Consider the Fork

by Bee Wilson

  There was similar excitement in Britain, where another version of Verdun’s invention was marketed under the Magimix brand, also in 1973. A writer from the London Times described how it revolutionized the shredding of cucumbers and carrots and made it possible to cater for an entire wedding party and still have time left over to get ready before the guests arrived.

  By 1976, the cost of the Cuisinart in the States had actually gone up to $190, but even at this price, hardware stores could not always get enough stock to meet demand. At this time, Shirley Collins was the proprietor of Sur la Table (founded 1971), which is now the second-largest US cookware retailer after Williams-Sonoma, but was then a single shop in the Pike Place Farmers Market in Seattle. A small coffee shop called Starbucks had opened just down the way. Pike Place Market sold the best fresh produce of the Seattle area; berries in the autumn, Blue Lake string beans in the summer. Collins would tailor her goods to fit the seasonal calendar. When fat green stalks of asparagus arrived in the spring, she would sell “large quantities of asparagus cookers.” Collins was also the first person in the whole of the Northwest to sell the Cuisinart processor. At first she sold an “average of one a day.” Soon, sales escalated, dramatically.

  What Collins observed happening with the Cuisinart was something remarkable. The people who bought the Cuisinart were not like other customers who might buy a single asparagus steamer and never return. The customer who bought the Cuisinart kept coming back for more utensils: for “balloon whisks and copper pots and then for whatever was needed once they were launched on a new cooking venture.” The machine had got them hooked on the whole process of ambitious cooking. It wasn’t just that Cuisinart made a range of tasks easier in the kitchen “for anyone who cared to chop or slice mushrooms, make quenelles, dough or filling.” Collins had observed something altogether more significant. It was a “real explosion in cooking.” A single machine had transformed how many people felt about spending time in the kitchen. It was no longer a place of drudgery—a site of weary arms and downtrodden housewives. It was a place where you made delicious things happen at the flick of a switch. And $190 was not so much to pay for the transformation of cooking from pain to pleasure.

  Cuisinart was by no means the first electrical mixing device on the market. Blenders or liquidizers had been around since 1922, when Stephen J. Poplawski, a Polish American, designed a drinks mixer for the Arnold Electric Company Its original use was making malted milk shakes at soda fountains. Then in 1937 came the Waring Blender. It was based on an earlier model called the “Miracle Mixer,” which had suffered unfortunate teething problems with the seal of the jar: when it was switched on, malted milk was apt to spurt out all over the countertop. The Waring Blender worked better, and thanks to being promoted by the popular singer and bandleader Fred Waring, it was an instant hit. By 1954, the Waring had sold a million. Most electric blenders work in the same way. There is a motor underneath, a glass jar with a handle on top, and some small rotating metal blades to connect the two. Crucially, a rubber washer must be installed to prevent any smoothie or milkshake dripping on the motor. The blender is an awesome gadget. In goes fibrous pineapple, pulpy banana, lime juice, hard ice cubes, and some scraggy mint leaves. Blitz like crazy and out comes an aerated silky-smooth liquid, with the kind of consistency a Victorian servant would have needed three different sieves to achieve.

  Yet the blender has its limits. Washing the glass container is one. The limited size of most domestic blenders is another. Every time I attempt to make a smooth green watercress soup in my blender, it seems to turn into one of those math puzzles that ask you to pour different liquids into different containers. You ladle half the soup into the blender and puree it. But now how do you puree the second half? You need a third container to hold the batches as they are done. Both these problems—the tedious cleanup and the limited size—were solved in one fell swoop by the immersion, or stick blender, patented as the Bamix in Switzerland in 1950, but not generally used in the home in the United Kingdom or the United States before the late 1980s. I consider this one of the greatest kitchen tools: it was a virtuoso piece of lateral thinking to bring the blender to the pot rather than the other way around. My handheld blender gets used most days, whether for emulsifying a vinaigrette, making banana smoothies, creating a ginger-garlic puree for Indian cooking, or rendering a tomato-butter pasta sauce silky smooth.

