Consider the Fork

by Bee Wilson

  Cooking in such a confined dwelling can hardly have been the kind of pleasurable activity it is for so many of us now. Every attempt to poke the dull fire or prod the half-cooked meat only adds to the smoke. You must give up hope of keeping a steady flame under the meat and open a door. No wonder many ancient Greek cooks seem to have preferred to use a portable brazier, a clay cylinder that could be moved around into any room of the house, and far more easily controlled.

  Things were slightly better in the kitchens of the rich in medieval England. At least there were stone floors instead of beaten earth, and the vast high ceilings dissipated some of the smoke. Even so, while churning out the roasted meats the lords expected, the great halls of these dwellings were often choking with fumes. If cooks needed to do any additional cooking besides roasting, multiple fires needed to be built, dotted around the kitchen floor: there might be a stewing fire, a boiling fire, and a roasting fire, all ablaze, throwing off sparks and soot. In such houses, cooks were often expected to roast enough meat for fifty at a time. The danger and unpredictability of these open hearths can be gauged from the fact that English kitchens were often built as separate buildings, joined onto the hall by a covered passageway. That way, if one kitchen burned down, another could be built without disrupting the main house.

  There was no question of living without a hearth, however, for without it there was no winter warmth and no roast meat. To an English patriot, the thought of a vast haunch of venison or a baron of beef slowly rotating before a fire is splendid. In the reign of Elizabeth I, someone noted that “English cooks, in comparison with other nations, are most commended for roasted meat.” Englishmen prided themselves on their red-blooded tastes. “Beef and liberty!” was the cry in the eighteenth century. “When England discards Roast Beef, we may fairly conclude that the nation is about to change its manly and national character,” wrote Dr. Hunter of York in 1806. To the French, we are still “les Rosbifs.”

  But the English predilection for roast beef (which in any case was largely limited to the wealthy) was not, at root, a question of taste; it was a question of resources. English cooks chose to roast great carcasses by the heat of great fires in part because—in contrast to other nations—the English were abundantly well-endowed with firewood. From the middle ages up to the nineteenth century, London was far richer in fuel than Paris, a circumstance that made the entire food supply of the English more abundant. The French may have wished that they were “Rosbifs,” too. Bread, beer, and roast meat were all greedy consumers of firewood; it has been calculated that simply keeping up with London’s appetite for bread and beer would have taken around 30,000 tons of firewood in the year 1300, but this was no problem because there was plenty of well-stocked—and largely renewable—woodland in the surrounding counties. Still more fuel was needed to warm private homes and roast meat. After the Black Death, the cost of firewood increased dramatically in Britain, but cheap coal took its place, to keep those roasting fires roaring.

  The difference with China is stark. It is true that the Chinese have their own tradition of roast meats—the windows of every Chinatown are filled with glossy whole roast ducks and racks of roast pork ribs. But wok frying remains the basic Chinese cooking technique, a cuisine born of fuel poverty Every meal had to be founded on frugal calculations about how to extract the maximum taste from the minimum input of energy. “Les Rosbifs” had no such worries. The roast beef of England reflected a densely wooded landscape, and the fact that there was plenty of grass for grazing animals. The English could afford to cook entire beasts beside the heat of a fierce fire, throwing on as many logs as it took, until the meat was done to perfection. In the short run, this was a lavish way to eat; and a delicious way, if Ivan Day’s re-creations are anything to go by. In the long run, it almost certainly limited the nation’s cooking skills. Necessity is the mother of invention, and more restricted amounts of firewood might have forced the English into a more creative and varied cuisine.

  Having enough wood didn’t mean that traditional English roasting was a haphazard business. Far from it. To roast well, you needed to know which meats needed to be roasted in a gentle flame and which needed unrestricted blasting heat, such as swans. Judging from illuminated manuscripts, the know-how of spit-roasting went back at least as far as Anglo-Saxon times. Cooks needed to know how to baste the meat, in butter or oil, and how to dredge it, in flour or breadcrumbs for a crispier outside, which meant using a muffi-neer, a little metal shaker that resemble the nutmeg and chocolate shakers in coffee shops today A Swedish visitor who came to England in the eighteenth century noted that “Englishmen understand almost better than any other people the art of properly roasting a joint.” But once the technology was superseded, English cooks were left with an entire group of skills that couldn’t easily be transferred to other cooking methods.

