Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (16 page)

Because spit-roasting was so central to British cooking, much intelligence was lavished on inventing improved methods of turning the spit. Water, steam, and clockwork were all experimented with as ways of keeping a roasting joint in a state of constant—if not quite perpetual—motion. Mechanized spits were the gleaming espresso machines of their day: the single kitchen product on which the most complex engineering was lavished. In a seventeenth-century farmhouse kitchen, the spoons and cauldrons went back to the Romans. The spits and salamanders were medieval. The meat and fire were as old as time. But the weight-jack powering the spit was high-tech. Ivan Day still has a large collection of mechanized spit-jacks. When asked to name his favorite kitchen gadget of all time, he unhesitatingly names his seventeenth-century weight-driven jack, powered with the weight of a small cannon ball. He marvels at its efficiency. “Four hundred years before the microwave and its warning buzzer, my mechanism can tell me [when the food is done] by ringing a bell,” he told BBC Radio 4’s
Food Programme.
“I’d never use anything else. It works just as well now as it did 300 years ago.”

In its way, the mechanized jack clearly is a miracle. It saved the pains of boys and dogs. It produces—at least in the hands of a talented cook—stupendously good roast meat, evenly cooked by continuous, steady rotation. It is a joy to watch. Few pieces of kitchenware, ancient or modern, can supply the quiet satisfaction of watching a weight-jack do its job: the speedy whirring of the flywheel, the interlocking cogs and gears, the reliable motion of the spit. On its own terms, it really works.

But technologies never exist just on their own terms. By the mid-nineteenth century, the mechanized jack was becoming obsolete, not through any fault of its own, but because the entire culture of open-hearth cookery was on the way out. Fire was in the process of being contained, and as a result, the kitchen was about to be transformed.

 

M
ore fuel is frequently consumed in a kitchen range to boil a tea-kettle than, with proper management, would be sufficient to cook a dinner for fifty men.“ The author of these words was Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, one of the most skillful scientists ever to apply himself to the question of cooking. Among his many experiments, he set his mind to the problem of why apple pie filling tended to be so mouth-burningly hot.
³
Rumford was a great social campaigner, too, and believed he had found the solution to world hunger, by inventing a soup for the poor that could deliver the maximum nutrients for the minimum money One of his other main causes was the wastefulness of roasting fires. In the late eighteenth century, Rumford was appalled by the way the English cooked over an open flame: ”The loss of heat and waste of fuel in these kitchens is incredible.” Rumford did not even rate the food produced by spit-roasting very highly. By focusing all their energies on roasting, English cooks had neglected the art of making ”nourishing soups and broths.”

Rumford’s problem with English hearths was easily summarized: “They are not closed.” From this basic error, “other evils” followed. The kitchen was an uncomfortable environment to work in, as anyone knew who had ever “met the cook coming sweltering out of it.” The heat was excessive, there were drafts of cold air by the chimney, and worst of all, there were “noxious exhalations” from burning charcoal: a constant atmosphere of smokiness. Excessive smoke was not an accident, but inherent to the design of the English kitchen around the year 1800. To make room for all the pots that needed to be fitted over the fire, the range was built very long, which in turn necessitated an “enormously large” and high chimney that squandered much fuel and generated much smoke. Rumford’s solution was his own custom-built closed range, which consumed vastly less fuel, as he had proved when he installed one in the House of Industry (the Workhouse) in Munich.

In a Rumford range, instead of one large fire, there would be lots of small enclosed ones, to minimize smoke and fuel wastage. Each boiler, kettle, or stewpan in use would be assigned its own “separate closed fireplace,” built from bricks for added insulation and shut up with a door, with a separate canal for “carrying off the smoke into the chimney.” The kitchen would be smokeless and highly efficient, and Rumford claimed the food produced was tastier. He summoned some friends for a taste test of a leg of mutton roasted in a Rumford roaster as against a spit-roasted leg. Everyone preferred the one cooked in the enclosed roaster, relishing the “exquisitely sweet” fat with currant jelly; or so they said.