  It is a marvel. Still, there are some jobs it cannot do. “Will It Blend?” is the hugely successful ad campaign produced by Blendtec from 2006 onward, in which we see a white-coated Tom Dixon, the founder of Blendtec, attempting to blend a bizarre selection of items: golf balls, marbles, an entire chicken, bones and all, mixed with Coca-cola, even an iPhone. The implication of the ads is that a blender can do anything. But it can’t, even a third-generation power blender like the Blendtec (or its rival brand, the Vitamix). Blenders can grind nuts; but they can’t chop meat. They can whiz a raw carrot so fast that the friction warms it into a kind of soup; but they can’t shred carrot into a fine salad the way a food processor can because no matter how powerful the motor, the blades are too small.

  The heavier end of food processing was met by a series of massive electric food mixers. The first to reach the market was an electric stand mixer, invented by Herbert Johnston in 1908 for the Hobart Manufacturing Company, a firm specializing in motorized meat grinders. Johnston was watching a baker struggling to mix bread dough with a metal spoon. It struck him as absurd. Surely the task could be performed more easily using a motor. The first Hobart electric mixers were industrial, with a dimension of eighty quarts. In 1919, however, Hobart launched an offshoot, KitchenAid, providing a scaled-down countertop version for restaurants, weighing sixty-nine pounds. This was then scaled down still further for the home kitchen. The KitchenAid is still the all-American mixer par excellence, a great chunk of metal, like a Humvee, but in pretty colors like a Cadillac (meringue, red, pearl gray); such a mixer turns the airy layer cakes and frostings so difficult to achieve with a rotary beater into a cinch.

  The British equivalent was the Kenwood mixer, launched in 1950. It was the invention of Ken Wood (1916—1997), an electrical engineer fresh out of the Royal Air Force. Before the war, he had run his own business selling and repairing radios and televisions. Wood surveyed the existing gadgets on the market worldwide and attempted to combine the best elements in a single machine, the Kenwood Chef. Wood took a can opener from the United States, a potato peeler from Germany, a spaghetti maker from Italy and put them together with a mincer, a beater, a juicer, a liquidizer, and more. This wonder machine was capable—if you bought all the attachments—of whisking, kneading, liquefying, extracting, mincing, grinding, peeling, and also opening cans and even extruding different pasta shapes (the last function seems like showing off). It was advertised with the slogan: “Your Servant, Madam!” bringing home the point that food mixers did the work once done by human arms.

  The Kenwood was and is a formidable piece of engineering. And yet the Cuisinart/Magimix was more significant and life changing. The Kenwood is all about the attachments, whereas with the Cuisinart, all you really needed was the basic S-blades it came with: the sharp, double-bladed stainless steel knife whirling like a dervish inside the plastic bowl. It was these blades that enabled the food processor not just to liquefy and mix but to chop and to pulverize. It was these blades that were revolutionary, for the first time making many cooks feel free rather than enslaved. Roy Andries de Groot was the author of one of the earliest specialist food processor books that appeared in the years immediately following 1973. The processor, he wrote, was “virtually the equivalent of having, as your constant kitchen helper, a skilled chef armed with two super-sharp chef’s knives and a cutting board.” What was more, it could “produce all the results achieved by a stone mortar and pestle. It can tenderize tough ingredients by slashing and reslashing their fibres, just as if they were pounded for an hour in a pestle.”

  The metal S-blades were not the onl
y attachment to come with the original Cuisinart. There was also a medium serrated slicing disk, ideal for slicing raw vegetables such as carrots, cucumber, or cabbage (“Before you can say ‘coleslaw,’” wrote de Groot, “the work bowl will be full of perfectly shredded cabbage”). Various grating disks could be used to julienne a cucumber or to reduce a knobbly celeriac to that classic French starter, celeri remoulade. The most mystifying attachment was the noncutting plastic blade that came free with the machine, exactly the same size and shape as the steel blades but without the cutting power. De Groot recalled the comment of a chef who observed: “Their only use is to keep you awake at night, wondering what they are for.” It didn’t matter. To get the most out of a 1950s Kenwood, you needed a big range of accessories, many of which were actually as bulky to store as the gadgets they were supposed to replace (the liquidizer attachment was practically as big as a stand-alone blender). With a food processor, the attachments were more compact and you needed to use them less. Almost everything could be done with those basic metal S-blades, whirling in the bowl as you fed ingredients down the plastic chute.

