Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (28 page)

The Kenwood was and is a formidable piece of engineering. And yet the Cuisinart/Magimix was more significant and life changing. The Kenwood is all about the attachments, whereas with the Cuisinart, all you really needed was the basic S-blades it came with: the sharp, double-bladed stainless steel knife whirling like a dervish inside the plastic bowl. It was these blades that enabled the food processor not just to liquefy and mix but to chop and to pulverize. It was these blades that were revolutionary, for the first time making many cooks feel free rather than enslaved. Roy Andries de Groot was the author of one of the earliest specialist food processor books that appeared in the years immediately following 1973. The processor, he wrote, was “virtually the equivalent of having, as your constant kitchen helper, a skilled chef armed with two super-sharp chef’s knives and a cutting board.” What was more, it could “produce all the results achieved by a stone mortar and pestle. It can tenderize tough ingredients by slashing and reslashing their fibres, just as if they were pounded for an hour in a pestle.”

The metal S-blades were not the only attachment to come with the original Cuisinart. There was also a medium serrated slicing disk, ideal for slicing raw vegetables such as carrots, cucumber, or cabbage (“Before you can say ‘coleslaw,’” wrote de Groot, “the work bowl will be full of perfectly shredded cabbage”). Various grating disks could be used to julienne a cucumber or to reduce a knobbly celeriac to that classic French starter, celeri remoulade. The most mystifying attachment was the noncutting plastic blade that came free with the machine, exactly the same size and shape as the steel blades but without the cutting power. De Groot recalled the comment of a chef who
observed: “Their only use is to keep you awake at night, wondering what they are for.” It didn’t matter. To get the most out of a 1950s Kenwood, you needed a big range of accessories, many of which were actually as bulky to store as the gadgets they were supposed to replace (the liquidizer attachment was practically as big as a stand-alone blender). With a food processor, the attachments were more compact and you needed to use them less. Almost everything could be done with those basic metal S-blades, whirling in the bowl as you fed ingredients down the plastic chute.

They could be used for chopping hamburger meat and whizzing cake batters; for mincing onions and making the easiest mayonnaise in the world. Nearly forty years after the first Cuisinart, the food writer Mark Bittman was still marveling at this feature of the food processor:

The food mixers of the mid-twentieth century made it easier for housewives to do many of the jobs they were doing anyway: mincing meat, beating eggs, stirring cake batter. The food processor took it a step further, encouraging its owners to embark on types of cooking they would once have deemed impossible.

In 1983, the British cook Michael Barry noted that in the past “only a few brave and dedicated souls ever tried to make pate at home” because of the “exhausting process of cutting up, mincing, blending and then cleaning up the equipment.” Now, making pate had become normal, the work of five minutes: “The processor has
changed our way of life.” At a stroke, the processor demystified many of the trickiest dishes in the repertoire of French haute cuisine, including Carl Sontheimer’s beloved quenelles. Once, the wealthy of Europe wearied their servants to enjoy these puffy morsels. No more. To make the mixture, now you could simply fling two boneless chicken breasts, salt, pepper, parmesan, cream, and egg into the bowl of the processor and press the button.

So great is the feeling of freedom that the food processor brings to its middle-class devotees—I include myself—we should be careful not to delude ourselves that it has really saved all labor. The medieval housewife making pancakes in
Le Ménagier de Paris
stood face to face with the people she was wearying, whereas our servants have mainly been removed from view. We do not see the hands in the chicken factory that boned the breasts, never mind the chickens that gave their lives, nor the workers who labored to assemble the parts of our whizzy food processors. We only see a pile of ingredients and a machine ready to do our bidding. Alone in our kitchens, we feel entirely emancipated.

 

E
very revolution has its counterrevolution. You can’t unleash something as extraordinary as the food processor on the world without a backlash.In the case of the Magimix in Britain, the backlash came early. In 1973, the year it arrived on the market, a writer in the
London Times
suggested it would deprive future generations of the pleasures of podding peas and kneading dough by hand. She even went so far as to suggest that by depriving cooks of tactile stimulation, the processor might leave us all in need of “group therapy.”

No one could displace the processor from our lives once it had arrived. But they could complain, always in the same terms. It took the joy out of cooking; it would result in robotic food, which couldn’t possibly taste as good as something handmade and artisanal; and it reduced everything to mush.

In fairness, there was something in this last complaint. The birth of a new gadget often gives rise to zealous overuse, until the novelty
wears off. Reading through the early food processor cookbooks of the 1970s and 1980s, it is striking how many of the recipes had the consistency of baby food. Any vegetable that could be pureed, was. There were endless pates and timbales, dips galore (taramsalata, houmous, baba ganoush), and strange concoctions in ring molds. In those early years, many restaurants as well as home cooks couldn’t help themselves from blitzing everything in their new toy Quenelles went from being a rare aristocratic treat to a weeknight supper dish, until eventually people discovered that with the rarity factor gone, they were not so special after all. When was the last time you ate a quenelle?