It was one thing to convince his friends and acquaintances, still another to convince the general public. Rumford’s idea was ahead of its time. His ingeniously designed stoves never found a wide audience (though various sellers would later market and sell “Rumford stoves” that had no connection with the original). Rumford’s invention was not helped by the fact that it was largely made from bricks, containing very little iron. This meant that ironmongers—who at this
time were the main manufacturers of cooking apparatus—had little incentive to reproduce the design.

There was also the fact that smoky and wasteful as they might be, cooks clung to their open fires as simply the only way to roast meat. Campaigners for smokeless stoves in the developing world face the same obstacles today The average Third World open cooking fire—fueled by coal, dung, or wood—generates as much carbon dioxide as a car. Around 3 billion people—half the world’s population—cook like this, with dreadful consequences, both for carbon emissions and individual health: such fires can cause bronchitis, heart disease, and cancers. The World Health Organization has calculated that indoor smoke, chiefly from cooking fires, kills 1.5 million people every year. Yet when aid workers go into villages in Africa or South America offering clean, nonpolluting cookstoves, they often encounter resistance, as people stubbornly stick to the smoky fires they have cooked on all their lives.

In 1838, four decades after Rumford’s warnings on the dangers of open hearths, cookery writer Mary Randolph insisted that “no meat can be well roasted except on a spit turned by a jack, and before a clear, steady fire—other methods are no better than baking.” There continued to be innovations in jack design, long after you might have expected to see the last of them. In 1845, a Mr. Norton took out a patent for a spit propelled electrically with the aid of two magnets, a strange clash of old and new technology. Over Victoria’s century, Britain entered the age of gas lighting, high-speed rail travel, flushing toilets, and telephones; and still many people chose to have their meat cooked before a roaring fire. As late as 1907, the Skinners Company in London had an eleven-foot-wide roasting range installed in their Guild Hall kitchen.

The prejudice against closed-off cooking ranges was largely that they seemed too much like bread ovens. Only open fires could roast, it was believed. Ovens were things that baked. In European kitchens, the two kinds of heat were stubbornly kept apart.

 

I
n the East, this division has not existed to anything like the same extent. The Arabic word for bread is
khubz,
which generates the verb
khabaza,
meaning to bake or “to make
khubz.”
But
khabaza
can also mean to grill or to roast. This single verb thus brings together what in English would be three separate cooking techniques. All three techniques can be performed in a
tannur,
or clay oven.

Basic clay bread ovens go back at least as far as 3000 BC in the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia, on the site of modern-day Iraq and Pakistan. These bread ovens had the traditional round cylindrical clay form that they still have to this day in much of rural Africa. A fire is lit in the bottom of the cylinder, and dough is lowered in through a hole in the top and slapped on the side of the oven; it is lifted out again a couple of minutes later as flatbread. These clay ovens look like upside-down flower pots. In Iraq, the name for these ovens was
tinaru.
We would call them
tannurs
or
tandoors,
a technology still in use throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia.

Although it has been refined over the past 5,000 years, the
tannur/ tandoor
serves the same purpose it always has: a provider of intense, dry baking heat. The
tannur
enabled households, even humble ones, to be self-sufficient in bread. A series of laborers’ houses have been excavated in an ancient Egyptian village, Amarna, dating to 1350 BC. Half the houses, including small ones, show traces of cylindrical clay ovens. Whereas in Europe there was a persistent belief that the only true bread was that baked by professional bakers, in medieval Iraq, homemade
tannur
bread was preferred. A market inspector in medieval Baghdad noted that “most people avoid eating bread baked in the market.”

The
tannur
offered different cooking possibilities in the home than fire alone. Despite being cheap and portable, these clay ovens provided some heat control. An “eye” at the bottom could be opened or shut to increase or reduce the temperature. For some breads—such as a round Iraqi “water bread” coated in sesame oil—a more moderate heat was used. But clay ovens could also get furnace-hot
when needed. Because the wood or charcoal is burned directly in the bottom of the
tandoor
and continues to burn as the food cooks, the temperatures in a modern
tandoor
can be tremendous: as much as 896°F (compared with a maximum temperature of 428°F for most domestic electric ovens). It is this blistering heat that makes this oven such a powerful and versatile piece of equipment.

