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

by Bee Wilson

The word technology comes from the Greek. Techne means an art, skill, or craft, and logia means the study of something. Technology is not a form of robotics but something very human: the creation of tools and techniques that answer certain uses in our lives.

Kitchen gizmos offer a fascinating glimpse into the preoccupations of any given society.

Perhaps many hundreds of years from now, when our culture has been buried by some apocalypse or other, archaeologists will start to dig up our remains and name us the Mug community, MC for short: we were a people who liked our ceramics to be brightly colored, large enough to accommodate high volumes of comforting caffeinated drinks and above all dishwasher-proof.

Food writer Nigel Slater observes that it is preferable for a pot to “shatter into a hundred pieces than sustain a deep crack. The Cracked Pot might still be a favourite, but it introduces an element of danger I can live without . . . that uneasy feeling when you open the oven door that the dish will be in two halves, macaroni cheese sizzling on the oven floor.”

One-pot cookery is a cuisine of scarcity: scarce fuel, scarce utensils, scarce ingredients. Nothing is wasted.

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 cook. Use all the pans, bowls and equipment you need.”

There’s a very easy way to check for hot spots in your own pans. Just sprinkle plain flour over the surface of a pan and put it over a medium-high heat. You will see a brown pattern start to form as the flour burns. If the brown patch spreads over the whole surface of the pan, you’ll know that this pan has good heat uniformity. More likely, though, a small brown dot will appear toward the center: a hot

The ideal pan—like the ideal home—does not exist. Never mind. Pots have never been perfect, nor do they need to be. They are not just devices for boiling and sautéing, frying and stewing. They are part of the family. We get to know their foibles and their moods. We muddle through, juggling our good pots and our not-so-good ones. And in the end, supper arrives on the table; and we eat.

What rice cookers are not so good for—thus far—are the long-grain rices of India and Pakistan. Basmati grains should be fluffy and separate. The slow steaming of the rice cooker does long grains no favors; they turn gummy.

The tou’s greatest power is to save those eating from any knife work. Table knives are viewed as unnecessary and also slightly disgusting in China. To cut food at the table is regarded as a form of butchery. Once the tou has done its work, all the eater has to do is pick up the perfectly uniform morsels using chopsticks. The tou and the chopsticks work in perfect symbiosis: one chops, the other serves.

So much of what we believe about utensils is determined by culture, but cultural values are not fixed and eternal.

The second change was that table knives ceased being sharp. They were thus divested of their power, too. The raison d’être of knives is to cut. It takes a civilization in an advanced state of politesse—or passive aggression—to devise on purpose a knife that does a worse job of cutting. In more ways than one, we are still living with the consequences of this change today.

It is one of the reasons so many of us have bad knife skills. We use the same grip on sharp knives as table knives, which is disastrous. When holding a kitchen knife, you should never rest your index finger along the spine—there’s far more danger of cutting yourself than when you robustly grip the bottom of the blade with thumb on one side and forefinger on the other. A good training in table manners—which teach constant diffidence around sharpness—is bad training for the kitchen.

Vinaigrette and steel knives were a particularly bad combination, hence the French prejudice, that persists to this day, against cutting salad leaves.

What the orthodontists don’t tell you is that 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. Before that, most human beings had an edge-to-edge bite, comparable to apes. The overbite is not a product of evolution—the time frame is far too short. Rather, it seems likely to be a response to the way we cut our food during our formative years.

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.

We generally think that our bodies are fundamental and unchanging, whereas such things as table manners are superficial: we might change our manners from time to time, but we can’t be changed by them. Brace turned this on its head. 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.

Moreover, 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.

We have plenty of other things to do, and our cooking has to fit around our lives, rather than the other way around.

Kitchen technology is not just about how well something works on its own terms—whether it produces the most delicious food—but about all the things that surround it: kitchen design; our attitude to danger and risk; pollution; the lives of women and servants; how we feel about red meat, indeed about meat in general; social and family structures; the state of metallurgy.

weight-driven jack,

The devices that are truly revolutionary are not the ones that enable us to make entirely new creations—air-drying strawberries or vacuum-cooking rare cuts of venison—but the ones that let us do the things we already do with greater ease, better results, and more pleasure:

The use of prayers as timing devices belonged to the long centuries when cooks had to use deep ingenuity and vigilance to ensure that a meal came out right: cooked, but not burned.

