Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat Read Free Page B

roasting meat; and extremely long-handled iron ladles, skimmers, and forks. With the end of open-hearth cookery, all of these associated tools vanished, too.
    For every kitchen technology that has endured—like the mortar and pestle—there are countless others that have vanished. We no longer feel the need of cider owls and dangle spits, flesh-forks and galley pots, trammels, and muffineers, though in their day, these would have seemed no more superfluous than our oil drizzlers, electric herb choppers, and ice-cream scoops. Kitchen gizmos offer a fascinating glimpse into the preoccupations of any given society. The Georgians loved roasted bone marrow and devised a special silver spoon for eating it. The Mayans lavished great artistry on the gourds from which chocolate was drunk. If you walk around our own kitchenware shops, you would think that the things we are really obsessed with in the West right now are espresso, panini, and cupcakes.
    Technology is the art of the possible. It is driven by human desire—whether the desire to make a better cupcake or the simple desire to
stay alive—but also by the materials and knowledge available at any given time. Food in cans was invented long before it could easily be used. 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.
    The birth of a new gadget often gives rise to zealous overuse, until the novelty wears off. Abraham Maslow, a guru of modern management, once said that to the man who has only a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. The same thing happens in the kitchen. To the woman who has just acquired an electric blender, the whole world looks like soup.
    Not every kitchen invention has been an obvious improvement on what came before. My kitchen cupboards are graveyards of passions that died: the electric juicer I thought would change my life until I discovered I couldn’t bear to clean it; the rice cooker that worked perfectly for a year and then suddenly burned every batch it made; the Bunsen burner with which, I imagined, I would create a series of swanky crème brûlées for dinner parties I never actually gave. We can all think of examples of more or less pointless pieces of culinary equipment—the melon baller, the avocado slicer, the garlic peeler—to which we can only respond: what was wrong with a spoon, a knife, or fingers? Our cooking benefits from much uncredited engineering, but there have also been gadgets that create more problems than they solve, and others that work perfectly well, but at a human cost.
    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.” This is certainly true in the kitchen. Tools are not neutral objects. They change with changing social context. A mortar and pestle was a different thing for the Roman slave forced to pound up highly amalgamated mixtures for hours on end for his master’s enjoyment than it is for me: a pleasing object with which I make pesto for fun, on a whim.

    At any given time, we do not necessarily get the tools that would—in absolute terms—make our food better and our lives easier. We get those that we can afford and those that our society can accept. From the 1960s onward, a series of historians pointed out the irony that the amount of time American women spent on housework, including cooking, had remained constant since the mid-1920s, despite all of the technological improvements that came on the market over those four decades. For all the dishwashers, electric mixers, and automatic garbage disposals, women were working as hard as ever. Why? Ruth Schwartz Cowan, in her campaigning history More Work for Mother, noted that in pure technical terms, there was no reason America should not have