Consider the Fork

by Bee Wilson

  The cast-iron kitchen range was one of those curious technologies that became an object of consumer desire without offering much real improvement on what came before. It didn’t save labor—quite the opposite, in many cases. Getting a fire started was no easier in a stove than on a hearth, and polishing and cleaning the range was practically a full-time job, whether for a servant or a wife. As late as 1912, a housewife married to a policeman listed her daily duties relating to the range:

  1. Remove fender and fire-irons.

  2. Rake out all the ashes and cinders; first throw in some damp tea-leaves to keep down the dust.

  3. Sift the cinders.

  4. Clean the flues.

  5. Remove all grease from the stove with newspaper.

  6. Polish the steels with bathbrick and paraffin.

  7. Blacklead the iron parts and polish.

  8. Wash the hearthstone and polish it.

  All this work and not a single dish has been prepared; not a rasher of bacon has been fried, not a potato boiled. Unlucky woman. If only she had been born a few years later, she might have been spared it all. She would almost certainly have gotten a gas oven.

  Our domestic lives are all composed of hundreds of small, daily, recurring activities, nowhere more so than in the kitchen. The devices that are truly revolutionary are not the ones that enable us to make entirely new creations—air-drying strawberries or vacuum-cooking rare cuts of venison—but the ones that let us do the things we already do with greater ease, better results, and more pleasure: making family breakfast more speedily for less money and far less trouble, for example. The gas range was a rare breakthrough: a tool offering real progress in the kitchen.

  Compared to a coal range, gas was cleaner, pleasanter, and cheaper: it was estimated that for a middle-class English family, the cost of cooking with gas was around 2-½ pence a day, as against 7 pence to 1 shilling for coal. The real joy of gas, however, was the work it saved. The early cooks who learned to prepare meals using gas in the 1880s went into rhapsodies over how much easier life had become. A simple job such as cooking the morning breakfast took far less “time and attention” than under the old system. Mrs. H. M. Young, who wrote one of the first cookbooks to include a section on gas, noted that “a breakfast for a medium family, say, coffee, chops, steaks or bacon, eggs and toast, may be prepared easily in 15 minutes.”

  As is so often the case, the innovation was initially met with suspicion and resistance. There was a time lag of nearly a century between the first experiments in gas cookery and its adoption by a wider public. The same cooks who toiled in the tropical heat and filth of a coal-fire range feared that gas was a dangerous form of cooking, which would make the food taste and smell disgusting. Although increasingly happy to light their homes with coal gas—London was the first city to be lit by gas, in 1814—people feared they would either be poisoned or die in an explosion if they cooked with it. Servants were said to be scared senseless by gas ovens.

  Perhaps some of the prejudice was justified, insofar as the earliest models of gas oven were badly ventilated and the burners did not always give an even flow of gas, which did indeed result in some gassy-tasting food. But the prejudices continued long after gas cookery had become safe and reliable. Ellen Youl, a working-class housewife from Northampton, acquired a gas stove at the end of the nineteenth century. Ellen’s husband reacted with horror.

  He thought the gas contained poison and refused to eat anything cooked by it. Ellen, however, would not get rid of her new laboursaving contrivance. She cooked his dinner every day in the gas stove, transferring it to the open fire a few minutes before he returned from work.

  The very first experiments in gas cooking had an element of scientific showmanship, as if to highlight the novelty. The first commercial gas cooking apparatus sold in Britain appeared in 1824, produced by the Aetna Ironworks. It looked a bit like a horizontal squash racket, fashioned from gunmetal and pierced with holes, through which the gas jets flowed, creating open flames. There was no surrounding oven or cooktop: you just placed it under whatever you wanted to cook to create a heat source, like a Bunsen burner. It would be another half a century before gas cooking became widespread, despite the attempts of Alexis Soyer, the Victorian celebrity chef, who marketed a very expensive and fancy gas stove called the Phidomageireion that boasted the impossibility of “explosion ever taking place.” This didn’t entirely reassure. Many people must have shared the opinion of Thomas Webster (author of the Domestic Encyclopedia ) in 1844 that gas cookery was simply “an elegant culinary toy,” an addition to the “usual means of cooking” rather than a replacement for it.