They hold a thumb on the base of the pot and measure rinsed rice up to the thumb joint, then rest the tip of the thumb on the rice and pour in water until it again reaches the joint. It is then easy to cook perfect fluffy rice by the absorption method. The technology being used here is sheer know-how. We all have thumbs; what we lack is the confidence to use them.

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

Japanese ginger grater.

Spoons hold up a mirror to the surrounding culture precisely because they are so universal. There are fork cultures and there are chopstick cultures; but all the peoples of the world use spoons.

Having more gadgetry—more kitchen belongings—at our disposal does not necessarily make life easier. The problem with assembling more and more shiny tools that deal with the messy business of cooking and eating is that they tend to arrive with social mores that deem it necessary to use the tools, even when it flies in the face of common sense to do so.

In 1836, it was thought that to pick up sugar using fingers rather than sugar tongs was such a terrible faux pas, it might lead to a gentleman losing his good reputation. On the other hand, there was also an anxiety about seeming too refined or minding too much about the finer points of table manners. To go on too much about the right fork was a sign of insecurity or even fraudulence. Real aristocrats knew the “refined coarseness” of when to employ fingers instead of a fork: fingers were right for radishes, crackers, celery, unhulled strawberries, and olives.

how what we are prepared to accept in the way of the technology of eating is often determined more by cultural forces than function.

The technology of tableware cannot be understood solely in terms of function. On pure utilitarian grounds, there is very little that you can do with the triumvirate of knife-fork-spoon or with chopsticks that you cannot do with fingers and a bowl (assuming that there is also some kind of cutting implement available). Table utensils are above all cultural objects, carrying with them a view of what food is and how we should conduct ourselves in relation to it.

For a long time, the myth was bandied about that cooks in the past used spices to disguise the taste of putrid meat. This was not so: spices were expensive and would not be wasted on condemned food. But an important use of spices was tempering the harshness of salt meat.

So much of what we think of as personal taste is actually a consequence of technological change.

However radical we may think we are in our everyday beliefs, when we step into a kitchen, most of us become (small “c”) conservatives. We chop food with knives, stir it with spoons, and cook it in pots. As we stand in our modern kitchens, we still use the colanders, the pestles, and the frying pans of the ancients. We do not start from first principles every time we want to produce a meal but draw on the tools and ingredients we have at hand, governed by the rules and taboos and memories we all carry in our heads about cuisine.

In contrast to “culinary professionals,” Myhrvold notes, mothers and grandmothers in the past were “only cooking for themselves and their families.” Only! As if feeding those close to you were an act of no importance.

The thing that defines our culinary life now is not this or that technique, but the fact that we can choose from so many different technologies when we amble into our kitchens and ponder what to cook.

In the end, what you want from tools is not that they should be advanced but that they should work: to perform the job as helpfully as possible and fit with your particular kitchen and body, whether you are cooking for one, two, or many.

In the kitchen, old and new stand side by side as companions. 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.

Of course, most households are more ruthless about discarding things when they fall out of use. But kitchens remain extremely good at accommodating both old and new under a single roof. There is something sad as well as wasteful about the current impulse to start a kitchen from scratch: to rip out every trace of the cooks who came before you. It feels forgetful. Kitchens in general have never been so highly designed; so well equipped; so stylish; or so soulless.

It’s an illusion, of course. In the most highly designed modern kitchen, we are still drawing on the tools and techniques of the past. As you grasp your shiny tongs to whip up a modern dish of wok-fired squid and greens or linguini with butternut squash and red chili, you are still doing an old, old thing: using the transformative power of fire to make something taste better. Our kitchens are filled with ghosts. You may not see them, but you could not cook as you do without their ingenuity: the potters who first enabled us to boil and stew; the knife forgers; the resourceful engineers who designed the first refrigerators; the pioneers of gas and electric ovens; the scale makers; the inventors of eggbeaters and peelers.