  The key skill every English cook needed was this: knowledge of how to control a large fire, stoking it up or letting it die down, depending on the dish. A good cook knew the temperament of fire, reading patterns in the flame. To control a fire, you control the draft: by pulling air into the fire, you make the heat more intense. When Day wants to raise the temperature, he pokes it vigorously with a poker. “It will now absolutely soar!” he cries. Sure enough, ten minutes later, it is painful to go anywhere near the hearth. You feel your cheeks fry within seconds.

  Cooking supper over a gentle gas flame, you can get close enough to stir and prod. Sometimes I stand with my nose over a pan, inhaling the perfume of garlic and thyme in a sauce for the sheer pleasure of it. With a roasting fire, the cooks must have kept more of a distance from the food, approaching the meat only when strictly necessary: to baste or dredge the meat or to change its position in relation to the fire. The utensils of open-fire cookery tended to be extremely long-handled: elongated basting spoons and flesh-forks, skimmers and ladles, all of which gave cooks a few extra inches of distance from the blaze. One of these long-handled instruments was the salamander, a utensil named after a mythical dragon that was supposed to be able to withstand great heat. It consisted of an elongated handle with a cast-iron paddle-shaped head. The head of the salamander was held in the fire until the iron glowed red hot, then maneuverd over a dish of food—mostly pastries, sugary creams, or dishes topped with cheese—to broil it. In the nineteenth century, this is the technique that gave crème brûlée its burned top (no need for a blowtorch). Ivan Day uses his salamander to give a crispy topping to a dish of tomatoes stuffed with breadcrumbs. He holds it a few inches above the tomatoes, and almost at once they start to bubble and brown. You can’t do that with a gas cooktop.

  Another critical aspect of open-fire management for a roast was getting the position of the food just right. Many people think that spit-roasting meant roasting over the fire, but the meat cooked a good distance to the side of the fire, only getting moved close up right at the end to brown it. This is a technique similar to a modern Argentine asado, a barbecue method that slow-roasts a whole animal at an angle several feet from an outdoor charcoal fire pit, until the meat is succulent and smoky A skilled roaster knew that getting the distance right was critical for moderating the heat accumulation on the surface of the meat. Modern science has confirmed it. Recent experiments have shown that the heat intensity from a roasting fire varies by the inverse square of the distance of the meat being roasted. Each inch that you move a piece of beef nearer to the fire doesn’t just make it a bit hotter; it makes it a lot hotter. With a big roast, the “sweet spot,” or optimum position for roasting without charring, will be as much as three feet from the fire.

  Apart from the complexity of fire, an additional problem with spit-roasting was keeping the food firmly gripped on the spit. When you stick a spit through something and turn it around, the spit has a tendency to spin while the meat stays still. Various strategies addressed this. One was to put skewer holes in the spit: the joint could be speared in place with flat skewers. Another solution was the aforementioned “holdfast,” a kind of
hook to grip the meat. Once the food was firmly in place, there was one more challenge facing the roaster, and it was the trickiest by far: how to keep a hulking piece of meat in perpetual motion for the hours it needed to cook.

  Of all the thankless, soul-destroying jobs in a rich medieval British kitchen—scullion, washpot, drudge—there can have been few worse than that of the turnspit or turnbroach, the person (usually a boy) charged with rotating the roasting spits. “In olden times,” wrote the great biographer John Aubrey, “the poor boys did turn the spits, and licked the dripping pans.”

