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

by Bee Wilson

Take the relationship between labor-saving devices and servants. The story here is one of technological stagnation. There was very little interest in eliminating the grind of cooking for the many centuries when well-off kitchens came with an abundance of human labor to take the strain. Electric food processors and blenders are genuinely liberating tools. Arms no longer have to ache to produce kibbe in Lebanon or ginger-garlic puree in India. So many meals that were once seasoned with pain are now trouble free.

Technology is the art of the possible.

Historians of technology often quote Kranzberg’s First Law (formulated by Melvin Kranzberg in a seminal essay in 1986): “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”

French cooks are fond instead of braising vegetables such as carrots in a tiny amount of water with butter, or stewing them like ratatouille, or baking them with stock or cream in a gratin to concentrate their sweetness; boiling is—perhaps rightly—regarded as the dullest way.

The Chinese cook takes fish and fowl, vegetable and meat, in all their diverse shapes and renders them geometrically exact and bite-sized.

The habit of carrying your own sharp knife with you was as much a bedrock of Western culture as Christianity, the Latin alphabet, and the rule of law.

The microwave is not always given enough credit for the many things it does exceptionally well. It can cook fish so that it stays moist and make old-fashioned steamed puddings in minutes. It is a nifty device for caramelizing sugar with minimal mess and for gently melting dark chocolate without it seizing up. It cooks perfect fluffy Basmati rice effortlessly. The attraction of microwaves for fat molecules makes it the ideal way to de-fat ducks and spare ribs before roasting, as Barbara Kafka notes in her 1987 opus, Microwave Gourmet, the most persuasive case ever made for the microwave as an instrument of pleasure.

No one sits around a microwave telling stories deep into the night.

The difference between a truly great dinner and an indifferent one might be thirty seconds and one-quarter of a teaspoonful of salt.

Michael Ruhlman recently wrote a whole cookbook founded on the principle of ratio, arguing that when you know a culinary ratio, “it’s not like knowing a single recipe, it’s instantly knowing a thousand.”

The two hardest things to quantify in the kitchen are timing and heat.

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. A French medieval recipe for preserved walnuts calls for boiling them for the time it takes to say a Miserere (“Oh wash me and more from my guilt . . . ”), about two minutes. The shortest measurement of time was the “Ave Maria,” twenty seconds, give or take.

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. Also, because the egg is sealed in its shell, there is no way to judge it by eye: hence the long marriage between eggs and timers.

as much on grounds of aesthetics as anything. The Roman philosopher Seneca wrote in praise of simpler cuisine: “I like food that a household of slaves has not prepared, watching it with envy, that has not been ordered many days in advance or served up by many hands.”

Behind every course of a grand dinner was a mini-army of minions with sore arms. Done by hand, grinding, pounding, beating, and sieving are among the most laborious of all kitchen tasks. The really striking thing, therefore, is how little impetus there was—until very recently—to develop labor-saving devices; and how little change there was in the basic equipment used. For thousands of years, servants and slaves—or in lesser households, wives and daughters—were stuck with the same pestles and sieves, with few innovations. This technological stagnation reflects a harsh truth. There was very little interest in attempting to save labor when the labor in question was not your own.

While we in the cities of the West were busily imitating the old peasant ways, many of the peasants had switched to using food processors.

Flatness is also necessary for the elaborate semaphore of knife-and-fork table manners that reached their apogee in Victorian times. The plate becomes like a dial, on which you communicate your intentions.

Both the Americans and the British secretly find each other’s way of using a fork to be very vulgar: the British think they are polite because they never put down their knives; Americans think they are polite because they do. We are two nations separated by common tableware, as well as by a common language.

As Karl Marx observed in the Grundrisse, “The hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth.” Forks change not just the how of eating but the what.

The system of eating with chopsticks eliminates the main Western taboos at table, which chiefly have to do with managing the violence of the knife.

In the countries of finger-eating, the food has evolved to fit, and hands have developed powers that the presence of cutlery denies them.

The term spork is first recorded in a dictionary in 1909, though the first patent for one was only issued in 1970. Both the word and the thing are a hybrid of spoon and fork. Like a pencil with an eraser on the end, the spork is what theorists of technology call a “joined” tool: two inventions combined. In its classical form—fashioned from flimsy disposable plastic and given away at fast-food outlets—the spork has the scooping bowl of a spoon coupled with the tines of a fork. It is not to be confused with a splayd, a knoon, a spife, or a knork.* Sporks have developed an affectionate following, of a somewhat ironic kind, in our lifetime. There are several websites devoted to them, proffering tips on use (“bend the prongs inward and outward and stand the spork on end. This is a leaning tower of spork”), haikus in their honor (“The spork, true beauty / the tines, the bowl, the long stem / life now is complete”), and general musings. Spork.org has this to say: A spork is a perfect metaphor for human existence. It tries to function as both spoon and fork, and because of this dual nature, it fails miserably at both. You cannot have soup with a spork; it is far too shallow. You cannot eat meat with a spork; the prongs are too small. A spork is not one thing or another, but in-between. In the Pixar-animated film Wall-E, a robot in a postapocalyptic wasteland attempts to clear up the detritus left behind on planet earth by the human race. He heroically sorts old plastic cutlery int...

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. When we can’t think what else to do, we open the fridge door and stare into it long and hard as if it will provide the answers to life’s great questions.

Frigidaire noted the challenge of cracking the British market: “The hard sell was probably essential in a Britain which regarded ice as only an inconvenience of winter-time and cold drinks as an American mistake.” This fear of the excess of American appetites was a national austerity of the mind that long predated the actual austerity of wartime and its aftermath.

For French scientist Hervé This, one of the inventors of the term “molecular gastronomy,” our cooking is guilty of “technical stagnation.” In 2009, This asked: Why do we still cook as we did in the Middle Ages, with whisks, fire, and saucepans? Why this outdated behavior; when, at the same time, humanity is sending probes to the outer limits of the solar system?

Six years earlier in Britain, a Hungarian physicist named Nicholas Kurti had been making some discoveries of his own. In 1968, Kurti gave a Friday-night lecture at the Royal Institution, entitled “The Physicist in the Kitchen.” Kurti found it very sad that the role of science in the kitchen had not been given more attention. He showed the audience a series of hypodermic syringes, which he used with a dramatic flourish to inject pineapple juice into a loin of pork to tenderize it (pineapple contains an enzyme, bromelin, that breaks down proteins). He used a microwave oven to construct an “inverted Baked Alaska” with an outer layer of chocolate ice cream encasing an inner layer of hot meringue and apricot puree. Finally, Kurti brought in a leg of lamb cooked for eight hours at precisely 176°F until fantastically tender: here already was a version of the sous-vide idea of cooking meat low and slow at highly controlled temperatures. Kurti is now revered among the modernist chefs and food scientists as one of the fathers of high-tech cuisine.