Consider the Fork

by Bee Wilson

  Yes, you could have blitzed it in a food processor or chopped it with a regular chefs knife. But the mezzaluna does it better. There is efficiency ehind the romance. When chopping nuts, for example, processors have a tendency to overdo things—you hold the pulse button too long and before you know it, you have ground almonds; a minute later, nut butter. With a chef’s knife, the nuts skitter all over the board. The mezzaluna catches the nuts at each end as it rocks, producing a nicely uneven rubble in no time.

  Single-bladed mezzalunas are best because with a double blade, what you gain in power, you waste in time as you push out debris that clumps between the blades. A single curved blade is easily powerful enough to dispatch dried apricots, which gum up normal knives. And its rocking motion remains the best way to chop fresh green herbs until they are fine but not mush.

  The mezzaluna has another great advantage over the knife, which cooking guru Nigella Lawson points out. With the mezzaluna, she writes, “both my hands are engaged and thus it is impossible for me to cut myself.”

  3

  FIRE

  Probably the greatest [discovery],

  excepting language, ever made by man.

  CHARLES DARWIN, on cooking

  O father, the pig, the pig, do come

  and taste how nice the burnt pig eats.

  CHARLES LAMB, “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig”

  IMAGINE DOING THIS IN AN UNLIT KITCHEN—SEE HOW dangerous it is!“ A man dressed in a black T-shirt and white chef’s apron is standing near a hot fire, thrusting a small piece of veal stuffed with sage leaves onto what looks like an instrument of torture. It is composed of five deadly iron spears, each several feet long and precariously joined together. This device looks like a five-pronged javelin. It is actually a rare type of spit called a spiedo doppio, an Italian device for roasting meats from the sixteenth century. The man holding it is Ivan Day. He may be the only person in the world who still cooks with one.

  Day, a boyish man in his early sixties, is the foremost historian of food in Britain. He lives in the Lake District in a rickety seventeenth-century farmhouse, crammed with period utensils and antiquarian cookbooks, a kind of living museum where he gives courses on historic cookery. Day teaches groups of amateur cooks (as well as numerous chefs, scholars, and museum curators) how to cook historically. In an Ivan Day course, you might learn how to make a Renaissance pie of quinces and marrow bone; a seventeenth-century wafer flavored with rosewater; Victorian jelly; or medieval gingerbread, all made with the authentic equipment. Day’s greatest passion, though, is for spit-roasting, which he believes to be the finest technique ever devised for cooking meat. “People tell me my roast beef is the best they have ever tasted,” he observes in one of his courses. His hearth and all its spits enable him to roast vast joints, sometimes seventeen pounds at a time.

  Standing on the uneven stone floor in Ivan Day’s kitchen, I am struck by how unusual it now is to have an entire house organized around an open hearth. Once, almost everyone lived like this, because a single fire served to warm a house, heat water for washing, and cook dinner. For millennia, all cooking was roasting in one form or another. In the developing world, the heat of an open fire remains the way that the very poorest cook.

  But in our own world, fire has been progressively closed off. Only at barbecues or campfires, sitting around toasting marshmallows and warming our hands by the flames, do we encounter a cooking fire directly. Many of us proclaim a fondness for roast beef—and Ivan Day’s really was the best I’ve ever tasted—but we have neither the resources nor the desire to set up our homes in the service of open-hearth cookery. We have plenty of other things to do, and our cooking has to fit around our lives, rather than the other way around. It takes huge effort on Day’s part to maintain this kitchen. Day scours the antiquarian markets of Europe looking for spits and other roasting utensils, all of which got junked many decades ago when kitchens were converted away from open hearths to closed-off stoves and cooktops.

