Consider the Fork

by Bee Wilson

  Chefs today are measuring things no one ever thought to measure before, such as the exact water content a potato needs to make the ideal French fry. Heston Blumenthal, visionary chef of The Fat Duck in Britain, prides himself on his Triple-Cooked Chips (cooked once in water, then in a sous-vide bath, finally in groundnut oil—I have tasted them only once and they were indeed superbly crisp). He has found that the perfect “consistently crunchy” French fry can only be made from a potato with a dry-matter content of around 22.5 percent. “The problem,” Blumenthal has noted, “is that there is no easy way to look at a potato and know how much water it contains.” The answer is a special “dry-matter” scale that determines the water content of a small sample of raw potato by weighing it and cooking it simultaneously. It then finds the difference in weight between the cooked potato and the raw potato, in other words, how much water has evaporated.

  Measures such as these undoubtedly help professional chefs achieve dependable results. Blumenthal knows that his Triple-Cooked Chips will always be as near the same as possible. I’m not so sure whether ultraprecision is what the average home cook is looking for, though. I glance through a Heston Blumenthal recipe for “sand,” part of a recipe for something he calls “Sound of the Sea.” It calls for 10 g grapeseed oil, 20 g shirasu (baby eels or anchovies), 2 g blue shimmer powder, 3.5 g brown carbonized vegetable powder, and 140 g “reserved miso oil,” along with various other baffling things. Having measured these peculiar ingredients on our laboratory scales, we are supposed to saute and grind them until they become a kind of savory sand. The whole recipe is deeply intimidating.

  Even if I possessed brown carbonized vegetable powder—and alas, I have rummaged in my kitchen cupboards in vain—I have neither the technology nor the patience to weigh out 3.5 grams of the stuff. This is cooking as pure mathematics: everything is quantified; nothing is left to chance; there is no room for variation or judgment. For restaurant chefs who want to produce the same—often spectacular—results time and time again, Blumenthal’s way makes sense. Blumenthal is the master of food as theater, and the performance only works when everything is just so. The imperatives of home cooking are different. We’d rather have flexibility than absolute control.

  What if I wanted to substitute something else for the blue shimmer powder (or preferably, leave it out altogether)? What if my shirasu taste saltier than Blumenthal’s? Pointless to ask. I have nothing to compare this recipe with, and therefore no way of knowing how it could be tweaked. Such hypermeasuring makes the average cook feel lost in a sea of numbers. Blumenthal’s measures may be accurate, precise, and consistent, but no one could accuse them of being easy. Nor are they meant to be. They are aimed at chefs like him whose ambition is to push food in extraordinary new directions.

  Compare and contrast with Fannie Farmer’s trusty old cup measures. For all their faults—and, as we have seen, they are many—they do have one huge virtue. For cooks who have learned to cook using cups, they bestow a feeling of calm competence. They may not score highly on precision or consistency, but they are wonderfully easy. When asked to measure three level cups of flour, you think: yes, I can do this. Scoop and sweep, scoop and sweep; one, two, three. To measure with cups requires such little expertise, it can be done by a child who has only just learned to count and in a kitchen with the most minimal equipment. Because Fannie Farmer came so late to cooking, she remembered what it felt like to be perplexed in the kitchen. She herself had found reassurance in her level cup measures and warmly passed this reassurance on to her readers. Blumenthal’s recipes seek to amaze, to confound, even to disgust. Farmer hoped her directions would “make many an eye twinkle.” For the thousands who bought her book, reading Fannie Farmer was like having a friendly but firm red-haired woman holding your hand as you cooked, whispering: follow me and it will work.

  Fannie Farmer’s cup measures may not have bestowed the accuracy they promised. But she understood something every bit as important: the technology of measuring in the kitchen needs to be tailored to the person doing the measuring. Most chefs and food writers have been cooking for so long, they forget what it feels like to be thrown into a panic by the simplest of recipes.