In 1983, the food writer Elizabeth David noted the connection between the widespread availability of the food processor and nouvelle cuisine, with its obsession with velvety purees. She was dining in a “much praised” London restaurant with Julia Child in the 1970s when the latter noted that what they were eating was “Cuisinart cooking”:

Thanks to David herself, among others, the pendulum of food fashion swung back again, to more robust French and Italian provincial cooking, in which the individual ingredients are discernible. Soups and stews became chunky, which was a way of parading that no food processor had been used in their preparation. Fine-textured food lost almost all its previous cachet. Now it was the rustic and the irregular that was prized, because this showed that someone’s hand had been tired out making it.

The mortar and pestle came back into fashion. Food writers would insist bossily that a pesto, a Thai curry paste, or a Spanish
romesco
could only be made authentically in a pestle. The processor kind could never
possible
taste as good. There was even nostalgia for the way of life of all those women in Italy, Spain, Africa, or the Middle East who sat around communally pounding the day’s food for hours on end, singing all the while. It didn’t seem to occur to these food writers that perhaps the women were singing because it was the only way to stop their mouths from screaming with boredom at their task. While we in the cities of the West were busily imitating the old peasant ways, many of the peasants had switched to using food processors. In 2000, the California food expert Marlena Spieler traveled to Liguria to research how pesto was made in its birthplace. What she found was that “after proudly showing off the huge, heirloom, generations-old mortar and pestle, most Ligurians will then show you what they really use for making pesto: a food processor.”

The same was true in the Middle East. By 1977, more food processors were in use per capita there than anywhere else in the world. One reason for this was
kibbé,
a dish that takes many forms, both raw and cooked, all of them involving finely pounded lamb, usually with bulgur wheat, cinnamon and allspice, onion, and green herbs. The Lebanese writer Anissa Helou remembers
kibbé
being made at home in Beirut by her mother and grandmother:

The pounding process took an hour, during which Helou and her sisters “darted in and out of the kitchen,” asking if it was ready yet. Next, the pounded meat had to be made into “well-formed balls” with
the bulgur and seasonings. This stage must still be done by hand. But the pounding—which previously took two educated women an hour to perform—now takes a minute’s pulsing in a machine.

This is exhilarating; but it is also a little bit slighting, to the skillful hands that had pounded
kibbé
for so many generations. It is what happens whenever a machine replaces the labor of an artisan: the artisan’s skills become devalued. The food processor was an affront to the proud ego of a cook, because it made the effort superfluous. All that pounding could feel worthwhile if you told yourself that your hands and your hands alone were what made the difference between good
kibbé
and indifferent
kibbé.
By doing the same job just as well, if not better, the food processor stripped the hardworking cook of some of her dignity. By working so well, this machine seems to discount the effort it once took to process different foods: to whisk a mayonnaise, sieve a smooth puree of carrots, pound
kibbé.

The Thermomix is a newish device that makes the cook’s hands more or less irrelevant. It is advertised as being more than ten kitchen appliances in one. This is a blender and processor that can also weigh, steam, cook, knead bread dough, crush ice, emulsify, mill, grate, and puree. The Thermomix can do many of the subtle tasks for which human hands were once considered most necessary. After you have plonked in the ingredients, it can stir and cook a creamy risotto. It can make velvety lemon curd and perfectly emulsified hollandaise. Your only task is to eat the results.

Different cooks respond to this knowledge in different ways. Some fight the machine, seeking out an artisanal cuisine, which asserts with every rugged bite that the meal has been made by hand. Many Italian families even now happily spend hours rolling, cutting, and pinching tortelloni by hand, because the factory-made versions of filled pasta—unlike the best machine-made dried pasta, which is unimprovable—cannot compete with homemade. Yet they do not go so far as to take out a pestle and grind their own flour for the pasta. The cult of handmade food only goes so far, because we all have better things to do than spend hours grinding.

The Slow Food Movement started in Italy in 1989 to “counter the rise of fast food and fast life.” The slowness of Slow Food refers primarily to methods of agriculture and ways of eating: its philosophy defends biodiversity against intensive farming, and slow and sensuous meals as opposed to quickly grabbed bites. The movement also favors food that is slow to produce. Slow Food goes along with a cult of the handmade and the homemade as against the machine-made, with a rediscovery of the therapeutic pleasures of kneading sourdough or making home-cured salami from scratch, recreating as leisure pursuits what were once backbreaking kitchen work.

But slow and difficult is not the only way to make delicious food. Other, more pragmatic cooks embrace the machine. The great chef Raymond Blanc sometimes demonstrates how to make sweet pastry in a food processor, tipping in butter, flour, and sugar and pulsing for no more than half a minute with egg yolk and water, forming it with a dexterous movement into a ball of buttery dough. “You can make it by hand if you like,” I once heard him comment, reasonably enough. “But it will take much longer and it won’t be any better.”