  It is not just a question of the fire itself. Cooking by an open hearth went along with a host of related tools: andirons or brand-irons to stop logs rolling forward at either end of the fire; hasteners, which are large metal hoods placed in front of the fire to speed up the cooking or protect the cook from the heat; spits of numerous kinds, from small and single-pronged to vast and five-pronged; spit-jacks to rotate the meat on the spit; fire tongs and bellows to control the fire; pot hooks for hanging pots over the fire and dripping pans to go under the fire to catch the fat dripping off roasting meat; brandreths and trivets to support cooking pots, and flesh-forks for pulling pieces of meat out of the pot. All these implements were made of heavy metal (usually iron) and were long-handled to protect the cook from the fierce heat. Not one of these things can be found in kitchenware shops today. They vanished along with the open hearth.

  If I came into Day’s kitchen with short-handled stainless steel tongs and nonstick silicone spatulas, I wouldn’t stand a chance. The utensils would melt. I would fry. The children would howl. Dinner would burn. The entire way of life that supported cooking by an open hearth has become obsolete. Kitchen technology is not just about how well something works on its own terms—whether it produces the most delicious food—but about all the things that surround it: kitchen design; our attitude to danger and risk; pollution; the lives of women and servants; how we feel about red meat, indeed about meat in general; social and family structures; the state of metallurgy. Roasting meat before the fire goes along with an entire culture that has been lost. This is why it is so disconcerting to step into the kitchen of Ivan Day, one of the last men in Britain who is prepared to build his life around an open fire.

  Roasting is the oldest form of cooking. At its most basic, it means nothing more than placing raw ingredients directly into a fire. In Africa, the Kung! San hunter-gatherers still cook like this, plunging tsin beans into hot ash. We will never know the lucky person who—whether by accident or design—first discovered that food could be transformed by fire, becoming both easier to digest and more delicious. In his “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig,” Charles Lamb imagines it taking place in China when Bo-bo, the lazy son of a swineherd, starts a house fire that kills, and accidentally burns, a litter of piglets. In Lamb’s fable, Bo-bo marvels at the savory smell. He reaches out to take a fragment of hot scorched pig skin, “and for the first time in his life (in the world’s life, indeed, for before him no man had known it) he tasted—crackling!”

  It’s an alluring story, but the discovery of roasting can’t possibly have happened like this, for the obvious reason that roast meats long predate both houses and swineherds. The technology of roasting is far older than that of constructing buildings, and older still than agriculture. It predates both pottery for boiling and ovens for baking by nearly 2 million years. The oldest building known dates to around half a million years ago, toward the end of the era of Homo erectus, the first hunter-gatherer humans. It would be many thousands of years, however, before these house-dwelling proto-humans became farmers. Plant agriculture dates back to around 10,000 BC, well into the time of modern man or Homo sapiens. Animal husbandry is yet more recent. Pigs were only domesticated in China around 8000 BC. By this time, our ancestors had already been familiar with the savory taste of roast meat for hundreds of thousands of years.

  Indeed, it may have been the discovery of roasting over an open fire that first made us what we are. If anthropologist Richard Wrangham is correct, this first act of cooking or roasting—around 1.8 to 1.9 million years ago—was the decisive moment in history: namely, the moment when we ceased to be upright apes and became more fully human. Cooking makes most foods far easier to digest, as well as releasing more of the nutritive value. The discovery of cooked food left us with surplus energy for brain growth. Wrangham writes that “cooking was a great discovery not merely because it gave us better food, or even because it made us physically human. It did something even more important: it helped make our brains uniquely large, providing
a dull human body with a brilliant human mind.”

  Having tamed this potent source of heat and light, men built homes near to it, and then around it. The hearth that supplied every meal was always the focal point of the house. Indeed, the Latin word focus translates as “fireplace.” The need to maintain a fire—to start it, to keep it going at the right heat, to supply it with enough fuel during the day and to damp it down at night so that the house didn’t burn down—these were the dominant domestic activities until 150 years ago, with the coming of gas ovens. The term curfew now means a time by which someone—usually a teenager—has to get home. The original curfew was a kitchen object: a large metal cover placed over the embers at night to contain the fire while people slept. As for cooking itself, it was largely the art of fire management.

