Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (27 page)

Many subsequent eggbeater designs tried to address the inadequacies of the Dover, only to create new glitches. Various eggbeaters dealt with the problem of a sliding mixing bowl by setting the paddles into an attached jar or bowl; but this created its own annoyances, in that you could only beat a small amount at a time and the bowl attachment was another thing to wash. Other beaters addressed the problem of needing two hands to hold the beater. “A New Idea in Egg Beaters” boasted a 1902 ad for a Roberts eggbeater, a type of Archimedes whisk. This was “the only automatic beater made that works with one hand. . . . Simply press on the handle and release.” This was undoubtedly an advantage; but the one-handed beaters—whose mechanisms ranged from strange wire whirls to springs to disks like potato ricers—were far from perfect. They took a very long time to froth eggs or cream, and they could malfunction if a hasty housewife attempted to speed things up. “Do not operate too fast” warned the Simplex one-handed mixer, unhelpfully. Strangest of all was a family of water-operated egg whisks hooked
up to the new running water that was appearing in American homes. “Turn the Faucet and it Starts!” boasted The World Beater.

Looking back on this curious moment in American history—the eggbeater bubble—we are faced with a conundrum. From a purely technological point of view, not a single one of the hundreds of patented designs on which so much intelligence was lavished and so many dollars spent was actually an improvement in efficiency or ergonomics over the basic French balloon whisks, which had been in use at least since the eighteenth century, long before the eggbeater boom started (and possibly as long ago as 1570 in Italy, as mentioned above). No top chef now would dream of using a Dover eggbeater. But many of them still have a wide range of old-style balloon whisks (or “French whips”), sometimes using them in tandem with old-fashioned copper bowls. The top quality balloon whisks now come with insulated handles, and the wires are made of stainless steel instead of tin. Other than this, however, these are exactly the same whisks that would have been used by an eighteenth-century confectioner.

So what was going on with the American eggbeater boom? The whole thing was a phantom. This wasn’t really about saving labor, because the French whip took less arm action to do the job than most of the new patented designs. It was more about the illusion of saving labor and time. Rather than offering a real cure for weariness, they were placebos. Those who bought them—like Marion Harland—needed to feel that someone, if only the manufacturer, was on their side in the perennial battle to produce the fluffiest eggs in the least amount of time. What the eggbeater boom tells us is that suddenly, cooks had started to rebel against their tired arms. But those arms would only really get a rest with the advent of the electric mixer.

 

I
f Carl Sontheimer had not been so taken with quenelles, the history of American home cooking over the past forty years might have been very different. In 1971, Sontheimer was a fifty-seven-year-old engineer and inventor (whose discoveries included a lunar direction finder used by the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration [NASA]), a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a French food buff. Having successfully started and sold two electronics companies, Sontheimer was enjoying early retirement. As much a hobby as a business, he traveled to France with his wife, Shirley, looking for French culinary products that might translate in an American market. It was at a French cookery show that he spotted it: a food processor designed for restaurant use, called the Robot Coupe. It wasn’t pretty or compact, but it was amazingly versatile. As well as being able to blend—like the electric blenders that had been on sale in America since the 1920s—it could grind, chop, dice, slice, and grate. It could take almost any food and reduce it to puree. Carl Sontheimer looked at this bulky machine and what he saw was quenelles.

“A quenelle,” writes Julia Child, “for those who are not familiar with this delicate triumph of French cooking, is
pâte à choux,
cream, and puree of raw fish, veal, or chicken that is formed into ovals or cylinders and poached in a seasoned liquid.” Prepared in the traditional manner, they are a pain to make. Souffles are child’s play by comparison. The quenelle mixture—the paste of chicken or nsh—required long pounding and sieving to ensure it was satin smooth. Even Julia Child in 1961, that “servantless cook,” needed to go to the trouble of putting her fish quenelle paste through the grinder twice. And this was all before you got to the perilous task of molding the fragile mixture into oval shapes using two dessert spoons. Julia Child noted, with typical kindness, that “in case of disaster,” if the quenelles collapsed you could “declare it to be a mousse.”