  It was only in the 1880s that manufacturers—notably, William Sugg, whose family cornered the market in gas stoves for some time—finally started producing equipment accessible enough to convert the staunchest coal-range user. Sugg gas ranges looked remarkably like coal ranges, and they came with the same type of fanciful names: the Westminster, the Cordon Bleu, the Parisienne. Reassuringly, for lovers of an old English roast, meat cooked in the oven was still suspended over a dripping pan, reminiscent of an old open fire. The Sugg company came up with a good solution to quell the fear of explosions, fitting all the burners with flash lights to light them with the turn of a knob, avoiding the need for matches.

  The 1880s also saw the spread of the penny-in-the-slot gas meter, which made gas cookery affordable for all but the very poorest in areas with gas supplies. Gas companies installed the meters free of charge and also rented out ovens for a modest quarterly cost. Subscriptions increased rapidly. In 1884, the Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Gateshead Gas Company rented out just ninety-five gas stoves; by 1920, the number had increased to 16,110. By 1901, one in three British households had a gas stove; by 1939, on the brink of World War II, three-fourths of households cooked with gas. In other words, the majority of people were finally liberated from what had been one of the defining activities of human life, the business of starting and maintaining a fire.

  By this point, gas ovens had a challenge in the form of electricity. Thomas Edison first created a successful light bulb in 1879, but electric cooking was much slower to take off, hampered by the expense of early electric stoves and the limited availability of an electricity supply. The Science Museum in London has in its collection the earliest surviving electric oven, consisting of a cookie tin joined to a large light bulb with some coils of wire. It does not look very promising. In 1890, the General Electric Company started selling an electric cooking device, claiming it could boil a pint of water in twelve minutes—which only serves to bring home just how slow much cooking was in the era of coal fires.

  Electric cooking only became normal—both in Europe and the States—in the late 1920s, as the price of electric cookers decreased and their efficiency improved. Early electric ovens took ages to preheat—as much as thirty-five minutes in 1914—and the heating elements had a tendency to burn out. And they were expensive both to buy and to run. An average family might buy an electric kettle or toaster but had little incentive to upgrade a gas oven to an electric one. The electric refrigerator performed functions that simply did not exist before. The electric oven was less revolutionary (its only real advantage before the invention of inbuilt safety devices to cut off unlit gas was that you couldn’t asphyxiate yourself in one). Its great benefit—of providing cooking heat that could be switched on and off at will—had already been achieved by the wonders of gas. By 1948, 86 percent of households in Britain used electricity in some form. But only 19 percent owned an electric stove.

  Now, like many, I cook using a combination of gas and electric. My oven is an electric convection type (using a small fan to circulate air better) with a separate grilling oven on top. It does the job OK. I put in flat cake mixture; it comes out risen. It roasts potatoes evenly enough, and I can peer through the glass door to make sure nothing is scorching. But I feel nothing like the same affection for it that I feel when cooking at my gas cooktop, which offers all the benefits of fire an
d none of the drawbacks. The few times I have cooked on an electric induction cooktop, it has driven me to despair: the flat surface, an invitation to chubby little fingers to burn themselves. One minute it is stone cold, then suddenly and seemingly without warning it is red hot (though admittedly I haven’t used the very latest generation of induction cooktops, which are currently being trumpeted as the last word in efficient heat). Gas does my bidding. When I hear that click-click-click, waiting for the flame to light, I know good things will happen. In 2008, the Chinese food writer Ching-He Huang offered some sound advice on wok cookery to people who did not have a gas cooktop: “Invest in a new stove!”