  In the modern kitchen, fire has not just been tamed. It has been so boxed off, you could forget it existed at all, amid the cool worktops and all the on-off switches that enable us to summon heat and dismiss it again in a second. But then fire resurfaces and reminds us that even in the modern world, kitchens are still places where people get burned. In a Greek study of 239 childhood burn cases, it was found that the kitchen was by far the most dangerous room of the house, causing 65 percent of burn injuries. The age group most affected by kitchen scalds are one-year-olds: old enough to be mobile, not old enough to know that stoves are hot.

  In earlier times, you walked into a kitchen and expected to see fire. Now, the presence of fire is a signal to panic. In the United Kingdom today, the majority of fires in the home are still caused by cooking, specifically by leaving pans of food unattended, and even more specifically by leaving chip pans unattended. The chip pan—a deep-sided open pan in which potatoes are fried in a basket—is an interesting example of how people often cling to kitchen technologies long after they have been proven to be lethal and inefficient. There are around 12,000 chip pan fires in the UK every year, resulting in 4,600 injuries and fifty deaths. The fire services periodically plead with the public to give up cooking fries in chip pans, begging people either to buy a proper deep-fat fryer with a closed lid or just eat something—anything!—else instead, particularly when drunk. But still the chip-pan fires continue.

  The great British chip-pan fire is emblematic of a deep forgetfulness, which goes beyond the obvious dopiness of combining drinking with hot oil late at night in confined spaces. There is a sort of innocence about the chip-pan blaze, as if those responsible had altogether forgotten the connection between cooking and fire. Real, deadly fire. This was not something you could ever forget in the days when all cooking started with an open flame.

  Brillat-Savarin, the great French philosopher of cuisine, wrote in 1825 that “a cook may be taught but a man who can roast is born with the faculty.” The first time I read this, as a student getting started in the kitchen, I was puzzled. Roasting didn’t seem that hard to me—certainly not compared with making mayonnaise that didn’t separate or a puff pastry that didn’t fall apart. It was no trouble to dab a three-pound chicken with butter, salt, and lemon, put it in roasting dish in a hot electric oven, wait an hour and ten minutes, then remove. So long as I bought a good free-range bird, my “roast chicken” came out perfect every time. Roasting was far easier than braising a shin of beef or sauteing a pork chop, both of which required stringent attention to ensure the meat didn’t toughen.

  This basic procedure was not at all what Brillat-Savarin had in mind. Until well into the nineteenth century, there was a strict conceptual division in Western cookery between open fires—things that roasted; and closed ovens—things that baked. To Brillat-Savarin, what I do with a chicken has little to do with roasting. From the point of view of most cooks of previous centuries, the “roast dinners” we serve up are nothing of the kind but are instead a strange kind of baked meats, half broiled, half stewed in their own fat. The point about roasting in its original sense was that it required, firstly, an open hearth and, secondly, rotation on a spit (the root of the word roast is the same as “rotate”).

  The original direct-fire roasting—shoving something into an untamed fire—is a crude and quick method that results in chewy, greasy meat. The muscle protein gets overcooked and chewy, while collagen in the connective tissue does not have time to tenderize. True roasting, by contrast, is a gentle process. The food cooks at a significant distance from the embers, rotating all the while. The rotation means that the heat cannot accumulate too much on any single spot: no scorching. The slow, gradual pace keeps the food on the spit tender; but the cook must also be vigilant for signs that the fire isn’t hot enough or that the spit needs to be moved nearer to the fire. This is why true roasters are said to be born, not made. In addition to the sheer hard labor of rotating, you need a kind of sixth sense for the food on the spit, some instinct that forewarns you when it is about to burn or when the fire needs prodding.

  It enrages Ivan Day when people say, as they often do, that spit-roasting by an open hearth—the most prized method of cooking in Europe for hundreds of years—was dirty and primitive. “On the contrary, it was frequently a highly controlled and sophisticated procedure with an advanced technology and its own remarkable cuisine.” Sometimes, spit-roasting is dismissed as Neanderthal, to which Day remarked one day, warming to his theme, “I’d rather eat beef cooked the Neanderthal way” than beef prepared “in a microwave.”