  By the reign of Henry VIII, the king’s household had whole battalions of turnspits, charring their faces and tiring their arms to satisfy the royal appetite for roast capons and ducks, venison and beef, crammed in cubbyholes to the side of the fireplace. The boys must have been near-roasted themselves as they labored to roast the meats. Until the year 1530, the kitchen staff at Hampton Court worked either naked or in scanty, grimy garments. Henry VIII addressed the situation, not by relieving the turnspits of their duties, but by providing the master cooks with a clothing allowance, with which to keep the junior staff decently clothed, and therefore even hotter. Turnspits were employed in lesser households, too. In 1666, the lawyers of the Middle Temple in London were making use of one “turnbroach” alongside two scullions, a head cook, and an under cook. To be a turnspit was deemed suitable work for a child well into the eighteenth century. John Macdonald (b. 1741), a Scottish highlander, was a famous footman who wrote memoirs of his experiences in service. An orphan, Macdonald had been sacked from a previous job rocking a baby’s cradle and next found work in a gentleman’s house turning the spit. He was aged just five.

  But by that time, turnspit boys like Macdonald were something of a throwback. Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Britain, their work had largely been taken over by animals. In a 1576 book on English dogs, a “turnspit” was defined as “a certain dog in kitchen service.” The dogs were bred specially to have short legs and long bodies. Stuck in a wheel around 2.5 feet in diameter, suspended high up against a wall near the fireplace, they were forced to trundle around and around. The treadmill was connected to the spit via a pulley.

  Some cooks preferred to use geese instead of dogs. In the 1690s, it was written that geese were better at turning spits than dogs because they kept going for longer at the treadmill, sometimes as long as twelve hours. There were signs that dogs were too intelligent for the job. Thomas Somerville, who witnessed the use of dog wheels during a childhood in eighteenth-century Scotland, recalled that the dogs “used to hide themselves or run away when they observed indications that there was to be a roast for dinner.”

  The turnspit breed is no longer with us. It would be nice to think that they died out because of a sudden fit of conscience on the part of their owners. But history doesn’t usually work like this. Dog wheels were still being used in American restaurant kitchens well into the nineteenth century. Henry Bergh, an early animal rights lobbyist, campaigned against using dog wheels to roast meats (along with other abuses of animals, such as bear baiting). The fuss Bergh made about turnspit dogs did finally attach some shame to the practice, but it also had unintended consequences. When Bergh paid surprise visits to kitchens to check for the presence of dog wheels, he several times found that the dogs had been replaced at the fire by young black children.

  In the end, it was not kindness that ended the era of the turnspit dog but mechanization. From the sixteenth century onward, inventors devised numerous mechanical jacks to rotate the spit without the need for anyone—boy, dog, or goose—to do the work. By 1748, Pehr Kalm, a Swedish visitor to England, was praising the windup iron “meat jack” as “a very useful invention, which lightens the labour amongst a people who eat so much meat.” Based on his travels, Kalm claimed that “simply made” weight-driven jacks were to be found “in every house in England.” This was an exaggeration. However, judging from probate inventories—lists of possessions at the time of death—around one-half of all households, not only affluent ones, did possess a windup jack, a strikingly high percentage.

  Still, no wonder. Archaic as they might seem to us, these were highly desirable pieces of kitchen equipment . Mechanical jacks really were brilliant devices, culinary robots that took much of the labor out of spit-roasting. The basic mechanism was this. There was a weight, suspended from a cord, wound around a cylinder. The force of gravity made the weight slowly descend (another name for these little machines was “gravity jacks”). As it did so, the power was transmitted through a series of cogwheels and pulleys to one or more spits. Through the force of the weight dropping, the spit rotated. Some jacks rang a bell when the spit stopped.

  Weight-driven jacks were not the only form of automated spit. From the seventeenth century onward, there were also smoke jacks, which used the updraft of heat from the fire to power a vane, like a weather vane. Fans of the smoke jack liked the fact that it needed no winding up and was cheap. Smoke jacks were only cheap, however, if fuel use was not taken into account. To keep the vane turning in the smoke, grotesque amounts of wood or coal had to be kept burning in the hearth. In 1800, it was calculated that you could use one-thousandth of the fuel needed to make a smoke jack work to power the spit with a small steam engine instead.