  They could be used for chopping hamburger meat and whizzing cake batters; for mincing onions and making the easiest mayonnaise in the world. Nearly forty years after the first Cuisinart, the food writer Mark Bittman was still marveling at this feature of the food processor:

  By-hand instructions for mayo require you to dribble oil—not quite drop by drop, but close—into an egg-acid mixture, while beating with a fork or whisk. It’s doable and it’s fun—once.

  By machine, you put an egg, a tablespoon of vinegar, two teaspoons of mustard and some salt and pepper into a bowl; you put the top on and start ’er up; pour a cup of oil into the pusher, with its little hole, and go sip coffee or do yoga. The oil drizzles in, and you get perfect mayonnaise in a minute. That alone is worth the price of admission.

  The food mixers of the mid-twentieth century made it easier for housewives to do many of the jobs they were doing anyway: mincing meat, beating eggs, stirring cake batter. The food processor took it a step further, encouraging its owners to embark on types of cooking they would once have deemed impossible.

  In 1983, the British cook Michael Barry noted that in the past “only a few brave and dedicated souls ever tried to make pate at home” because of the “exhausting process of cutting up, mincing, blending and then cleaning up the equipment.” Now, making pate had become normal, the work of five minutes: “The processor has changed our way of life.” At a stroke, the processor demystified many of the trickiest dishes in the repertoire of French haute cuisine, including Carl Sontheimer’s beloved quenelles. Once, the wealthy of Europe wearied their servants to enjoy these puffy morsels. No more. To make the mixture, now you could simply fling two boneless chicken breasts, salt, pepper, parmesan, cream, and egg into the bowl of the processor and press the button.

  So great is the feeling of freedom that the food processor brings to its middle-class devotees—I include myself—we should be careful not to delude ourselves that it has really saved all labor. The medieval housewife making pancakes in Le Ménagier de Paris stood face to face with the people she was wearying, whereas our servants have mainly been removed from view. We do not see the hands in the chicken factory that boned the breasts, never mind the chickens that gave their lives, nor the workers who labored to assemble the parts of our whizzy food processors. We only see a pile of ingredients and a machine ready to do our bidding. Alone in our kitchens, we feel entirely emancipated.

  Every revolution has its counterrevolution. You can’t unleash something as extraordinary as the food processor on the world without a backlash.In the case of the Magimix in Britain, the backlash came early. In 1973, the year it arrived on the market, a writer in the London Times suggested it would deprive future generations of the pleasures of podding peas and kneading dough by hand. She even went so far as to suggest that by depriving cooks of tactile stimulation, the processor might leave us all in need of “group therapy.”

  No one could displace the processor from our lives once it had arrived. But they could complain, always in the same terms. It took the joy out of cooking; it would result in robotic food, which couldn’t possibly taste as good as something handmade and artisanal; and it reduced everything to mush.

  In fairness, there was something in this last complaint. The birth of a new gadget often gives rise to zealous overuse, until the novelty wears off. Reading through the early food processor cookbooks of the 1970s and 1980s, it is striking how many of the recipes had the consistency of baby food. Any vegetable that could be pureed, was. There were endless pates and timbales, dips galore (taramsalata, houmous, baba ganoush), and strange concoctions in ring molds. In those early years, many restaurants as well as home cooks couldn’t help themselves from blitzing everything in their new toy Quenelles went from being a rare aristocratic treat to a weeknight supper dish, until eventually people discovered that with the rarity factor gone, they were not so special after all. When was the last time you ate a quenelle?

  In 1983, the food writer Elizabeth David noted the connection between the widespread availability of the food processor and nouvelle cuisine, with its obsession with velvety purees. She was dining in a “much praised” London restaurant with Julia Child in the 1970s when the latter noted that what they were eating was “Cuisinart cooking”:

  About seven dishes out of ten on that restaurant menu could not have been created without the food processor. The light purees, the fluffy sauces and the fish mousselines so loved by today’s restaurateurs can also be achieved at home more or less by pressing a button. . . . [I]t is indeed a marvel that the food processor does all the mincing, chopping, pureeing and blending, without a thought of all that hard pounding of the past. But let’s not treat the food processor as though it were a waste-disposal unit.

