by Jane Kramer
This was the kitchen where I unpacked my own pots and pans in the 1970s—a mirror of somebody else’s moment in the saga of domestic life. There would be no company while I cooked, no friends sharing a glass of wine while they chopped the tomatoes for my pasta. Supper would mean the dining room, which remains so stately and demanding that I feel obliged to break out the family silver and the wedding china and lay the plates for a four-course dinner even when I’m eating alone with my husband. (Perhaps I should make a seating plan or put out place cards.) More to the point, there was no way to expand my kitchen to accommodate my own moment—not, at any rate, without paying a plumber to move a century’s worth of corroding pipes. The cook’s bedroom became the cubbyhole study where I shut the door and write.
I am consoled, however, by my other kitchen. It is the “please come in” room of the Umbrian farmhouse where I work and cook in the summer—a much more satisfying image of the way I like to live. It was once occupied by cows. And while the house itself could be considered small—given the size of the peasant families that used to live together in four or five rooms above the animals—the stalla where I built my kitchen was enormous. The first things I bought for it, after the stove, the fridge, and the dishwasher went in, were an eleven-foot table, ten chairs, a pair of outsize armchairs, and an old stone Burgundian fireplace wide enough for a side of pork. The shelves for my pots and pans are low and open. The front door, which leads directly into the room, is also open. My friends are welcome to my wine, my knives, and my chopping boards.
I was at the table in that companionable kitchen, sniffing the basil and garlic I had just ground to a mash for pesto in a mortar and pestle, when I started leafing through a book called Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, by the British writer Bee Wilson, and came upon a chapter called “Grind.” It was full of intriguing scholarship on the false starts and transformative successes without which there would have been no pesto on my table, but what intrigued me most was a paragraph on the subject of Wilson’s mortar and pestle. It was black granite from Thailand, and much nicer to use, she said, than the white china variety, which set her teeth on edge “like chalk on a blackboard.” I felt a wave of kitchen kinship, first because the mortar and pestle I’d been using was also stone, but also because she called hers “an entirely superfluous piece of technology,” given the far easier ways of grinding and crushing available to her in a twenty-first-century Cambridge kitchen. She used it infrequently, she said, only when she had the time and the urge for the “bit of kitchen aromatherapy” that pounding together a pesto brings. In fact she was terrified of getting it down from the shelf where, presumably, she kept her only-infrequently equipment. It was that heavy. She worried about dropping it on her foot. I imagined it stored at the same treacherous top-of-the-stepladder level where my paella pan, my mother’s biggest turkey platter, and my New York mortar and pestle, which is also stone and weighs nearly ten pounds, have been gathering dust for years. In New York, I share her terror. In Italy, where I can slide my mortar and pestle across a counter, brace myself, and move it to the table, the only thing that ever fell on my foot was a full bottle of Barolo, and it was three in the morning, I had been working late, and the fig tart in the oven was about to burn.
Bee Wilson describes herself as a food writer. That’s half the story. She is also a historian, with a Cambridge doctorate in early French utopian socialism, followed by a research fellowship in the history of ideas, and she has carved out an estimable place for herself in an energetically brainy family: her father is the biographer A. N. Wilson; her mother is the Oxford Shakespeare scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones; her sister, Emily, is a University of Pennsylvania classicist; and her husband, David Runciman, is a Cambridge political scientist. Wilson, who is thirty-nine, took on the history of food. She wrote a book about bees and honey, The Hive—from which I learned, among other interesting things, that Paleolithic man not only hunted for honeycombs but prized them enough to paint them on his cave walls, along with the elusive animals he hoped to catch, and that early Christians regarded the flame of a beeswax candle as a symbol of divine light—and then a book called Swindled, with the ominous subtitle The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee. (It was.) Both were stylish exercises in what could be called painless pedagogy. They had the kind of narrative charm that could carry large chunks of scholarship; weave them together; sprinkle them with asides, experiences, suppositions, and strong opinions; and entertain you.
