Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (24 page)

Concrete numbers have their place in the kitchen, Rodgers insists, particularly for the inexperienced. Numbers are “points of reference,” offering “at a minimum, a notion of scale and a sense of the relative scale of different ingredients, temperatures and amounts of
time.” The first time you make a dish you may need to follow the numbers fairly closely, which can help to “abbreviate the romantic but lengthy learning process one might characterize as ‘guess, feel, botch, puzzle, try again and try to remember what you did.’” By the second or third time, the numbers are less important because you have started to trust your own senses. After all, Rodgers remarks, you do not need to measure “the exact amount of sugar or milk you add to your coffee or tea.” Numbers, therefore, are crucial, but never the whole story. There is a world outside of measuring in the kitchen. Part of the scientific method is accepting that not everything is within the domain of science.

I am fond enough of my measuring devices—there’s a quiet contentment in peering at that classic Pyrex measuring cup trying to see if stock for a pilaf has reached the 600 ml mark; or watching the dial swing around on a candy thermometer when making fudge; or using a tape measure to verify the diameter of biscotti dough. I even use my iPhone as a kitchen timer. Still, not everything can be reduced to measurements. Many things that matter in the kitchen are beyond measuring: how much you enjoy the company of those you dine with; the satisfaction of using up the last crust of bread before it goes moldy; the way an Italian blood orange tastes in February; the pleasure of cold cucumber soup on a hot evening; the feeling of having a hearty appetite and the means to satisfy it.

These cooks, how they stamp and strain and grind!

GEOFFREY CHAUCER, “The Pardoner’s Tale”

 

 

 

 

 

M
OST WEEKENDS, WE MAKE PANCAKES. IT TAKES A few swigs of coffee to rouse myself enough to locate the flour, milk, eggs, and butter, but after that, it’s easy. Pour the ingredients into a pitcher. Blitz with handheld blender for a few seconds until lump free. That’s it. The batter is ready for pouring into a hot pan. Within minutes, a pile of lacy golden-brown crepes have emerged with scarcely more effort than pouring out a bowl of Corn Flakes.To make pancakes in the Middle Ages was not so quite so easy. In the fourteenth-century advice book
Le Ménagier de Paris
(published 1393), there is a pancake recipe. It goes like this. First, get a quart-sized copper pan and melt a large quantity of salted butter. Then take eggs, some “warm white wine” (this takes the place of our milk) and “the fairest wheaten flour” and beat it all together “long enough
to weary one person or two.”
Only then is the batter done.

There is a startling nonchalance in this “one person or two.” It conjures up a kitchen in which there is a standing army of servants, arrayed like so many utensils. When one underling is worn out, another steps forward. Suddenly we see that the recipe is not at all like one of ours, in which the reader is the person expected to do the work.
Le Ménagier de Paris
—which roughly translates as “The Housewife of Paris”—was written in the voice of an elderly husband to a wealthy young wife, teaching her the proper way to behave. To prove her worth, a French medieval wife of this class needed to ensure that dishes were well made. But not to the extent of dirtying her own hands. She has an entire team of human eggbeaters at her disposal. As the pancakes are being fried, “all the time” another person needs to carry on “moving and beating the paste unceasingly.”

This incessant beating reflects the intense urge that wealthy palates once had toward smoothness. This desire has largely abated, now that pappy white bread and spongy hamburgers are among the cheapest foods. On a fine spring day in 2011, I sat in one of the best Italian restaurants in Britain, where the main courses cost around $50. Well-heeled families were eating Sunday lunch. Many of the diners were enjoying chewy rectangles of bruschetta, anointed with olive oil and coarse salt. There were platters of crunchy green vegetables, minimally prepared. A pork chop came on a massive bone, proving a challenge even for a steak knife. Linguini with crab and chili was genuinely al dente: you felt the hard center of each strand on your teeth. Until the silky gelato for dessert, nothing was smooth; the textures were all rustic, variegated, challenging. This was not a sign of careless cooking: in the age of the food processor, it takes great conscious effort to produce a meal like this.

Until modern times, by contrast, the meals that took the most effort to make were highly processed. Popes and kings, emperors and aristocrats did not want too much to chew on. They expected fine pastes to be pounded for their pleasure in mortars with pestles. In wealthy kitchens, pastries and pastas were rolled out so fine you
could look through them (by implication so fine that someone’s arms ached). Sauces were strained and strained again through ever-finer sieves and cloths. Flour was “bolted” through “crees” and linen. Nuts were ground as fine as dust and made into biscuits with super-refined sugar. Now we use the word “refined” to mean rich or posh, but originally refining referred to the degree to which a food was processed. Refined food was what refined people ate.