Carl Sontheimer spotted that the wondrous machine in front of him could take this fraught process and hugely simplify it. All of the pounding and sieving could be done at the touch of a button. The Robot Coupe had been created in 1963 by Pierre Verdun, a French inventor who aimed his device at the restaurant business. It was a hefty drum with a rotating blade inside. It had three functions: start, stop, and pulse. Sontheimer saw that a scaled-down version could work every bit as well in home kitchens. As soon as he had spotted
the machine, he negotiated distribution rights to sell his own adapted version of the Robot Coupe in the United States. He brought a dozen machines home for his own personal experiments in the kitchen. In his garage, he fiddled with the various versions, taking more than a year to analyze every component until he created a model that made the smoothest quenelles with the greatest of ease. What to call this new wonder gadget? “He always thought of French cooking as an art and he wanted it to be based on the word
cuisine
,,” recalled his wife, Shirley. Hence, Cuisinart.

When the Cuisinart launched in the United States in 1973, it was expensive. The initial retail price was $160. In today’s money, that is nearly $800 (based on the Consumer Price Index; by contrast, in January 2011 you could buy a brand new Cuisinart for $100). At this price, it might have been expected that the Cuisinart would never be anything other than a niche piece of equipment, and sure enough, for the first few months, sales were sluggish. All it took, however, was a couple of favorable reviews—one in
Gourmet
magazine, one in the
New York Times,
and suddenly the Cuisinart was flying off the shelves. Craig Claiborne, the food critic for the
New York Times,
was an early adopter of this “most dextrous and versatile of food gadgets.” As an invention, he compared it to “the printing press, cotton gin, steamboat, paper clips, Kleenex,” the equivalent of “an electric blender, electric mixer, meat grinder, food sieve, potato ricer and chef’s knife rolled into one.” It was, he excitedly claimed, the greatest food invention since toothpicks.

There was similar excitement in Britain, where another version of Verdun’s invention was marketed under the Magimix brand, also in 1973. A writer from the
London Times
described how it revolutionized the shredding of cucumbers and carrots and made it possible to cater for an entire wedding party and still have time left over to get ready before the guests arrived.

By 1976, the cost of the Cuisinart in the States had actually gone up to $190, but even at this price, hardware stores could not always get enough stock to meet demand. At this time, Shirley
Collins was the proprietor of Sur la Table (founded 1971), which is now the second-largest US cookware retailer after Williams-Sonoma, but was then a single shop in the Pike Place Farmers Market in Seattle. A small coffee shop called Starbucks had opened just down the way. Pike Place Market sold the best fresh produce of the Seattle area; berries in the autumn, Blue Lake string beans in the summer. Collins would tailor her goods to fit the seasonal calendar. When fat green stalks of asparagus arrived in the spring, she would sell “large quantities of asparagus cookers.” Collins was also the first person in the whole of the Northwest to sell the Cuisinart processor. At first she sold an “average of one a day.” Soon, sales escalated, dramatically.

What Collins observed happening with the Cuisinart was something remarkable. The people who bought the Cuisinart were not like other customers who might buy a single asparagus steamer and never return. The customer who bought the Cuisinart kept coming back for more utensils: for “balloon whisks and copper pots and then for whatever was needed once they were launched on a new cooking venture.” The machine had got them hooked on the whole process of ambitious cooking. It wasn’t just that Cuisinart made a range of tasks easier in the kitchen “for anyone who cared to chop or slice mushrooms, make quenelles, dough or filling.” Collins had observed something altogether more significant. It was a “real explosion in cooking.” A single machine had transformed how many people felt about spending time in the kitchen. It was no longer a place of drudgery—a site of weary arms and downtrodden housewives. It was a place where you made delicious things happen at the flick of a switch. And $190 was not so much to pay for the transformation of cooking from pain to pleasure.

