Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (33 page)

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
. . . Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAM,
“This Is Just to Say”

 

 

 

 

 

J
ULY 24, 1959, WAS A VITAL MOMENT IN THE COLD WAR. Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union, and Richard Nixon, then vice president of the United States during Eisenhower’s presidency, staged a big public meeting in Moscow, in front of TV cameras. It was the most high-profile exchange between Soviets and Americans since the Geneva Summit of 1955, but far more informal. Laughing and sometimes jabbing fingers at one another, the two men debated the merits of capitalism and
communism. Which country had the more advanced technologies? Which way of life was better? The conversation—which has since been christened the Kitchen Debate—hinged not on weapons or the space race but on washing machines and kitchen gadgets.

The occasion was the opening day of the American National Exhibition at Sokolniki Park, a municipal park of “leisure and culture.” This was the first time many Russians had encountered the American lifestyle firsthand: the first time they tasted Pepsi-Cola or set eyes on big American refrigerators. The exhibition featured three fully equipped model kitchens. One was a labor-saving kitchen from General Mills, with an emphasis on frozen foods. Another was a “futuristic” kitchen made by Whirlpool that would require women only to push a button to set off all sorts of kitchen machines. The third was a lemon-yellow modular kitchen supplied by General Electric.

This third kitchen is the one that entered the history books. It looked like something out of a Doris Day movie: clean and yellow and apple-pie neat. Pretty female demonstrators showed Russian visitors the wonders that could emerge from the lemon-yellow fridge: cupcakes topped with cool creamy frosting, fudgy chocolate layer cake. This General Electric kitchen was made as part of a complete ranch-style American house.

Nixon and Khrushchev paused to look at the kitchen, leaning against the white dividing railings. Lois Epstein, a perky brunette American exhibition guide, demonstrated how the typical American housewife might use the built-in washer-dryer. On top of the machine were a box of SOS scouring pads and a box of Dash soap powder. “In America, we like to make life easier for women,” noted Nixon. Khrushchev replied that “your capitalistic attitude to women does not occur under communism,” implying that instead of making life easier, these machines only confirmed the American view that the vocation of women was to be housewives (and perhaps he was partly right about this). Khrushchev went on to query whether all these new machines offered real benefits. In his memoirs, Khrushchev recalled how he picked up an automatic device for
squeezing lemon juice for tea and said, “What a silly thing . . . Mr. Nixon! . . . I think it would take a housewife longer to use this gadget than it would for her to . . . slice a piece of lemon, drop it into a glass of tea, then squeeze a few drops.”

Nixon fought back, drawing Khrushchev’s attention to all the gleaming utensils on display—mixers, juicers, can openers, freezers. “The American system,” he insisted “is designed to take advantage of new inventions.” Khrushchev continued to be disdainful. “Don’t you have a machine that puts food in the mouth and presses it down? Many things you’ve shown us are interesting but they are not needed in life. They have no useful purpose. They are merely gadgets.”

Yet Khrushchev wanted to have it both ways. While rejecting the American kitchen as worthless, he also wanted to insist that the Soviets could make kitchens that were every bit as good. He wanted to win the kitchen race as well as the space race. “You think the Russian people will be dumbfounded to see these things, but the fact is that newly built Russian houses have all this equipment right now.” This wasn’t true, and Khrushchev surely knew it. No house or apartment in the whole of Moscow had a kitchen anything like the gleaming yellow exemplar at the American exhibition. By American standards, Soviet kitchens in the brand-new apartments built under Khrushchev’s regime were miniscule: between 4.5 and 6 meters square. The crowning glory of these kitchens, the great labor-saving device of the future was a series of cramped wall-mounted cabinets and cupboards underneath the work surfaces. These were built at a standard height—85 cm—aimed at Mrs. Moscow Average. Taller women must stoop; smaller ones must stretch, to bend themselves to the state’s uniform standards. Apart from work space, what these kitchens notably lacked was anything like the capacious lemon-yellow refrigerator in the General Electric model kitchen. Soviet fridges in 1959 were ugly and cramped. But the vast majority of Russian kitchens had no fridge at all.