  In 2011, Tilda, a leading rice brand, conducted a UK focus group of around 500 people looking at factors inhibiting the British public from buying rice. They found that many households possessed no kitchen scales. Even when they did, there was a widespread terror of getting the measuring wrong: of overestimating the portion size or cooking the rice for too long. For many, the focus group revealed, this terror was enough to stop them from buying even the smallest half-kilo bag of rice in the supermarket: the risk of failure was too high. This stood in stark contrast to customers in Asian communities in Britain, who buy their Basmati in 20-kilo sacks from the Cash and Carry and cook it with effortless confidence, using a thumb to measure the correct quantity of water every time, just like their mothers and grandmothers before them. They hold a thumb on the base of the pot and measure rinsed rice up to the thumb joint, then rest the tip of the thumb on the rice and pour in water until it again reaches the joint. It is then easy to cook perfect fluffy rice by the absorption method. The technology being used here is sheer know-how. We all have thumbs; what we lack is the confidence to use them.

  Lack of confidence also explains the existence of the most curious measuring spoon I have ever seen. Instead of tablespoons and teaspoons, it has: a dash, a pinch, a smidgen, and a drop. Those of us who feel reasonably relaxed at the stove might have assumed that you can’t assign an exact quantity to a smidgen. We would be wrong. All of these terms now have technical definitions (as of the early 2000s, when this type of measuring spoon first started being manufactured). A dash = ⅛ teaspoon (0.625ml). A pinch = teaspoon (0.313ml). A smidgen = teaspoon (0.156ml). A drop = teaspoon (0.069ml). Clearly, there is market out there for people who will not rest easy unless they can measure out every pinch of salt. Even if from the point of view of an experienced cook, the idea of measuring a single drop seems to be overkill.

  Attitudes to measuring in the kitchen tend to be polarized. On the one hand, there are creative spirits who claim that they never weigh or measure anything. If you ask for a recipe from such a person, you will be told airily, “Oh, I never look at a cookbook”; if they do consult recipes, they happily play fast and loose with quantities. Every meal they cook is pure invention, pure instinct: cooking is an art and cannot be reduced to numbers. At the opposite end of the spectrum are those who want to assign an exact figure to everything. They view recipes as strict formulas, not to be tampered with. If a recipe calls for 325 ml double cream and a carton contains only 300 ml, then such people will anxiously buy a second carton to make up the shortfall. If a recipe says tarragon, they wouldn’t dream of using chervil instead. People in this second group are more likely to think that what they are doing is scientific, the idea being that the more we can measure and pin cooking down, the more like science it will be.

  Both groups are probably deluding themselves. Artistic cooks do far more measuring than they admit. And cooking-by-numbers cooks are much less scientific than they pretend.

  Cooking by numbers is based on a subtle misunderstanding of the scientific method. The popular view of “science” is one of unswerving formulas and a set of final answers. In this reading, scientific cooking would be able to come up, once and for all, with the definitive formula for, say, bechamel sauce: how many grams of flour, butter, and milk, the exact temperature at which it should cook, the diameter of the pan, the precise number of seconds for which it should simmer and the number of revolutions of your whisk as it cooks: cooking by numbers. The problem with this—apart from the fact that it leaves no room to improvise, which is half the joy of cooking—is that no matter how many factors you succeed in pinning down, more spring up that you haven’t thought to measure or that are beyond your control: where your flour was milled and how old it is, the ambient heat in the kitchen; whether you actually like bechamel.


  Often, with all this focus on numbers, the really important thing gets overlooked. Take seasoning. It is striking how often cooks and chefs who are otherwise wedded to the numbers game do not quantify the salt content in a recipe. Nathan Myhrvold in Modernist Cuisine weighs everything, gram for gram, even water, yet advises that salt is “to taste.” Similarly, Heston Blumenthal measures the dry-matter content in his potatoes but does not measure the salt and pepper in his signature mashed potatoes. This underscores the point that no kitchen formula can ever be definitive.