Wilson remains engaging, and nowhere as deeply or as smoothly as in Consider the Fork, where the information she has to juggle is at once gastronomic, cultural, economic, and scientific. She will begin a disquisition on, say, why the Polynesians, who had been making clay cooking pots for a thousand years, abandoned clay when they arrived at the Marquesas Islands from Tonga and Samoa, a hundred or so years into the Christian era, and went back to cooking on hot stones; she will lead you through the various explanations, the most recent (and “radical,” she says) being that the yams, taro, breadfruit, and sweet potatoes that were their staples simply cooked better, or more efficiently, on hot stones than in pots; and then she will remind you that, short of ignorance, nostalgia, or necessity, there is always something mysterious about our choices and attachments, and do it with a homely story from her own kitchen—something recognizable.
“I used to have a large mug with all the American presidents on it,” this one began. Wilson’s husband had brought it home from a trip to Washington, and she had commandeered it for her morning tea, watching the presidents’ faces fade year by year until she couldn’t tell them apart, and loving it all the more for that, she said, because morning tea “didn’t taste the same from any other mug.” She never shared it. In fact, if she caught other people drinking from it she “felt they were walking on my grave.” We’ve all had a mug like Wilson’s. Mine broke—so, somewhat to her relief, did hers—and I am still searching for one that will make my morning coffee taste the same. Attachments like that—part habit, part fetishism, part association—are human for being inexplicable. It may be that the Polynesians, having just crossed two thousand miles of the Pacific in a fleet of outrigger canoes, were too exhausted to think about making cooking pots. Maybe they simply dug for roots near the beach where they had landed and, being quite hungry, heated the closest stones and ate their dinner. It would have tasted “better,” like coffee or tea in the mug your husband gave you when you’ve dragged yourself out of bed and need some caffeine to start the day.
The technological leaps that interest Wilson—from spear and skewer to fork and knife, say, or from pounding stone and grinding mill to food processor—are, obviously, inextricable from the cultural leaps that moved Homo sapiens from cave to settlement, which is to say to agriculture and, with it, to concepts of wealth, property, and the kitchen. For millennia, a man’s prosperity could be judged by who cooked his meals. If he was poor, his wife and daughters cooked, and the process was so arduous that—added to the burden of years of childbearing and child-rearing—those women barely saw daylight unless they were out gathering food to cook or drawing water for the cleaning up. If the man of the house was rich, a host of slaves or servants did the work. You could calculate how many servants were in his kitchen by the “refinement” of the food he served. “Refined,” as Wilson notes, originally meant “processed,” and gastronomically speaking still does. Think of the centuries of sorbets, fruit jellies, root purées, silky soups, and sauces that preceded the technology that gave us the super-refined flour and sugar that we now piously reject.
It took days, even weeks, and in all likelihood a hundred kitchen slaves to prepare the food for a proper Roman feast—that is, an orgy in every sense, given the tastes and textures and sights and smells that a rich man served up for his guests before the sex began. A few years ago, I heard the Oxford classicist Oswyn Murray deliver a witty conference lecture called “From the Greek Symposium to the Roman Orgy,” in which he said that w
hat really distinguished those entertainments from each other (besides a thousand years) was the presence of food and women at the latter. The symposia, of course, were orgies, too, and women did show up at some of them, at the end of the evening, to amuse the guests. But the ones that Murray described could be called Socratic. They were male, high-minded, and quite select. The wise men reclined, talked philosophy, and consumed a sickening amount of watered wine. The ephebes stood and poured, listening respectfully to the conversation until they were summoned to a couch. Rome, on the other hand, was not noted for Socratic party talk. A Roman orgy was a rave, and the fact that women not only served but were also guests, and that, once a couple of mad emperors took to throwing orgies, some of those guests were wives (summoned for what could be called command performances) suggests that, like wives today, they didn’t think you could have a good party without providing dinner. Orgies became a potlatch of kitchen labor. You didn’t see the kitchen; it was underground, or you might say, “downstairs.” But you knew it was huge by the food you did see.