  A part from the original invention of cooking, gas-powered heat was the single greatest improvement ever to occur in kitchen technology. It liberated millions from the pollution, discomfort, and sheer time-wasting of looking after a fire. A further step away from the open hearth came with the microwave oven, though this time the benefits—both culinary and social—were less straightforward. Today, with new markets in China just opening up, global microwave sales stand at around 50 million a year. In many small city kitchens the world over, a microwave is the major way of applying heat to food. Cooks clearly do a lot of microwave cooking. Yet it remains a controversial tool that has never inspired the love we once felt for fire.

  The microwave is not always given enough credit for the many things it does exceptionally well. It can cook fish so that it stays moist and make old-fashioned steamed puddings in minutes. It is a nifty device for caramelizing sugar with minimal mess and for gently melting dark chocolate without it seizing up. It cooks perfect fluffy Basmati rice effortlessly. The attraction of microwaves for fat molecules makes it the ideal way to de-fat ducks and spare ribs before roasting, as Barbara Kafka notes in her 1987 opus, Microwave Gourmet , the most persuasive case ever made for the microwave as an instrument of pleasure.

  Yet the microwave is just as likely to inspire thoughts of panic as pleasure. These “fireless ovens,” as they were initially called, seemed baffling objects when they were first sold in the 1950s, and many cooks remain baffled and alarmed by them today. The invention came in 1945 from Percy Spencer of the Raytheon Company, an engineer who was working on military radar systems, trying to improve the magnetron, a vacuum tube for generating microwaves. Various mythical stories are told of the moment when Spencer first noticed that the magnetron generated enough heat to cook. In one version, he was leaning against an open waveguard—the tube through which waves travel—when he noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. Others say he stared, amazed, as an egg exploded and cooked itself; or that he left his lunchtime sandwich on the magnetron and returned to find it cooked. The team of engineers who worked alongside Spencer later said that the truth was less dramatic: it took a series of methodical observations by several people rather than one man’s eureka moment to hatch the microwave oven. However it happened, it took a huge leap of imagination on the part of Spencer and his team to think that the magnetron, this vast metal cylinder, could be used not in the field of war but in a kitchen. The QK707 magnetron used in very early models weighed a colossal 26.5 pounds, as against the 1.5 pounds of a standard modern microwave. Spencer showed still more imagination in realizing immediately what would be one of the microwave’s most popular uses: making popcorn. An illustration on Spencer’s second microwave patent showed how an entire ear of husked corn could be seasoned with butter and salt, placed in a waxed paper bag and turned into popcorn in just “20 to 45 seconds.” In 1945, this seemed highly unlikely; and indeed it would be another two decades before the domestic microwave oven was a mainstream proposition (sales only took off in 1967, when manufacturers managed to get the price of an oven below $500).

  Many consumers still find the microwave an unlikely way to cook. It seems a step too far away from fire to be anything good. For a long time it was feared on health grounds. It is true that older models sometimes leaked more than 10 mW/cm2 of radiation, compared to the new, extremely stringent standards of 1 mW/cm2. But in either case, it was vastly less “radiation” than you would be exposed to simply by standing around two feet from a fireplace (50 mW/cm2). Based on all the evidence to date, the microwave is innocent of health hazards, beyond the dangers of cooking with it, such as small objects exploding in “hot spots.” You can avoid most of these just by reading the instruction manual.

  Lying behind the periodic microwave health scares is a more fundamental suspicion of the device as a method of cooking. In 1998, a Mintel market report on microwaves in the UK found that 10 percent of consumers doggedly insisted that they would “never buy a microwave oven.” Until very recently, I was part of that 10 percent. I was age thirty-six before I acquired my first one, having been brought up to believe that there was something weird about cooking “from the inside out.” In my family, we viewed the microwave as only slightly less malign than nuclear bombs. How could “zapping” food possibly result in anything good?