  The scientific method is far more open-ended than is generally allowed. It is not a dogmatic set of numbers but a process of forming and testing conjectures based on experience using controlled experiments, which then throw up new conjectures. The process of cooking supper every night can certainly be understood in this light. My experience tells me that lemon and Parmesan taste delicious together, particularly in a pasta sauce. This leads me to form the conjecture that lime and Parmesan might go well together, too. I test for this by tossing some lime zest into tagliatelle with olive oil, basil, and parmesan one evening. We eat it. No one asks for second helpings. My provisional conclusion is that: no, lime and Parmesan do not improve one another, but further work needs to be done to eliminate the possibility that the oil was the rogue element.

  Some of the wisest words ever written on the subject of weights and measures in the kitchen appear in The Zuni Café Cookbook by the California chef Judy Rodgers, whose approach to cooking is both very artistic—her signature dish is a bread and chicken salad made from rustic bread torn into variegated pieces—and very precise; she tells you exactly how to season the chicken and (without going so far as to use a pH measure) names the ratios in the tart vinaigrette with which it is dressed. She gently suggests that when professional cooks claim that they “never measure,” it is “frankly, not entirely true”:

  We may not take a tool to measure ingredients, or look at a piece of paper, but we measure with our eyes and weigh with our hands and scroll through memories of prior cooking experiences for the unwritten script for the current one.

  Concrete numbers have their place in the kitchen, Rodgers insists, particularly for the inexperienced. Numbers are “points of reference,” offering “at a minimum, a notion of scale and a sense of the relative scale of different ingredients, temperatures and amounts of time.” The first time you make a dish you may need to follow the numbers fairly closely, which can help to “abbreviate the romantic but lengthy learning process one might characterize as ‘guess, feel, botch, puzzle, try again and try to remember what you did.’” By the second or third time, the numbers are less important because you have started to trust your own senses. After all, Rodgers remarks, you do not need to measure “the exact amount of sugar or milk you add to your coffee or tea.” Numbers, therefore, are crucial, but never the whole story. There is a world outside of measuring in the kitchen. Part of the scientific method is accepting that not everything is within the domain of science.

  I am fond enough of my measuring devices—there’s a quiet contentment in peering at that classic Pyrex measuring cup trying to see if stock for a pilaf has reached the 600 ml mark; or watching the dial swing around on a candy thermometer when making fudge; or using a tape measure to verify the diameter of biscotti dough. I even use my iPhone as a kitchen timer. Still, not everything can be reduced to measurements. Many things that matter in the kitchen are beyond measuring: how much you enjoy the company of those you dine with; the satisfaction of using up the last crust of bread before it goes moldy; the way an Italian blood orange tastes in February; the pleasure of cold cucumber soup on a hot evening; the feeling of having a hearty appetite and the means to satisfy it.

  Egg Timer

  WHY EGG TIMERS AND NOT CARROT TIMERS or stew timers? Because there is very little margin of error in achieving the ideal soft-boiled egg—flowing, orange yolk; set but not rubbery white. Also, because the egg is sealed in its shell, there is no way to judge it by eye: hence the long marriage between eggs and timers.

  Timing boiled eggs is almost the only practical occasion in which we still use the medieval technology of the hourglass. In this digital age, most of us have on our person several items—a watch, a mobile phone—that could time a soft-boiled egg more accurately. If hourglass egg timers endure, it is surely because of their symbolic value: to watch the sands of time running out is still a powerful thing.

  Recently, the entire logic of using kitchen timers has been challenged. We use timers to test for oneness. But timers can only test doneness at one remove. Time alone becomes a stand-in for temperature plus time. A soft-boiled egg becomes known as a “three-minute egg,” but the minutes are only an approximation for what is going on inside the egg. Experiments by food scientists have found that the perfect milky-soft boiled egg is achieved somewhere between 141.8°F and 152.6°F. But how can we know when the egg has reached this temperature? We are back at the problem of the shell.

  In the mid-1990s, a Los Angeles firm (Burton Plastics) launched Egg-Per’fect, an egg-shaped piece of plastic that goes into the water along with the eggs. Instead of measuring time, it measures temperature. There are lines on the plastic for different types of boiled egg: soft, medium, and hard. As the eggs boil, the Egg-Per’fect slowly transforms in color from red to black. The main drawback—apart from a very faint plastic odor—is its silence. You have to stand over it like a hawk. To make the Egg-Per’fect truly perfect, it would have a little sound sensor that shouted as it boiled—Soft! Medium-Soft! Hard!—leaving you free to read your newspaper and sip your coffee, while calmly awaiting the arrival of your eggs.