The fact was that neither the Soviet Union—nor any country in the world, not Britain, not Germany—could match American
domestic refrigerators in 1959. The United States was the ice nation par excellence. Ninety-six percent of households owned fridges (compared to 13 percent for Britain). The American way of life was, to a very large extent, made possible by refrigeration. From the clink of ice cubes in a glass of bourbon to the easy luxury of a Chicago steak in New York City, from soda fountains and popsicles to frozen peas, the business of cooling food and drink was deeply American. An automatic lemon squeezer may indeed be, in Khrushchev’s words, a “mere gadget”; a refrigerator is something more. It serves many useful purposes, being not just a single technology but a cluster of interrelated technologies that together created entirely new approaches to eating. Sometimes, refrigeration is a tool for making something cold for the sheer frivolous delight of it—an icy glass of white wine, a refreshing slice of melon. But it is also a method of food conservation: keeping food safe to eat for longer times and over longer distances. The efficient home refrigerator entirely changed the way food—getting it, cooking it, eating it—fitted into peoples’ lives.

The roomy American fridge—and its close relative, the freezer—was, first and foremost, a tool for food preservation, which freed cooks from the need to pickle, salt, or can that which could not be eaten straight away. At a stroke, it removed the harsh seasonality of consumption, for the poor as well as the rich. The fridge transformed what people ate: fresh meat, fresh milk, and fresh green vegetables became year-round staples in all parts of the United States for the first time in history. Fridges changed how people shopped for food: without refrigeration, there could be no supermarkets, no “weekly shopping,” no stocking up the freezer for emergencies. As well as a preservation device, the fridge was a storage system, taking over the function of the old larder. To have a refrigerator heaving
with fresh produce—lettuces in the crisper, gallons of milk, jars of mayonnaise, whole roast chickens, pounds of cold cuts, and creamy desserts—was to participate in the American Dream, which is at heart a dream about plenty. The American fridge became a new focal point for the kitchen, taking over from the old hearth. Once, we congregated around fire; now people organize their lives around the hard, chilly lines of the refrigerator.

The whole world aspires to be American now, when it comes to fridges. In spring 2011, at a product launch in a vast underground space in London’s Bloomsbury, I stood in front of a new state-of-the-art refrigerator-freezer. Its eco rating was A++ and it was frost free. It was tall and plain white, except for a little metallic panel on the front, which looked like a security device from the world of James Bond. There was a button you could press with a parasol on it if you went on holiday: for all the time you were away sunning yourself, the fridge would calibrate its energy use to a lower setting than normal. I was impressed. But this was nothing. Samsung has launched a “smart fridge,” with built-in Wi-Fi, Twitter feeds, and weather reports. At the time of this writing, researchers at the University of Central Lancashire in Britain were working on a self-cleaning fridge that would also do a constant inventory of its own contents, moving goods nearing their use-by-date toward the front. It seems we have reached the point where we expect a fridge to organize our lives for us; and where they will soon be capable of doing so.

A fridge rather than a stove now tends to be the starting point—what designers call the “statement”—around which the rest of a kitchen is constructed. When we can’t think what else to do, we open the fridge door and stare into it long and hard as if it will provide the answers to life’s great questions.

 

B
acon, parmesan, and cheddar, hard sticks of salami, sauerkraut, confit duck, sausages, smoked salmon, kippers, salt cod, sardines in oil, raisins, prunes, dried apricots, raspberry jam, marmalade. . . .
Countless delicious foodstuffs might never have been invented if refrigeration had been available sooner.

The continued presence of many of these foods in our diet is an anachronism; but we are creatures of habit and have learned to love many things that were once eaten from necessity. Bacon serves no real purpose in a refrigerated age, except that of pleasure, which can never be discounted. There is no longer any need to eat smoked ham when you can keep a fresh pork chop in the fridge. Our taste for smoked things belongs to earlier times, when preserving meats by smoking them could make the difference between being able to eat a food year-round and eating it just once a year.

For the whole of winter and spring in medieval times in Europe, almost all protein foods—if you were lucky enough to have them—would have been smoky and salty because this was the only way to stop meat and fish from spoiling. Any meat not eaten immediately after slaughter would be preserved by salting: portions of meat were layered in a large wooden cask, smothered in layers of salt. This was an expensive process: as of the late thirteenth century, it took two pennies’ worth of salt to cure five pennies’ worth of meat, so only good-quality meat was salted. Pork was the meat that took salt the best. As well as ham and gammon, bacon and salt pork, the Elizabethans made something called, crudely, “souse,” a pickled medley of pigs’ feet, ears, cheek, and snout: everything but the squeak. Salt beef was also made. A variant was “Martinmas beef,” prepared around the feast of Martinmas, on November 11. After it was salted, the meat was hung in the roof of a smoky house until it was well and truly smoked. For a long time, the myth was bandied about that cooks in the past used spices to disguise the taste of putrid meat. This was not so: spices were expensive and would not be wasted on condemned food. But an important use of spices was tempering the harshness of salt meat.