  Thanks to David herself, among others, the pendulum of food fashion swung back again, to more robust French and Italian provincial cooking, in which the individual ingredients are discernible. Soups and stews became chunky, which was a way of parading that no food processor had been used in their preparation. Fine-textured food lost almost all its previous cachet. Now it was the rustic and the irregular that was prized, because this showed that someone’s hand had been tired out making it.

  The mortar and pestle came back into fashion. Food writers would insist bossily that a pesto, a Thai curry paste, or a Spanish romesco could only be made authentically in a pestle. The processor kind could never possible taste as good. There was even nostalgia for the way of life of all those women in Italy, Spain, Africa, or the Middle East who sat around communally pounding the day’s food for hours on end, singing all the while. It didn’t seem to occur to these food writers that perhaps the women were singing because it was the only way to stop their mouths from screaming with boredom at their task. While we in the cities of the West were busily imitating the old peasant ways, many of the peasants had switched to using food processors. In 2000, the California food expert Marlena Spieler traveled to Liguria to research how pesto was made in its birthplace. What she found was that “after proudly showing off the huge, heirloom, generations-old mortar and pestle, most Ligurians will then show you what they really use for making pesto: a food processor.”

  The same was true in the Middle East. By 1977, more food processors were in use per capita there than anywhere else in the world. One reason for this was kibbé, a dish that takes many forms, both raw and cooked, all of them involving finely pounded lamb, usually with bulgur wheat, cinnamon and allspice, onion, and green herbs. The Lebanese writer Anissa Helou remembers kibbé being made at home in Beirut by her mother and grandmother:

  They sat on low stools, either side of a beautiful white marble mortar in which were pieces of tender pink lamb. The rhythmic sound of pounding swelled from a slow dull beat to a faster, louder one as the meat was pounded into a smooth paste.

  The pounding process took an hour, during which Helou and her sisters “da
rted in and out of the kitchen,” asking if it was ready yet. Next, the pounded meat had to be made into “well-formed balls” with the bulgur and seasonings. This stage must still be done by hand. But the pounding—which previously took two educated women an hour to perform—now takes a minute’s pulsing in a machine.

  This is exhilarating; but it is also a little bit slighting, to the skillful hands that had pounded kibbé for so many generations. It is what happens whenever a machine replaces the labor of an artisan: the artisan’s skills become devalued. The food processor was an affront to the proud ego of a cook, because it made the effort superfluous. All that pounding could feel worthwhile if you told yourself that your hands and your hands alone were what made the difference between good kibbé and indifferent kibbé. By doing the same job just as well, if not better, the food processor stripped the hardworking cook of some of her dignity. By working so well, this machine seems to discount the effort it once took to process different foods: to whisk a mayonnaise, sieve a smooth puree of carrots, pound kibbé.

  The Thermomix is a newish device that makes the cook’s hands more or less irrelevant. It is advertised as being more than ten kitchen appliances in one. This is a blender and processor that can also weigh, steam, cook, knead bread dough, crush ice, emulsify, mill, grate, and puree. The Thermomix can do many of the subtle tasks for which human hands were once considered most necessary. After you have plonked in the ingredients, it can stir and cook a creamy risotto. It can make velvety lemon curd and perfectly emulsified hollandaise. Your only task is to eat the results.

  Different cooks respond to this knowledge in different ways. Some fight the machine, seeking out an artisanal cuisine, which asserts with every rugged bite that the meal has been made by hand. Many Italian families even now happily spend hours rolling, cutting, and pinching tortelloni by hand, because the factory-made versions of filled pasta—unlike the best machine-made dried pasta, which is unimprovable—cannot compete with homemade. Yet they do not go so far as to take out a pestle and grind their own flour for the pasta. The cult of handmade food only goes so far, because we all have better things to do than spend hours grinding.