Consider the Fork

by Bee Wilson

  In many cases, the clay pot enabled people to eat plants that would otherwise be toxic. An example is cassava (also known as manioc or yuca), a starchy tuber native to South America, which is now the third-largest source of edible carbohydrate in the world. In its natural form, cassava contains small amounts of cyanide. When inadequately cooked or eaten raw, it can cause a disease called konzo, a paralytic disorder. Once it was possible to boil cassava in a pot, it went from useless toxin to valuable staple, a sweet fleshy source of calcium, phosphorus, and vitamin C (though little protein). Boiled cassava is a basic source of energy in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Ghana, among other countries, usually eaten simply by mashing the boiled root to a comforting paste, perhaps with a few spices. This is classic pot-cooked food: the kind that warms the belly and soothes the heart.

  Casseroles are a pleasure to eat largely because of the juices: that heady intermingling of herbs and wine and stock. Right from the start, pots enabled cooks to capture juices that would otherwise be lost in the flames. Pots seem to have been especially valued among people who ate a lot of shellfish, because the clay caught the luscious clam liquor. Pottery is a great breakthrough for another reason: it is much harder to burn food than when it is cooked directly in the fire (though still not impossible, as many of us can testify). So long as the pot is not allowed to run dry, the food won’t char.

  The earliest recipes on record come from Mesopotamia (the site of modern-day Iraq, Iran, and Syria). They are written in cuneiform on three stone tablets, approximately 4,000 years old, offering a tantalizing glimpse of how the Mesopotamians might have cooked. The vast majority of the recipes are for pot cooking, most of them for broths and court bouillons. “Assemble all the ingredients in the pot” is a frequent instruction. Pots made cooking a refined and subtle business for the first time; but pot cookery is also easier than direct-fire roasting. It was little trouble to boil up mutton and water and mash in some leeks, garlic, and green herbs, then leave it to bubble away in its own good time. The elementary pattern these Mesopotamian recipes took was: prepare water, add fat and salt to taste; add meat, leeks, and garlic; cook in the pot; maybe add fresh coriander or mint; and serve.

  A whole range of techniques opened up with pottery. Boiling was the most important, but it also became possible to use ceramic griddles to cook thin maize cakes, cassava cakes, and flatbreads; to use large pots to brew and distill alcoholic drinks; and to use a dry, lidded pot to toast grains, the most notable example of this being the popped maize of Mesoamerica: popcorn!

  People loved clay pots for another reason: the way they made the food taste. In modern times, we have more or less discarded the idea of a pot’s surface mingling with its contents. We want pots to be made from surfaces that react as little as possible with what is inside: this is one of the many virtues of stainless steel. With a few theatrical exceptions—the 1970s chicken brick, the Thai clay-pot—we do not consider the possibility that the cooking surface could react with the food in beneficial ways. But traditionally, cultures that cook with porous clay appreciate the flavor it gives to the food, a result of the free soluble salts in the clay leaching out. In the Kathmandu Valley in India, a clay pot is considered essential for pickle jars, adding something extra to mango, lemon, and cucumber pickles.

  Clay’s special properties may explain why many cooks resisted the next great leap forward: the move from clay pots to metal pots. Metal cauldrons are a product of the Bronze Age (circa 3000 BC onward), a period of rapid technological change. They belong to roughly the same era as early writing systems (hieroglyphics and cuneiform), papyrus, plumbing, glassmaking, and the wheel. Cauldrons started to be used by the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians, and the Chinese, by at least 2000 BC. The expense of manufacturing them meant that their use was limited at first to special feasts or the food of the afterlife.

  Metal cauldrons have a number of highly practical advantages over pottery. A cauldron can be scrubbed clean with sand or ash, unlike unglazed earthenware, which tends to hold the residue of the previous meal in its pores. Metal conducts heat better than clay, and therefore food cooks more efficiently. Most significant, a cauldron can be placed directly over fire without fear that it will shatter from thermal shock or get chipped. It might even survive dropping. Whereas archaeologists tend to encounter clay pots in the form of shards, they sometimes unearth cauldrons in their entirety, such as the Battersea cauldron in the British Museum, a splendid Iron Age specimen from 800-700 BC, which was pulled out of the River Thames in the nineteenth century. It is a magnificent pumpkin-shaped vessel, constructed from seven sheets of bronze riveted together like a shield, that has survived in all its glory It is an awe-inspiring piece of equipment. Looking at it, you can see why cauldrons were often passed on in wills; they were weighty pieces of engineering.