Cuisinart was by no means the first electrical mixing device on the market. Blenders or liquidizers had been around since 1922, when Stephen J. Poplawski, a Polish American, designed a drinks mixer for the Arnold Electric Company Its original use was making malted milk shakes at soda fountains. Then in 1937 came the Waring
Blender. It was based on an earlier model called the “Miracle Mixer,” which had suffered unfortunate teething problems with the seal of the jar: when it was switched on, malted milk was apt to spurt out all over the countertop. The Waring Blender worked better, and thanks to being promoted by the popular singer and bandleader Fred Waring, it was an instant hit. By 1954, the Waring had sold a million. Most electric blenders work in the same way. There is a motor underneath, a glass jar with a handle on top, and some small rotating metal blades to connect the two. Crucially, a rubber washer must be installed to prevent any smoothie or milkshake dripping on the motor. The blender is an awesome gadget. In goes fibrous pineapple, pulpy banana, lime juice, hard ice cubes, and some scraggy mint leaves. Blitz like crazy and out comes an aerated silky-smooth liquid, with the kind of consistency a Victorian servant would have needed three different sieves to achieve.

Yet the blender has its limits. Washing the glass container is one. The limited size of most domestic blenders is another. Every time I attempt to make a smooth green watercress soup in my blender, it seems to turn into one of those math puzzles that ask you to pour different liquids into different containers. You ladle half the soup into the blender and puree it. But now how do you puree the second half? You need a third container to hold the batches as they are done. Both these problems—the tedious cleanup and the limited size—were solved in one fell swoop by the immersion, or stick blender, patented as the Bamix in Switzerland in 1950, but not generally used in the home in the United Kingdom or the United States before the late 1980s. I consider this one of the greatest kitchen tools: it was a virtuoso piece of lateral thinking to bring the blender to the pot rather than the other way around. My handheld blender gets used most days, whether for emulsifying a vinaigrette, making banana smoothies, creating a ginger-garlic puree for Indian cooking, or rendering a tomato-butter pasta sauce silky smooth.

It is a marvel. Still, there are some jobs it cannot do. “Will It Blend?” is the hugely successful ad campaign produced by Blendtec
from 2006 onward, in which we see a white-coated Tom Dixon, the founder of Blendtec, attempting to blend a bizarre selection of items: golf balls, marbles, an entire chicken, bones and all, mixed with Coca-cola, even an iPhone. The implication of the ads is that a blender can do anything. But it can’t, even a third-generation power blender like the Blendtec (or its rival brand, the Vitamix). Blenders can grind nuts; but they can’t chop meat. They can whiz a raw carrot so fast that the friction warms it into a kind of soup; but they can’t shred carrot into a fine salad the way a food processor can because no matter how powerful the motor, the blades are too small.

The heavier end of food processing was met by a series of massive electric food mixers. The first to reach the market was an electric stand mixer, invented by Herbert Johnston in 1908 for the Hobart Manufacturing Company, a firm specializing in motorized meat grinders. Johnston was watching a baker struggling to mix bread dough with a metal spoon. It struck him as absurd. Surely the task could be performed more easily using a motor. The first Hobart electric mixers were industrial, with a dimension of eighty quarts. In 1919, however, Hobart launched an offshoot, KitchenAid, providing a scaled-down countertop version for restaurants, weighing sixty-nine pounds. This was then scaled down still further for the home kitchen. The KitchenAid is still the all-American mixer par excellence, a great chunk of metal, like a Humvee, but in pretty colors like a Cadillac (meringue, red, pearl gray); such a mixer turns the airy layer cakes and frostings so difficult to achieve with a rotary beater into a cinch.

The British equivalent was the Kenwood mixer, launched in 1950. It was the invention of Ken Wood (1916—1997), an electrical engineer fresh out of the Royal Air Force. Before the war, he had run his own business selling and repairing radios and televisions. Wood surveyed the existing gadgets on the market worldwide and attempted to combine the best elements in a single machine, the Kenwood Chef. Wood took a can opener from the United States, a potato peeler from Germany, a spaghetti maker from Italy and put them together
with a mincer, a beater, a juicer, a liquidizer, and more. This wonder machine was capable—if you bought all the attachments—of whisking, kneading, liquefying, extracting, mincing, grinding, peeling, and also opening cans and even extruding different pasta shapes (the last function seems like showing off). It was advertised with the slogan: “Your Servant, Madam!” bringing home the point that food mixers did the work once done by human arms.