You know that corner cupboard full of kitchen gadgets that promised to transform our lives?
Or maybe they’re all in a box in the basement. The truly rational may have parted ways completely and long ago tossed that old melon-baller, raclette and bread-maker.
But, for those who can’t let go, in that corner cupboard lies a rich history of technological promise and dashed hopes. One that, until Bee Wilson’s recent release, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, nobody has thought to tell.
Consider the Fork isn’t just Ginzu knives, Bullet blenders and other things as seen on TV. Instead, her history of home food processing delves into larger issues, like how the inaccurate “cup” became an ubiquitous unit of measurement in America — a country which, in its nascent years, was devoted to throwing off antiquated and clunky systems of measure, like, for example, the pounds-shilling-pence system. And yet, cups are wildly inaccurate. The volume of flour in a cup, for instance, is radically different pre- and post-sift. Chopped vegetables in a cup can be completely different weights, depending on the size of the dice. And you could have almost half the amount of brown sugar to a cup if it’s light and fluffy as opposed to tightly packed.
Wilson traces our attachment to cups to an influential 1846 recipe book that advised readers to switch to handier and readily available household drinking cups for efficiency’s sake. There was one caveat, however — the reader was told to prepare for the switch by familiarizing him or herself with the weight of a range of ingredients which were meant to be measured by that particular cup. Somehow, that last crucial bit was lost.
But does it matter? Is precision as important as some claim? Wilson points out that many home and professional chefs claim to use very precise measurements, particularly in what she calls “modernist” cooking, which prides itself on precise temperatures and measures. These chefs stand in contrast with the “I do it by instinct” school, which claims to eschew recipes altogether. Wilson lays waste to both pretensions by pointing out that no amount of modern science can completely account for differences in raw ingredients. Perfect control is an illusion. On the other side, the so-called instinct cooks are doing more measuring than they admit — to themselves, even — since people who repeat recipes have become unwitting experts in eyeballing portions.
This is the kind of measured reasoning Wilson applies to many of the components of our kitchens which we either irrationally fear — like the microwave oven, which she declares perfectly safe and quite useful for some things — or those we take for granted. As the title suggests, for example, she carefully considers the fork, which is actually a fairly new staple at the dinner table. Only 400 years ago, it was associated with effeminate and uncivilized Southern European foreigners in England. It would take another century for it to be okay not to eat with your hands.
Clearly-written and methodically researched, Consider the Fork fills a real void in culinary literature. Other than the history of refrigeration, which has recently been explored at length by Mark Kurlansky, most of the topics in this book are new ground.
And, although we already knew the history of the restaurant, diets and many specific ingredients, we did not know the history of the gadgets on our counters (and in boxes in the basement) used to cut, dice, chop and cook these ingredients.
At least not until now.
Christine Sismondo is the author of America Walks into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops (Oxford University Press).