  5

  GRIND

  These cooks, how they stamp and strain and grind!

  GEOFFREY CHAUCER, “The Pardoner’s Tale”

  MOST WEEKENDS, WE MAKE PANCAKES. IT TAKES A few swigs of coffee to rouse myself enough to locate the flour, milk, eggs, and butter, but after that, it’s easy. Pour the ingredients into a pitcher. Blitz with handheld blender for a few seconds until lump free. That’s it. The batter is ready for pouring into a hot pan. Within minutes, a pile of lacy golden-brown crepes have emerged with scarcely more effort than pouring out a bowl of Corn Flakes.To make pancakes in the Middle Ages was not so quite so easy. In the fourteenth-century advice book Le Ménagier de Paris (published 1393), there is a pancake recipe. It goes like this. First, get a quart-sized copper pan and melt a large quantity of salted butter. Then take eggs, some “warm white wine” (this takes the place of our milk) and “the fairest wheaten flour” and beat it all together “long enough to weary one person or two.” Only then is the batter done.

  There is a startling nonchalance in this “one person or two.” It conjures up a kitchen in which there is a standing army of servants, arrayed like so many utensils. When one underling is worn out, another steps forward. Suddenly we see that the recipe is not at all like one of ours, in which the reader is the person expected to do the work. Le Ménagier de Paris—which roughly translates as “The Housewife of Paris”—was written in the voice of an elderly husband to a wealthy young wife, teaching her the proper way to behave. To prove her worth, a French medieval wife of this class needed to ensure that dishes were well made. But not to the extent of dirtying her own hands. She has an entire team of human eggbeaters at her disposal. As the pancakes are being fried, “all the time” another person needs to carry on “moving and beating the paste unceasingly.”

  This incessant beating reflects the intense urge that wealthy palates once had toward smoothness. This desire has largely abated, now that pappy white bread and spongy hamburgers are among the cheapest foods. On a fine spring day in 2011, I sat in one of the best Italian restaurants in Britain, where the main courses cost around $50. Well-heeled families were eating Sunday lunch. Many of the diners were enjoying chewy rectangles of bruschetta, anointed with olive oil and coarse salt. There were platters of crunchy green vegetables, minimally prepared. A pork chop came on a massive bone, proving a ch
allenge even for a steak knife. Linguini with crab and chili was genuinely al dente: you felt the hard center of each strand on your teeth. Until the silky gelato for dessert, nothing was smooth; the textures were all rustic, variegated, challenging. This was not a sign of careless cooking: in the age of the food processor, it takes great conscious effort to produce a meal like this.

  Until modern times, by contrast, the meals that took the most effort to make were highly processed. Popes and kings, emperors and aristocrats did not want too much to chew on. They expected fine pastes to be pounded for their pleasure in mortars with pestles. In wealthy kitchens, pastries and pastas were rolled out so fine you could look through them (by implication so fine that someone’s arms ached). Sauces were strained and strained again through ever-finer sieves and cloths. Flour was “bolted” through “crees” and linen. Nuts were ground as fine as dust and made into biscuits with super-refined sugar. Now we use the word “refined” to mean rich or posh, but originally refining referred to the degree to which a food was processed. Refined food was what refined people ate.

  It would be going too far to say that the only appeal of this style of food was to cause pain to the servants who made it. There were many motivations. Soft mixtures were potentially desirable in any era before modern dentistry. Medieval cooks made “mortrews,” mortar-pounded concoctions of white boiled meats and almonds that were ideal for those with bad teeth. Moreover, the mingling together of many pounded ingredients corresponded to medieval ideas about temperament and balance. Later, in Renaissance times, processing became a kind of alchemy: a desire to distill things down and down and down, until all you were left with was the very soul or inner kernel of a particular foodstuff.