Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (26 page)

Still, a “birchen rod” was a preferable option to some of the other technologies available. Once forks were in common use—from the late seventeenth century onward—they were at least an option. Until then, many cooks might make do with a spoon or a broad-bladed knife, neither of which offered much traction. The nastiest idea was to take the egg whites and wring them repeatedly through a sponge, a method both ineffectual and rather disgusting, particularly if the sponge had already been used for some other purpose.

No wonder chocolate mills, or moliquets, were greeted with enthusiasm when they first arrived in Britain at the end of the seventeenth century. These wooden instruments—which are still used in Mexico and Spain for foaming hot chocolate—consist of a long handle and a notched head, a bit like a water mill. They work by being spun between the palms of the hands. In the late seventeenth century, they start to show up in the inventories of large country-house kitchens, doubtless being used to whip eggs as much as to froth the newly fashionable drink of chocolate. As late as 1847, in an American cookbook, the moliquet, or chocolate mill, was being mentioned as an alternative to the birchen rod, for whipping cream. Even using the moliquet was a relatively laborious way to beat eggs.

Then again, laborious preparation was not limited to egg whites. Most recipes involving beaten whites also included sugar, or double-refined sugar to be precise, another arm-sapping thing to produce. It is easy to forget what a revolution it was when sugar began to be sold pre-ground in the late nineteenth century; when British customers could choose among caster, granulated, and icing sugar without having to do any of the work themselves. Pre-ground sugar is a far more labor-saving invention than sliced bread. Traditionally, sugar came in
a lump or loaf, conical blocks ranging in size from five to forty pounds. It was “nipped” into smaller pieces using sugar nippers. In order to convert it into something to be used in cooking, it needed to be pounded—once more in the trusty mortar—and refined through a series of ever-finer sieves. Colanders and sieves are another of those implements, like the mortar and pestle, that have not really altered in essentials since ancient times, the reason being that ancient cooks relied on them far more than we do.

As late as 1874, the Paris-based chef Jules Gouffé described what was involved in processing sugar. This was how he made granulated sugar (used for sprinkling on sweet pastries):

The sugar then has to be sifted successively through each of the sifters, concluding with the hair sieve.

Gouffeécomplains that some do not take the trouble of going through this whole rigmarole, “owing to its being rather . . . troublesome.” Instead, they merely pounded the sugar in a mortar without any of the sieving. Gouffé regretted such laziness, noting that mortar sugar lacked the brightness of sugar sifted “the old-fashioned way.” He is by implication regretting the existence of kitchens less well-equipped with labor than the royal ones in which he worked. Surprisingly little had changed in the nearly 500 years since
Le
Ménagier de Paris;
or in the 2,000 years since Apicius, come to that. Sifting and grinding, beating and straining; these were still activities in which people were employed to weary themselves, in order that rich people might enjoy fluffy creams, powdery sugar, and other rich compounds.

The technological conservatism of food processing cannot be understood apart from the servant question. We often ignore the great and disquieting fact that premodern cookery books were largely written for people who did not themselves do any of the hands-on cooking, for people who would take the credit for what was served at their table without having put in any of the elbow grease. Well-born ladies might dress a salad with their own fair hands, or perform some of the prettier tasks, like sugar work, but they did not need to do any of the heavy beating and grinding tasks, because they had people to do that for them. Robot Coupe is a twentieth-century French brand of food processing machines: choppers, grinders, kneaders, and sievers. The name implies that these are kitchen robots, like an artificially powered servant. But for as long as there were plenty of real servants on hand—or a hard-working wife in poorer households—there was no call for robots.

Things only really started to change after the Industrial Revolution, when altered patterns of labor combined with factories that could mass-produce low-cost metal gadgets finally led to an outpouring of new machines designed to make the cook’s life easier.

 

T
he phrase “labor saving” is first recorded in relation to manufac-Tturing in 1791. It would be another half a century before the concept arrived in the kitchen. In the second half of the nineteenth century in the United States, the market was suddenly flooded with “labor-saving” culinary devices, many cheaply made of tin. There were raisin seeders, potato mashers, coffee mills, cherry pitters, and apple corers. Many were heavy apparatus clamped to the table like meat-grinding machines, which also appeared in volume. And all of a sudden, there were hundreds and hundreds of competing varieties
of eggbeaters. What tulips were to Holland in the 1630s and Internet startups were to Seattle in the 1990s, eggbeaters were to the East Coast of the United States in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Between 1856 and 1920, no fewer than 692 separate patents were granted for eggbeaters. In 1856, one eggbeater patent was issued; in 1857, two; in 1858, three. In 1866, the number had jumped to eighteen, with designs ranging from jar shakers to tin shakers, from ratchets to the Archimedes (a kind of up-and-down mixer based on the Archimedes screw used in shipbuilding).

Marion Harland, a cookery writer who lived through the eggbeater bubble, recalled how unsatisfactory many of the novel beaters turned out to be. She found that very few of the patent eggbeaters outlived the initial excitement. Wooden handles fell off; tin handles stained your hands black. Elaborate machines consisting of “whirligigs” inside a tin cylinder seemed marvelous until you found that the tin cylinder was impossible to wash and too big to whip small quantities. “After a few trials,” Harland added, “the cook tossed the ‘bothering thing’ into a dark corner of the closet, and improvised a better beater out of two silver forks, held dexterously together.”