  I have eaten several “historic” spit-roasted meats cooked by Ivan Day using his seventeenth-century fireplace and all its accoutrements. Both the flavors and textures were out-of-this-world superb. I could never be sure, though, to what extent this reflected the technology of open-fire cookery or whether it really came down to Day’s considerable gastronomic skills. His culinary standards go far beyond those of the average home cook. He candies his own citrus peel and distills his own essences. He frets over seasoning, and every meal that emerges from his kitchen looks like a still-life painting.

  What all Day’s spit-roasted meats had in common was a tender succulence sometimes lacking in oven-roasted meat. A leg of mutton cooked using a vertical bottle-jack emerged on the plate in deeply savory mouthfuls. Renaissance Italian veal was yielding and fragrant with green herbs. Best of all was the Victorian sirloin of beef, after a recipe by Francatelli, chef to Queen Victoria, which I learned how to make in one of Ivan’s courses. First, we larded the raw sirloin. This consisted of sewing strips of cured pork fat into the meat using giant “larding needles,” the idea being that it would be basted, deliciously, from within. Then, we marinated it in olive oil, shallots, lemon, and herbs—surprisingly light, Italianate flavors. Finally, we put it on a vast spit and secured it in place before the fire with metal clamps called “holdfasts.” The beef was served—in high Victorian style—decorated with hatelets: skewers filled with an opulent string of truffles and prawns. The beef itself had a caramel crust from Ivan’s diligent basting; the inside melted on the fork like butter. Those of us taking the course exchanged glances around the table. So this was why there was such a fuss about the roast beef of England. These superb results were the product of a startling and taxing range of work and equipment, which underwent centuries of refinements.

  First of all, there was the fire itself. We do not know how the first fires were made, whether by deliberately striking pyrite rock against flint or lighting a branch opportunistically from a brush fire. It is certain, however, that the early domestication of fire was an anxious business: getting the fire, keeping it going, and containing it were all liable to cause problems. Paleolithic hearths (from 200,000 to 40,000 years ago) consisted of a few stones arranged in a circle to hold the fire in. At Klasies River Cave in South Africa, there are 125,000-year-old remnants of cave-dwelling humans, who seem to have eaten antelope and shellfish, seals and penguins, roasted in purpose-built stone hearths.

  Once set up, a fire needs to be fueled. In places with scarce firewood, a fire might be fed with anything from turf and peat to animal dung and bone. Some hunter-gatherer tribes carried fir
e with them, because once the fire was out, there was no guarantee it could ever be started again. The Greeks and Romans built inextinguishable public hearths in honor of Hestia/Vesta, goddess of the hearth. Even in a domestic setting, the basic hearth fire was not lightly put out.

  When we hear of an “eternal flame,” we picture a neat orange fire, like that in the Olympic torch, being passed from hand to hand. But in the average premodern hut—whether Roman or Irish, Mesopotamian, or Anglo-Saxon—the eternal hearth came at the cost of marinating yourself in a foul medley of smoke and fumes. The heat in a modern professional kitchen is bad enough; I have visited the kitchens of various London restaurants for a few minutes at a time and emerged, drenched with sweat, pitying the poor commis chef who has to complete a ten-hour shift in such conditions. And these are shiny modern kitchens with all the ventilators and smoke extractors that “health and safety” require. How bad must it have been in a small ancient kitchen with zero ventilation? Near unbearable.

  In the mid-twentieth century, the classicist Louisa Rayner spent some time in a wattle-and-daub earth-floored cottage in the former Yugoslavia, the kind of accommodation the great bulk of humanity lived in before the arrival of such things as basic ventilation, electric lights, and modern plumbing. Rayner suggested that this cottage was not unlike a Greek cottage from the Homeric era. The main room had no windows or chimney, only a hole in the roof for the smoke to escape. The walls were soot-black from the fire. The inner timbers were pickled all over from smoke.