The uses of the
tannur
went far beyond baking, which partly explains why in Middle Eastern and Eastern cookery, the baking-roasting dichotomy did not exist. As well as baking bread, cookies, and crackers, a
tannur
could be used for stews and casseroles and for roasting meat. Today, the
tandoor
is probably most famous as a device for cooking chicken marinated in yogurt and red spices: tandoori chicken. In tenth-century Baghdad, the
tannur
was used to roast such things as “fatty whole lamb or kid—mostly stuffed . . . big chunks of meat, plump poultry and fish.” They were placed on flat brick tiles arranged on the fire or securely threaded into skewers and lowered into the
tannur
until they roasted to succulence. There was clearly no sense here that you could not “roast” meat in an oven. However, the heat of a
tandoor
works on food in a different way than a Western bread oven.

There are three different forms of cooking heat. All cooking obeys the second law of thermodynamics: heat flows from hotter things to colder things. But this transfer of energy can happen in more than one way. The first way is radiant heat. Imagine the way an Italian frittata omelette suddenly puffs and browns when you put it under the grill. The grill itself hasn’t touched the omelette; and yet it is cooking. This is from heat radiation, like the sun’s rays. Like radio waves, radiation works without any contact: the thing being heated and the heater do not need to touch. A red-hot fire provides lots of radiant heat, from both the flames and the embers. The moment in Ivan Day’s kitchen when he poked the fire and the heat levels jumped up from bearable to unbearable represented a sudden leap in the quantity of radiant heat, enough to produce a sizzling crust on a joint of beef.

The second type of heat transfer is conduction. Unlike radiation, it works from material to material, via touch. Some materials are very good conductors, notably, metals. Others are poor conductors, such as clay, brick, and wood. When something heats up, its atoms vibrate rapidly. Conduction works by passing on these vibrations from one material to another: from a metal saute pan to a piece of steak; from a metal saucepan handle to a tender human hand.

The third type of cooking heat is convection. It happens when the molecules in a fluid—whether air or water, stock or oil—diffuse heat to one another. The hot parts of the liquid or gas are less dense than the cold parts: think steam as opposed to water. Gradually, the hot fluid transfers energy to the cool fluid, until all is hot: think of porridge bubbling in a pot or the air in a preheating oven.

Any given method of cooking will involve a combination of these forms of heat, but one or another usually dominates. What makes the
tandoor
so unusual is that it combines all three forms of heat transfer in one. There is a massive blast of radiant heat from the fire below, plus more radiation from the heat retained in the clay walls. Bread cooked on the walls or meat cooked on skewers gets hot by conduction from the clay or the metal skewers. Finally, there is some convected heat from the hot air circulating in the oven. The
tandoor
provides intense and potent heat: the kind you can use to cook almost anything.

The ovens of Western cooking were generally brick boxes. Heat transfer in this sort of oven is typically around 8o percent by convection and only 20 percent by radiation. In place of the intense constant heat of the
tandoor
was a heat that started fierce but became progressively cooler. Indeed, the food didn’t go in until the flames had already gone out. Over centuries, cooking styles evolved to reflect this gradual cooling off, with a repertoire to make the most of every phase of oven heat. Food was cooked in succession: bread went into the hottest oven, followed by stews, pastries, and puddings; later when the oven was barely warm, herbs might be left to dry in it overnight.

It is true that the West had its own equivalent of the
tannur
in the “beehive ovens” introduced by the Romans, but these never penetrated the entire food culture as the Eastern clay ovens did. In ancient and medieval Europe, bread ovens tended to be vast communal chambers, feeding an entire community with bread. The baking equipment used in a manorial or monastery kitchen was all on a giant scale: dough was stirred with wooden spoons as big as oars and kneaded on vast trestle tables. Communal baking ovens were stoked up via stoking sheds from outside. First the fuel—bundles of wood or charcoal—was heaved into the back of the oven and fired up. When the oven was hot, the ashes were raked out into the stoking sheds and the dough was shoved in, on great long wooden paddles called peels. Like turnspit boys, bakers worked almost naked because of the heat.