One of the first patent eggbeaters to outlast the initial novelty stage was the Williams eggbeater, patented on May 31, 1870, and better known as the Dover. The Dover is an American icon: the basic form that the cheapest hand-operated eggbeater will still take in any hardware store. The idea behind it is simple: two whisks are better than one. The earliest 1870 Dover beaters consisted of two bulbous beaters with a rotary wheel to turn them. Turner Williams of Providence, Rhode Island, the inventor who first thought it up, described the advantages of his invention as being the “very peculiar shearing action” that came from two wheels revolving in opposite directions at once in the same space, something not seen in any previous beater.

The Dover was an instant hit, so much so that “Dover” became the generic term for eggbeater in America. “Look for
‘DOVER’ on the handle,” ordered an ad of 1891, indicating its huge popularity; “NONE OTHERS ARE GENUINE.” An 1883 book of
Practical Housekeeping
praised the Dover as “the best in the market.” The writer Marion Harland was another fan. Writing in 1875, five years after it came on the market, she insisted that “egg whipping ceased to be a bugbear to me” from the day she bought a Dover, adding that she would not sell it for $100 (note: a portable eggbeater at this time would have cost no more than 10–25 cents). What was so great about the Dover?

Harland, whose real name was Mrs. Mary Virginia Terhune, offers some insights into the circumstances, both social and culinary, that created America’s eggbeater boom. Born in 1830, she was brought up in rural Virginia, the third of nine children. Her own mother did little or no cooking. “I doubt if she ever swept a room, or roasted a piece of meat, in her life,” Harland later wrote. As was traditional for Southern ladies, she had “black mammies” to froth her eggs for her (and do much else besides).

Harland herself took a more active role in the kitchen than her mother. As well as producing twenty-five novels, she believed it was her calling to master the role of “homemaker.” After she married a Presbyterian minister in 1856 and moved to New Jersey, Marion decided to teach herself and her cook greater skills in the kitchen. In 1873, she published the results of their many cooking sessions in
Common Sense in the Household,
which sold 100,000 copies.

Harland is not writing for women who have to beat all their own eggs. She assumes her readers will have a cook, but one who needs considerable guidance and help to produce eggs as fluffy as is desirable. Harland’s ecstasy over the Dover eggbeater belongs to an uneasy transition point in the history of servants. The middle-class
American women she is writing for still have cooks, but probably only one. If the cook’s arms become weary then their arms will be next. Harland writes—in terms so condescending they make us cringe today—about the conversation she has with her servant, Katey, on bringing home an expensive fixed eggbeater, a “time-and-muscle saver in a box.” Harland brings the “cumbrous” eggbeater into the kitchen, “trembling” with excitement. “Yes, mem, what might it be, mem?” asks Katey. The complicated contraption goes wrong; it ends up tipping a bowl of ten yolks onto the floor. The hapless Katey is forced to experiment with a number of other devices before Harland discovers the miracle Dover beater.

Why did fluffy eggs matter so much, anyway? The great eggbeater boom coincided with a period of American cuisine when sweet things at respectable tables had become intensely aerated. For dessert, there might be apple snow or orange snow or lemon snow, each requiring the whites of four eggs, whipped to a “standing froth.” There was Orleans Cake (six eggs beaten light and the yolks strained) and Mont Blanc Cake (the whites of six eggs, very stiff). There were creams and charlottes, syllabubs and trifles, whipped frostings, muffins and waffles, not to mention meringues. All of these dishes depended on highly aerated eggs: yolks beaten to a cream, whites to a fluff. On the successful rise of these delicacies, a housewife’s reputation might depend. A properly airy cake—produced with a Dover or one of the other newfangled whisks—spoke well of a household. Even though it is mostly her cook who actually does most of the whipping, Harland takes the credit for the light muffins emanating from her kitchen. She contrasts her muffins with those of a less vigilant friend who wasn’t aware that her cook, Chloe, had been lazily making muffins with eggs barely beaten at all with “half a dozen strokes of the wooden spoon.” Harland rebukes her friend for not having been more “alert.”

The eggbeater boom answered a desire in middle-class American women not just to get more out air into their eggs, but to get more labor out of their servants. To those who were without servants altogether, the eggbeaters were supposed to make them not regret the
lack; to feel that their arms were doing no work even when they actually were. In 1901, a Holt-Lyon eggbeater along Dover lines promoted itself with the claim that owing to its unique “flared dashers” that “instantly tear the eggs into the minutest particles,” it could beat “eggs lighter and stiffer than the best hand whips in one-fourth the time.”

Yet despite the euphoric claims of the advertisers, none of these mechanical eggbeaters was really very labor-saving. The great drawback of the rotary beater is that it requires two hands to operate, leaving you no way of holding the mixing bowl. The paddles have a tendency to jam stubbornly in a particular place as they rotate, or else to whirr around too fast. They slip around in the bowl, spattering eggs everywhere long before they have stiffened. The Dover claimed it could beat the whites of two eggs in ten seconds: nonsense. A rotary beater usually takes longer to get whites stiff than a balloon whisk, in my experience; in either case, it is a matter of minutes, not seconds.