  Once metal cookware was possible, it wasn’t long before all the basic pots and pans were established. The Romans had a patella—a metal pan for shallow-frying fish that gave its name to the Spanish paella and the Italian padella—little different from our frying pans. The ability to boil things in oil—which is really what frying is—added yet another dimension to kitchen life. Fats reach much higher temperatures than water, and food cooks quicker in oil than water, browning deliciously at the edges. This is the result of the Maillard reaction, an interaction between proteins and sugars at high heats that is responsible for many of the flavors we find most seductive: the golden crust on a French fry, a dark spoonful of maple syrup. A frying pan is a good thing to have around.

  The Romans also had beautifully made metal colanders and bronze chafing dishes, flattish metal patinae, vast cauldrons of brass and bronze, pastry molds in varying ornate shapes, fish kettles, frying pans with special pouring lips to dispense the sauce and handles that folded up. Much of what has remained looks disconcertingly modern. The range of Roman metal cookware was still impressing the chef Alexis Soyer in 1853. Soyer was particularly taken with a very high-tech sounding two-tiered vessel called the authepsa (the name means “self-boiling”). Like a modern steamer, it came in two layers, made of Corinthian brass. The top compartment, said Soyer, could be used for gently cooking “light delicacies destined for dessert.” It was a highly valued utensil. Cicero describes one authepsa being sold at auction for such a high price that bystanders assumed the thing being sold was an entire farm.

  Technologically speaking, Roman metal utensils have had few rivals until the late twentieth century with the advent of pans made from multilayered metals. They even addressed themselves to the problem of avoiding hot spots when cooking, which remains a bugbear for saucepan designers. A metal pan has survived from Roman Britain with concentric rings in its base, whose purpose, it seems, was to create slow, steady heat distribution. Experiments with corrugated cooking pots versus smooth ones have shown that texturing the bottom of a pan reduces thermal stresses (the rings make it less susceptible to warping over high heat, strengthening the pan’s structure) —and also gives more cooking control: heat transfer happens more slowly with a textured pan, so there is less chance of annoying boilovers. A similar pattern of concentric rings appears on the base of Circulon cookware, launched in 1985, whose “unique Hi-Lo” grooves are said to reduce the surface abrasion and enhance the durability and nonstick qualities of the pan. As with aqueducts, straight roads, arched bridges, and books, this was a technology in which the Romans got there first.

  Despite the ingenuity of the Romans, most domestic cooks from the Bronze Age until the eighteenth century had to make do with a single big pot: the cauldron (often called a kettle or kittle). It was by far the largest utensil in the Northern European kitchen, and the one around which culinary activity was focused. Once the Romans had fallen, the range of cookware shrank back to basics. From a pot for every occasion, the one-pot meal was once again the dominant mode of cooking. The cauldron tended to decide for you how you could eat. Boiled, stewed, or braised was usually the answer (though a covered pot could also be used to make bread, which ba
ked or steamed under the lid). The contents of the cauldron could be fairly repetitive: “Pease porridge hot / Pease porridge cold / Pease porridge in the pot / Nine days old,” as the rhyme goes. A typical modest medieval household owned a knife, a ladle, an earthenware pan, perhaps a spit of some sort, and a cauldron. The knife chopped the ingredients to go in the cauldron along with water. Several hours later, the ladle poured out the finished soup or “pottage.” Supplementary pots took the form of a few cheap earthenware pots, and perhaps a skillet, which is a long-handled pan much smaller than the cauldron, used for heating up milk and cream.