  Microwave cooking seems inexplicable in a way that other cooking methods do not. This is unfair. Microwaving does not in fact cook from the inside out as I’d always been told. There is nothing paranormal about it. Microwaved food obeys the same laws of physics as a spit roast. Microwaves travel quickly, but they only penetrate food by around 4 to 5 cm (which is why small pieces cook best in a microwave). Fat, sugar, and water molecules in the food attract the microwaves, causing them to jump around very fast. These vibrations produce heat within the food. Beyond 4 to 5 cm, the heat spreads by conduction to the rest of the food—just as it would in a frying pan. Unlike in a frying pan, where food develops a lovely golden crust, microwaved food does not brown (though some models have browning functions to compensate).

  You cannot roast in a microwave, nor make bread. But no cooking tool can do everything, no matter what the manufacturers may say. It is no more of an argument against the microwave to say it can’t roast than to say of a bread oven that it’s too hot for making custard. The real drawback of the microwave is not with the device itself but with how it is used. The microwave had the misfortune to be first marketed in the era of postwar convenience food. “Reheating” rather than cooking food is the most common use of the microwave, according to a 1989 UK market report: 84 percent of households used it for reheating precooked food, whereas 34 percent used it for all cooking. “I don’t actually cook with it,” said one focus group participant, “just warm things up.” In most kitchens, the microwave is not used as a form of cooking, but as a way of avoiding cooking, by slinging a frozen precooked meal in and waiting mindlessly for the beep. The microwave provided a way to eat hot food without the sociability of sitting around a family table. Most microwaves are not big enough to cook for more than one or two at once.

  Is it the end of social life as we know it? Historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto excoriates the microwave as a device “with the power to change society” in a malign way, by returning us to “a pre-social phase of evolution.” It is as if we never discovered fire. Throughout history, we have sought to enclose and control fire, this focus of our social lives. We tamed it with rock hearths; we built great halls around it; we enclosed it in metal grates; we shut it off in cast-iron ranges; we submitted it to our will with the gas oven. Finally, we found a way of cooking without it in the microwave.

  There are signs that we miss fire and regret its absence from our lives. The enthusiasm with which amateur cooks whip out their barbecues at the first hint of sun, singeing sausages over the fire, implies that perhaps our cooking has lost its focus. No one sits around a microwave telling stories deep into the night. Its angular glass frontage cannot warm our hands or our hearts. Perhaps all is not lost, however. The process of cooking has a power to draw people together even when it does not follow the conventional old patterns. Those who believe that a microwave cannot be a focus for a home like the old hearth have never seen a group of children, huddled together in silent wonder, waiting for a bag of microwave popcorn to finish popping, like hun
ter-gatherers around the flame.

  Toaster

  MAKING TOAST IS SATISFYING. YOU COULD say that’s because it’s such a comforting substance—the crispness, the heavenly aroma as yellow butter slowly melts into the crevices. But the satisfaction is also mechanical and childish: fitting the slices in the slots, setting the timer, and waiting for a ping or a pop.

  For something so basic, the electric toaster arrived late. From the 1890s, gadget-crazy late Victorians could in theory use electricity to boil kettles and fry eggs, yet for toast they still relied on the toasting forks and gridirons of open-hearth cookery. These were variations on the theme of prongs and baskets for holding bread (or morsels of cheese and meat) before the flame. Toasting, when you think about it, is really roasting: applying dry radiant heat to something until the surface browns.

  Before the electric toaster could be invented, it was necessary to find a durable metal filament strong enough to withstand roasting heats without fusing. That came in 1905 when Albert Marsh discovered Nichrome, a nickel-chromium alloy with low conductivity. Then, the US market became flooded with electric toasters. There were Pinchers, Swingers, Flatbeds, Droppers, Tippers, Perchers, and Floppers: the names refer to different manual techniques for expelling the toast.

  The toaster as we know it was the invention of Charles Strite, a mechanic from Minnesota fed up with the burned cafeteria toast at work. In 1921, Strite was granted a patent for a toaster with vertical pop-up springs and a variable timer. Here was something new: a toaster that could be left to do the job itself. “You do not have to Watch it—The Toast can’t Burn,” insisted an ad for Strite’s Toastmaster. If only. It’s still possible, alas, to make burned toast in a pop-up toaster.