Running Commentary 1/27/2025

Consider the Fork by Bee Wilson

This is a history of kitchen technology, comprehensively wide-ranging in its scope. It mainly focuses on Western and East Asian cooking and eating techniques, though the artifacts of other societies get mentioned sporadically. Forks are mentioned, yes, but not until a later chapter which they share with spoons; if you’re after a history of the fork specifically, I would recommend Petroski’s chapter on them in his The Evolution of Useful Things, at least as a complement to Wilson’s account, which focusses more on how the fork was received socially than on how the fork’s design was arrived upon. That aside, this book is a very worthwhile read. Eating is one of the few truly universal human practices, and even societies with very little technology had/have tools for preparing and serving food. Wilson ably gives an account of nearly everything that might be found in the kitchen, from whisks to stovetops to blenders to refrigerators, without either just glossing over things or getting bogged down in details. She writes from a discernably British perspective but doesn’t act like the British kitchen is the only sort she could or should write about.

Wilson divides her book into chapters by topic. Very broad topics, which tend to shift as the chapter goes on, but the organization works.

• The first chapter is “Pots and Pans”, which traces the development of cooking vessels back to ancient times, but which also gives a history of boiled foods, clearing up misconceptions about 45-minute asparagus found in old cookbooks.
• “Knife” looks at the history of both prep and eating knives while contrasting European tradition (knives at the table, a set of many specialized knives in the kitchen) with Asian ones (generally only one or two knives, always kept back in the kitchen); Wilson presents the “tou” as the single knife to be found in the Chinese kitchen; looking into it myself it seems Chinese kitchens will have perhaps a few knives differing in thickness, but still following the same general design moreso than a French knife set does. Wilson calls East Asian cuisine a “culture of chopping” — breaking down food before it is served — where the West practices a “culture of carving” — wherein diners take prepared food apart themselves at the table.
• “Fire” speaks of the oldest culinary technology: cooking itself. Wilson gets into the peculiarly European division of “roasting” from “baking”, two things generally seen as one and done using the same equipment by other peoples. Tying into this, Wilson also looks at the too-slow decline of open-hearth spit-roasting, a dangerous, labor-intensive, energy-wasting method by which Europeans cooked meat well up into the modern era before finally adopting enclosed ovens as good for food besides bread.
• “Measure” is a history of recipes, the social technology that enables one cook to instruct another clearly The modern recipe is relatively new, veering closer to a scientific report than older recipes, which either gave ingredient amounts by analogy (”walnut-sized” pieces were a popular feature) or else leaving them out altogether. These were written with the belief that the reader is a trained cook who needed only to know secret ingredients or special techniques, and could fill in gaps with existing knowledge. The recipe was dependent on the development of standardized measurement of ingredients. For a British writer, Wilson is quite gracious in describing the uniquely North American aversion to weighing ingredients besides cuts of meat. Measuring packable dry goods by volume doesn’t make a great deal of sense but were apparently considered preferrable to constantly messing around with mechanical scales.
• “Grind” is perhaps the worst-named of the chapters; I expected something about coffee or spices, and while those two things get mentioned, so do things like egg beaters, blenders, and food processors, essentially anything developed to relieve repetitive labor in the kitchen. Most of these implements are fairly new. The mortar-and-pestle is very old, and exhausting to use at length. In an era of servants, there was little impetus to do away with it, but as more well-off people started to cook for themselves, more labor-saving gadgets found a market. Wilson makes an earlier point, relevant again here, that so-called labor-saving gadgets can often increase a cook’s workload by enabling them to do work they would otherwise leave to the pros.
• “Eat” sees Wilson finally actually consider the fork. She gives its history, as well as that of spoons, chopsticks, esoteric picks and tongs, and human fingers, as means of eating with. Table manners get a bit of a mention here.
• “Ice” is about the refrigerator, the most recent fundamental development in cooking. Wilson also takes the time to describe older methods of preserving food, such as salting and canning; these changed the food they preserved in serious ways, which actually helped them survive to modern times since people developed a taste for preserved food. Fresh food came to be seen as still fresh when preserved by refrigeration, although that was not immediately the case. (Compare with Frostbite)
• “Kitchen” is the final chapter. It gives the history of the kitchen as a room, which is a shorter history than you might expect, but it also looks at high-tech kitchen tools, like the sous-vide cooker and ergonomic can openers. These, and the kitchen itself, reflect the uniquely modern state of cooking as something relatively wealthy people are proud to do themselves, as a hobby as much as a necessity. Modern people spend a lot on kitchens and the tools within them. Rather than being hidden corners of the house, kitchens are open and decorated, and people are eager to discuss and try out new methods of preparing food to an unprecedented degree.