  If further kitchen tools were owned, they were most likely accessories to the cauldron. Iron pot cranes or sways, some of them beautifully ornate, were designed to swing the heavy pot and its contents on its hook over the fire and off again, a form of temperature control as instant as flicking a switch, if rather more dangerous. Those who could not afford such elaborate machinery might own a brandreth or two, ingenious little three-legged stands designed to lift the cauldron above the direct heat of the fire. Flesh-hooks and flesh-forks were other cauldron accessories, used for suspending meat over the bubbling liquid or for retrieving things from its depths.

  Cauldrons came in many shapes and sizes. In Britain, they were usually “sag-bottomed” (as opposed to pot-bellied) and made of bronze or iron, so that they could withstand the heat of the fire. If they had three legs, this was a sign they were designed to sit in the embers. Iron cooking pots, which tended to be smaller, were round-bellied, with handles for hanging over the fire. Sticks or tongs were used to manipulate the handle, which would become prohibitively hot. Cooking with a single pot could give rise to strange combinations of ingredients, all jumbled together. It is not clear how often the cauldron was cleaned out, in the absence of running water and dish detergent. Mostly, the scrapings of the previous meal were left in the bottom to season the next one.

  European folklore is haunted by the specter of the empty cauldron. It is the old equivalent of the empty fridge: a symbol of outright hunger. In Celtic myth, cauldrons are capable of summoning up both eternal abundance and absolute knowledge. To have a pot and nothing to put in it was the depths of misery. In the story called “Stone Soup” (which has many versions) some travelers come to a village carrying an empty cooking pot and beg for some food. The villagers refuse. The travelers produce a stone and some water and claim they are making “stone soup.” The villagers are so fascinated, they each add a little something to the pot—a few vegetables, some seasoning—until finally the “stone soup” has become a rich cassoulet-like hot pot, from which all can feast.

  Acquiring a cauldron required a sizable outlay. In 1412, the worldly goods of Londoners John Cole and his wife, Juliana, included a sixteen-pound cauldron worth four shillings (the cost of an earthenware pot at this time was around a penny, with twelve pennies to the shilling). Once bought or bartered, a metal pot might be repaired many times to prolong its life; if it sprang holes, you would pay a tinker to solder them. A bronze cauldron was dug up in County Down in a bog in 1857. It showed six areas of repair; small holes had been filled in with rivets; larger ones were mended by pouring molten bronze onto the gap.

  A cauldron might not be the ideal vessel for every dish. But once acquired, it was likely to be the one and only pot (supplemented, if at all, by a small earthenware vessel or two). Every culture has its own take on the one-pot dish, as well as variations on the specific pot that was used to make it: pot au feu, Irish stew, dobrada, cocido. One-pot cookery is a cuisine of scarcity: scarce fuel, scarce utensils, scarce ingredients. Nothing is wasted. It is no coincidence that food for the relief of poverty has almost always taken the form of soup. If there is not enough to go around, you can always add some more water and bubble it up one more time.

  Cooks devised some crafty ways around the limitation of the single pot. By putting vegetables, potatoes, and pudding in separate muslin bags in the boiling water, it was possible to cook more than one thing at once in a single vessel. The pudding might end up tasting a bit cabbagey, and the cabbage rather puddingy, but at least it made a change from soup. In Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson describes how “tea” was made for the men coming home from the fields:

  Everything was cooked in the one utensil; the square of bacon, amounting to little more than a taste each; cabbage, or other green vegetables in one net, potatoes in another, and the roly-poly swathed in a cloth. It sounds a haphazard method in these days of gas and electric cookers; but it answered its purpose, for, by carefully timing the putting in of each item and keeping the simmering of the pot well regulated, each item was kept intact and an appetising meal was produced.

  In the 1930s, the Nazis borrowed the frugal image of the one-pot meal, putting it to ideological use. In 1933, Hitler’s government announced that Germans should put aside one Sunday, from October to March, to eat a one-pot meal: Eintopf. The idea was that people would save enough money in this way to donate whatever was saved to the poor. Cookbooks were hastily rewritten to take account of the new policy. One recipe collection listed no fewer than sixty-nine Eintopfs, including macaroni, goulash, Irish stew, Serbian rice soup, numerous cabbagey medleys, and Old German potato soup.