It would be going too far to say that the only appeal of this style of food was to cause pain to the servants who made it. There were many motivations. Soft mixtures were potentially desirable in any era before modern dentistry. Medieval cooks made “mortrews,” mortar-pounded concoctions of white boiled meats and almonds that were ideal for those with bad teeth. Moreover, the mingling together of many pounded ingredients corresponded to medieval ideas about temperament and balance. Later, in Renaissance times, processing became a kind of alchemy: a desire to distill things down and down and down, until all you were left with was the very soul or inner kernel of a particular foodstuff.

But when considering the technologies of grinding, pounding, and so on, we cannot get past the labor question and preindustrial patterns of work. Highly processed foods were favored by the rich not despite the labor that they caused—the number of people that they wearied—but because of it. To serve a dish such as ravioli stuffed with a pounded mass of capon breast, grated cheese, and minced herbs topped with powdered sugar and cinnamon reflected your status. Everyone who ate it knew that it would take a lot more than just a wife with a wooden spoon to rustle it up. With no electric food processor to help, such a dish required one person to knead and roll the pasta, another to cook and pound the capon, a third to grate and mince the cheese and herbs, and so on. The luxury was not just in the ingredients but the trouble it took to assemble them (as is still the case in Michelin-starred kitchens: at Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli, making a rum and sugarcane cocktail required two people with handsaws to cut the tough cane into manageable pieces, another two
with cleavers to strip off the bark, and two to eight more people to cut the sugarcane into sticks; all of these people were unpaid “stagiaires”).

From time to time, voices have been raised against this laborious way of cooking, as much on grounds of aesthetics as anything. The Roman philosopher Seneca wrote in praise of simpler cuisine: “I like food that a household of slaves has not prepared, watching it with envy, that has not been ordered many days in advance or served up by many hands.” Similarly, in the fourth century BC, there was a generation of young cooks who reacted against the ubiquity of the mortar in the Greek kitchen. In place of all the pounded mixtures of vinegar and coriander, they served up simple pieces of fish and meat, eschewing the pestle.

Despite these odd moments when pastoral simplicity became fashionable, highly refined food remained the norm on wealthy tables well into the twentieth century. Edwardians ate crustless cucumber sandwiches and drank triple-strained consomme. Behind every course of a grand dinner was a mini-army of minions with sore arms. Done by hand, grinding, pounding, beating, and sieving are among the most laborious of all kitchen tasks. The really striking thing, therefore, is how little impetus there was—until very recently—to develop labor-saving devices; and how little change there was in the basic equipment used. For thousands of years, servants and slaves—or in lesser households, wives and daughters—were stuck with the same pestles and sieves, with few innovations. This technological stagnation reflects a harsh truth. There was very little interest in attempting to save labor when the labor in question was not your own.

 

M
y mortar and pestle comes from Thailand and is fashioned from craggy black granite. I like it far better than those restrained white-china mortars, whose rough insides set my teeth on edge, like chalk on a blackboard. Its downside is that it is probably the heaviest nonelectrical utensil I own. Every time I take the mortar down from its shelf, I have a moment of mild terror that I will drop it. Which may explain why I don’t actually get it down all that often. In my
cooking life, it is an entirely superfluous piece of technology I don’t need it to grind flour or sugar, which come pre-ground in bags. Nor do I need it for pepper, which I can grind far more quickly and easily in a pepper grinder. Garlic is better crushed with the back of a knife on a chopping board. When I do use my mortar and pestle, it is a sign that I am feeling leisurely and want to experience a bit of kitchen aromatherapy. I might use it to pound up a pesto, relishing the sensation of crushing the waxy pine nuts against the coarse granite. Or I might crush the individual spices for curry powder (something I do about once a year in a spurt of enthusiasm before I get lazy and revert to the pre-ground type). In any case, the mortar and pestle is never necessary in a kitchen that also contains blenders and a food processor. It is a pleasure-giving device. I use it—or not—on a whim.

This is in stark contrast to the earliest crushing devices, whose basic mechanism was more or less identical to my mortar and pestle, but whose role was entirely different: to render edible that which would otherwise have been impossible to eat. It was a tool on which humans depended for survival. The earliest grinding implements go back around 20,000 years. Grinding stones enabled early populations to obtain calories from extremely unpromising foods: tough, fibrous roots and grains in husks. The process of making wild cereals digestible, through grinding and pounding, was difficult, slow, and labor-intensive. A grinder would be used, first, to remove husks or shells, and second, to remove toxins (in their natural state, acorns, for example, contain dangerous amounts of tannin, which partially leaches out when it is exposed to the air by the pestle). Third, and most important, it reduced the particle size of the food—whether nuts or grain—until it was as fine as dust: producing flour. Without grinding tools, there is no bread. The discovery of a 20,000-year-old basalt grinding stone near the Sea of Galilee alongside traces of wild barley suggested the very first experiments with some form of baking.