This winter I got out an “ancient Rome” recipe book—an old Christmas present that I’d never opened—and tried to approximate the work involved in mincing and seasoning the flesh of just one small bird, returning it to a simulacrum made entirely of pastry, and then pounding the appropriate herbs, vegetables, and spices to dust for a “refined” sauce. Notwithstanding a fair amount of cheating—I used frozen puff pastry—it took a day. (The crust broke.) I thought about how many cooks it would take to prepare a hundred birds for that one dish, and how many roaring fires and hand-turned spits to produce a hundred other dishes. A slave kitchen was an alarming place, where a whoosh of flame was likely to roast the cook along with the meat, and the heat and smoke were infernal. (In fact, most kitchens remained infernal until gas ranges and enclosed gas ovens evolved, by trial and error, in Europe in the nineteenth century.)
And Rome was a high point. The food technology of Northern Europe took centuries to catch up, though an argument could be made that the tribes of Germania that Tacitus found so barbarous owed their eventual triumph to the stamina that came from cooking outdoors in a cold climate and keeping their lungs intact. And when the technology did catch up (the strainers and colanders, the elaborately pronged spits), most of Europe was still eating like those old Romans—mainly with its hands.
The spoon is ancient, although, like the fork, the teaspoon and tablespoon we use today are not. Flatware began as fashion, in the 1600s, after centuries in which you came to your host’s table with your own knife—by Wilson’s account, a double-edged dagger—hanging from your belt. You carried it for protection, getting there, and again at dinner, for spearing a chunk of meat from a passing platter—after which you ripped it off your knife and, possibly bleeding from this awkward exercise, popped it into your mouth. Even women carried their own knives out to dinner, and those, being accoutrements to party clothes, hung from their waists in silky sheaths that were as decorative as their dresses and often just as fragile.
The first revolution in cutlery was in fact revolutionary: you left your dagger at the door and sat down to a table set with flatware at every plate. It’s said that the second began in France, in 1637, at Cardinal Richelieu’s table. As Wilson tells the story, the cardinal became so agitated one night, observing a dinner guest pick his teeth with the double-edged knife still in use, that he ordered blunt knives for his household. And thanks to his reputation as a social arbiter, the fashion quickly spread. Sharp or blunt, table knives also meant forks, if for no other reason than that once you stopped impaling your meat (not to mention tearing it up with your hands and teeth) and began cutting it on a plate, you needed a fork to anchor it while you sliced. Blunt knives, of course, were barely adequate for most meats. They were a symbol of civility—a reminder that, at tables like Richelieu’s, you were expected to settle your arguments with piercing conversation, not by stabbing your antagonist. (This did not preclude stabbing him on the way home.) In time, place settings became elaborate and involved a whole complement of knives: blunt knives, fish knives, cheese knives, butter knives. (And that was only the knives. An elegant French table setting soon included a different fork for nearly every course.) The British, coming a century late to “ostentatiously blunt,” as Wilson describes that Continental fad, took it up with a defensive passion. It’s still hard to order a steak or chops in a good London restaurant without having to ask the waiter to bring a steak knife, too.
This new cutlery transformed the way people ate. By the late eighteenth century in Europe, people were slicing their food into bite-size morsels and carrying them to their mouths with forks—those formerly weird things, Wilson calls them. And they hardly needed to chew such tiny pieces, which in most cases were already softened by pounding, overcooking, or long, gentle braisings. At the same time, the modern overbite began to appear prominently in upper-class Western European jaws. Do not confuse this with the seriously inconvenient condition known to the world as buck teeth (without which we would have no orthodontists, and no mortified adolescents with mouthfuls of rubber bands and wire braces). Wilson’s modern overbite refers to “the way our top layer of incisors hangs over the bottom layer, like a lid on a box,” as she nicely puts it, and is “the ideal human occlusion” for the way we now eat. Why this happened and how long it took to happen is open to some debate, but it’s clear that until it happened, most humans had the bite of other primates—“where the top incisors clash against the bottom ones, like a guillotine blade.”
