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Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson is a book about the history of cooking and cooking utensils, from roasting spits and fireplaces to mortars and pestles and chopsticks. It explores the way our kitchen tools influence what we eat, how we eat, and what we feel about what we eat.
I first found Consider the Fork in the cruise ship library on which Tomiko was working when I visited her in the Baltic a few summers ago. I devoured the book, and recently just ordered it again from the library. I adore books on culinary history, like Cod, Salt, and Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky, and find the evolution of cooking methods and utensils extremely appetizing.
Wilson explains the uses and hey-days or declines of various kitchen gadgets and appliances. Some once-common items that have fallen out of use include cider owls, dangle spits, and flesh-forks, and I’m not sure what any of them were used for. There is also the chicken brick, a clay cooking vessel that will cook a chicken when placed in the oven and which was popular in the 1970s in the UK. Apparently cooking in a chicken brick keeps the chicken moist but the skin still stays crispy. If I ever see one, I’m totally buying it!
Being an avid cook, I use a lot of the tools that were investigated in this book. I was interested to hear that England’s quintessential roast beef was something of a delicacy and actually roasted on a spit over a fire, not baked in a dry oven which is how I always imagined it to be cooked. The book also discusses fits and spurts of food technology, like how the first canning factory opened in London in 1813, but it took another 50 years before someone invented the can opener.
It’s amazing how we take our everyday meal preparation for granted, and that even something as simple as making a cup of tea would have taken hours of preparation. I’ll never consider my fork the same way again.
Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson, 2012.
I actually used to own a chicken brick but I left it behind in Switzerland when I moved to Scotland. It does indeed make for a juicy chicken but I can’t remember the skin being crispy. The chicken brick was called a Roman pot in Switzerland. I do like the sound of your read, I have already added the Flavor Bible from last month (or was it earlier?) to my wish list and shall add the Fork book, too.
Chicken bricks are a European invention, I think, so I might have to go to Europe to get myself one!
I love Bee Wilson’s writing.. She used to write the food column for the New Statesman and it was the first page I turned to every week. I shall try and get hold of a copy of this book.