  Because spit-roasting was so central to British cooking, much intelligence was lavished on inventing improved methods of turning the spit. Water, steam, and clockwork were all experimented with as ways of keeping a roasting joint in a state of constant—if not quite perpetual—motion. Mechanized spits were the gleaming espresso machines of their day: the single kitchen product on which the most complex engineering was lavished. In a seventeenth-century farmhouse kitchen, the spoons and cauldrons went back to the Romans. The spits and salamanders were medieval. The meat and fire were as old as time. But the weight-jack powering the spit was high-tech. Ivan Day still has a large collection of mechanized spit-jacks. When asked to name his favorite kitchen gadget of all time, he unhesitatingly names his seventeenth-century weight-driven jack, powered with the weight of a small cannon ball. He marvels at its efficiency. “Four hundred years before the microwave and its warning buzzer, my mechanism can tell me [when the food is done] by ringing a bell,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Food Programme. “I’d never use anything else. It works just as well now as it did 300 years ago.”

  In its way, the mechanized jack clearly is a miracle. It saved the pains of boys and dogs. It produces—at least in the hands of a talented cook—stupendously good roast meat, evenly cooked by continuous, steady rotation. It is a joy to watch. Few pieces of kitchenware, ancient or modern, can supply the quiet satisfaction of watching a weight-jack do its job: the speedy whirring of the flywheel, the interlocking cogs and gears, the reliable motion of the spit. On its own terms, it really works.

  But technologies never exist just on their own terms. By the mid-nineteenth century, the mechanized jack was becoming obsolete, not through any fault of its own, but because the entire culture of open-hearth cookery was on the way out. Fire was in the process of being contained, and as a result, the kitchen was about to be transformed.

  More fuel is frequently consumed in a kitchen range to boil a tea-kettle than, with proper management, would be sufficient to cook a dinner for fifty men.“ The author of these words was Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, one of the most skillful scientists ever to apply himself to the question of cooking. Among his many experiments, he set his mind to the problem of why apple pie filling tended to be so mouth-burningly hot.3 Rumford was a great social campaigner, too, and believed he had found the solution to world hunger, by inventing a soup for the poor that could deliver the maximum nutrients for the minimum money One of his other main causes was the wastefulness of roasting fires. In the late eighteenth century, Rumford was appalled by the way the English cooked over an open flame: ”The loss of heat and waste of fuel in these kitchens is incredible.” Rumford did not even rate the food produced by spit-roas
ting very highly. By focusing all their energies on roasting, English cooks had neglected the art of making ”nourishing soups and broths.”

  Rumford’s problem with English hearths was easily summarized: “They are not closed.” From this basic error, “other evils” followed. The kitchen was an uncomfortable environment to work in, as anyone knew who had ever “met the cook coming sweltering out of it.” The heat was excessive, there were drafts of cold air by the chimney, and worst of all, there were “noxious exhalations” from burning charcoal: a constant atmosphere of smokiness. Excessive smoke was not an accident, but inherent to the design of the English kitchen around the year 1800. To make room for all the pots that needed to be fitted over the fire, the range was built very long, which in turn necessitated an “enormously large” and high chimney that squandered much fuel and generated much smoke. Rumford’s solution was his own custom-built closed range, which consumed vastly less fuel, as he had proved when he installed one in the House of Industry (the Workhouse) in Munich.

  In a Rumford range, instead of one large fire, there would be lots of small enclosed ones, to minimize smoke and fuel wastage. Each boiler, kettle, or stewpan in use would be assigned its own “separate closed fireplace,” built from bricks for added insulation and shut up with a door, with a separate canal for “carrying off the smoke into the chimney.” The kitchen would be smokeless and highly efficient, and Rumford claimed the food produced was tastier. He summoned some friends for a taste test of a leg of mutton roasted in a Rumford roaster as against a spit-roasted leg. Everyone preferred the one cooked in the enclosed roaster, relishing the “exquisitely sweet” fat with currant jelly; or so they said.