Wilson’s favorite theory comes from the American physical anthropologist Charles Loring Brace, a specialist in the evolution of hominid teeth. In 1977, Brace published an article that put the age of the Western overbite at no more than two hundred and fifty years—which is to say that flatware and, with it, a significant change in how we chewed were all it took for the edge-to-edge occlusion that we inherited from the Neanderthals to be replaced by the bite we now call normal. Brace was haunted by overbites. He had long assumed them to be an incremental and selective evolutionary change that began with agriculture and the consumption of grains. But the jaws he studied, on his way to building a database on the evolution of hominid teeth—apparently the biggest in the world—changed his mind. The transformation he’d seen in those eighteenth-century-gentlemen jaws was too abrupt and too radical to qualify as evolution, especially given the rapidity with which it then followed the spread of flatware into the middle classes, in the nineteenth century. In 1914, in the run-up to war with Germany, a stainless-steel alloy—developed to prevent corrosion in gun barrels—went on sale in Sheffield, England. Once stainless appeared on the country’s dinner tables, the guillotine bite all but disappeared.
For Brace, the proof of his hypothesis as to the relation between jaws and cutlery came when, “on his eternal quest” for new teeth to study, he visited Shanghai’s natural-history museum, examined the pickled jaw of a graduate student, dating from the Song dynasty (960 to 1279 A.D.), and discovered the same incisor overbite that by his reckoning had first appeared in Europe eight hundred to a thousand years later. More to the point, all the other Song “high-status individuals” whose jaws he then examined had overbites, too. The principle was the same, but the technological change in China obviously wasn’t flatware. It was the tou—the wide, well-honed, flat-edged whacker of a knife that Chinese cooks used for everything from butchering to dicing and fine slicing—and the chopstick, which in the Song era came into common use.
The Song jaw is Wilson’s ancient Asian reminder of the cultural and technological imperatives in the mixture of circumstances that in time produced our modern kitchen. The earliest surviving chopsticks were bronze, from late in the second millennium B.C., though for centuries only the rich used them, along with ivory, jade, lacquer, and even silver ones (a prophylactic court luxury: silver was believed to blacken on contact with any arsenic slipped into the emperor’s food). The poor made do with wood and bamboo sticks. But in some ways, it was the le
gacy of their poverty that produced the Chinese overbite. Meat was the caviar in a Chinese peasant’s diet, and what we now call Chinese cooking probably began as culinary experiments in making very little of it go a long way.
The trick was to cut small quantities of meat into paper-thin slices, season them with condiments, preserves, and spices, add whatever vegetables you could grow or barter, and keep adding until you arrived at a dish so tasty that you forgot how little meat was in it. Enter the all-purpose tou, the butchers and vendors who mastered that practical but scary implement, and the substantial savings in fuel that the quick stir-frying of tou-cut food provided. Apply all that new technology to an ancient lexicon of good manners that precluded not only the preparation but the cutting of food at Chinese tables, rich or poor, and you have no need for any tableware beyond your chopsticks, a couple of serving pieces, and a slippery porcelain spoon for soup. And if you have ever asked yourself why the Chinese eat the noodles in their soup with chopsticks, too—a Sisyphean labor that involves lifting a bowl to mouth level and slurping—think of Americans eating peas with a fork. Today the Chinese manufacture sixty-three billion pairs of disposable chopsticks a year—an industry and a habit inspired by Japanese Shinto taboos against sharing chopsticks or even washing and reusing them—and even that’s not enough for nearly one and a half billion people. In 2010, a new American company called Georgia Chopsticks began exporting hundreds of millions of poplar and gum-tree chopsticks to China, Korea, and Japan. (A year and a half later, it went bankrupt.)