  The Nazi promotion of the Eintopf was a shrewd piece of propaganda. Many in Germany already viewed the Eintopf as the ultimate frugal meal, a dish of sacrifice and suffering. It was said that Germany had managed to beat the French in 1870 in part because the armies had filled their bellies with Erbswurst, a one-pot mixture of pea meal and beef fat, a kind of pease pudding. The Eintopf came with a sea of nostalgic memories.

  The Nazis’ celebration of the Eintopf was actually a sign of how most kitchens—in Germany, as elsewhere—had moved beyond one-pot cookery. Like many other fascist symbols, it harks back to the archaic. You could only see the Eintopf as a money saver in a society in which most meals were cooked using more than one pot. By reviving the fairy-tale peasant ideal of a single cauldron hung on a single pothook, the Nazis inadvertently showed that the days of the cauldron were over. Even though times were tough in 1930s Germany, most cooks—which meant most housewives—expected to have an assortment of pots and pans to cook with, not just one.

  Petworth House in Sussex is one of the grandest residences in England. It has descended through the same aristocratic family, the Egremonts, since 1150, though the current building dates to the seventeenth century: a stupendous mansion set in a seven-hundred-acre deer park. It is now managed by the National Trust. Visitors to the kitchen can marvel at the gleaming copper batterie de cuisine. on display, more than 1,000 pieces in all: rows of saucepans and stewpans, plus multiple matching lids, all immaculately lined up, from large to small, from left to right, on several vast dressers. The kitchen at Petworth gives you a sense of what it meant to have “a place for everything and everything in its place,” as the cookery writer Mrs. Beeton said. The Petworth cooks would have had exactly the right pot for cooking each dish.

  The equipment at Petworth includes stockpots with taps at the bottom to release hot water (like tea urns); multiple stewpans, saute pans, and omelette pans in every size you could wish for; a large braising pan, with an indented lid designed to hold hot embers, so that the food was cooked from above and below at the same time. The pans devoted to fish cookery are a world unto themselves. In the grand old days, there would have been excellent fish from the Sussex coast, and the Petworth cooks were expected to do it justice. The house’s kitchens contain not just fish kettles (with pierced draining plates inside so that a fish could be lifted from its poaching water without disintegrating) and a fish fryer (a round open pan with a wire drainer) but a special turbot pan (diamond shaped to mimic the shape of the fish) and several smaller pans specifically for cooking mackerel.

  The kitchen at Petworth was not always so well-equipped. Historian Peter Brears studied inventories of the kitchen, documenting “every single movable item” used by the cooks; every pot, every pan. The first inventory took pla
ce in 1632; then 1764; then 1869. These documents offer a snapshot, century after century, of what cooking equipment was available in the richest British kitchens. The most telling detail is this. In 1632, during Stuart times, for all its wealth, Petworth owned not a single stewpan or saucepan. The devices for stewing or boiling at that time were: one large fixed “copper” (a giant vat that held boiling water, used to supply hot water for the whole house, not just for cooking); nine stockpots (or cauldrons); an iron cockle pan and a few fish kettles; and five small brass skillets, three-legged to stand in the fire. This is not a kitchen in which you could concoct an hollandaise or an espagnole sauce. You could stew, poach, or boil, but not with any great finesse. The focus of this kitchen was roasting not boiling: there were twenty-one spits, six dripping pans, three basting ladles, and five gridirons.

  By 1764, this had all changed. Now, Petworth had shrugged off some of its spits (only nine remained) and acquired twenty-four large stewpans, twelve small stewpans, and nine bain-maries and saucepans. This massive increase in the number and variety of pans reflects new styles of cooking. The old heavy spicy medieval ways were on the way out, to be replaced by something fresher and more buttery. An aristocrat in 1764 was familiar with many foods that simply were not known in 1632: with frothy chocolate and crisp cookies; with the sharp, citrusy sauces and truffley ragouts of French nouvelle cuisine. New dishes called for new equipment. Hannah Glasse, one of the most celebrated cookery writers of the eighteenth century, felt it was important to get the right pan when melting butter (a kind of thickened melted butter was starting to be served as a universal sauce to go with meat or fish): a silver pan was always best, she advised.