabled people to eat plants that would otherwise be toxic.
cauldrons were often passed on in wills;
of Julia Child, who began her Mastering the Art of French Cooking with a stern piece of advice: do not be a pot saver. “A pot saver is a self-hampering
hampering cook. Use all the pans, bowls and equipment you need.”
berries and lettuce stay fresher for
longer in the fridge if you first plunge them in warm water,
Your knife was as much a garment—like a wristwatch now—as a tool.
You would no more eat with another person’s knife than you would brush your teeth today with a stranger’s toothbrush.
the Latin word focus translates as “fireplace.”
When Bergh paid surprise visits to kitchens to check for the presence of dog wheels, he several times found that the dogs had been replaced at the fire by young black children.
The average Third World open cooking fire—fueled by coal, dung, or wood—generates as much carbon dioxide as a car.
Barbara Kafka notes in her 1987 opus, Microwave Gourmet,
The cup system quantifies all ingredients, whether wet or dry, fluffy or dense, by using measuring cups of a certain volume: 236.59 ml, to be precise.
Through a strange quirk of history, the United States is the only country in the world that measures food like this.
Delia Smith
A walnut
is somewhat more than a smidgen and less than a dollop. Much the same as a knob.
“Now take your right forefinger.” He shows me how to use this finger to touch the palm of my left hand, the fleshy part at the base of the thumb. “That’s what rare steak feels like,” says Cadieux. My finger sinks into my own squishy flesh: it feels just like raw meat, which doesn’t bounce back. “Next, bring your left forefinger
and thumb together and continue to feel the base of the thumb with your right finger—that’s medium rare. Add your middle finger—medium. Ring finger—medium-well done. Finally, the little finger—that’s well done.”
Each temperature was defined by the color a sample of white kitchen paper turned when put on the oven floor.
It is still used in this way to create Spanish romesco, a heady mixture of peppers, nuts, oil, vinegar, bread, and garlic.
We often ignore the great and disquieting fact that premodern cookery books were largely written for people who did not themselves do any of the hands-on cooking, for people who would take the credit for what was served at their table without having put in any of the elbow grease.
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.
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.
no one wanted to be seen eating dinner with a Roundhead spoon.
Most of the polite rules surrounding cutlery reflect a terror about handling food—an anxiety about its stickiness and noise.
Real aristocrats knew the “refined coarseness” of when to employ fingers instead of a fork:
But the table fork is a relatively recent invention, and it attracted scorn and laughter when it first appeared. Its
image was not helped by its associations with the Devil and his pitchfork.
Why did Italy adopt the fork before any other country in Europe? One word: pasta.
waribashi are an ecological disaster. Japan now uses and throws away around 23 billion pairs per year.
By American standards, Soviet kitchens in the brand-new apartments built under Khrushchev’s regime were miniscule: between 4.5 and 6 meters square.
A fridge rather than a stove now tends to be the starting point—what designers call the “statement”—around which the rest of a kitchen is constructed.
As of 1948, just 2 percent of British households owned a fridge.
although 75 percent of Americans ate dinner at home, fewer than one-third were cooking their meals from scratch.
Architects now speak of five basic arrangements for kitchens: L-shaped, U-shaped, island, one-wall, and galley.
It’s a small thing, but good vegetable peelers are a very recent development. They have been in our lives only since 1990.
In a single person’s kitchen, this might mean one of those new boiling-water faucets (the Quooker)
We do so because most of the time, in most kitchens, whisks, fire, and saucepans still do the job pretty well. All we want is better whisks, better fire, and better saucepans.
Our kitchens are filled with ghosts.
