Eat One’s Hat. A person who punctuates a prediction with “If I’m wrong, I’ll eat my hat” should know that at one time, he or she might well have had to do just that—eat hat. Of course, “hat” did not refer to a Panama or Stetson but to something more palatable—though only slightly.
The culinary curiosity known as a “hatte” appears in one of the earliest extant European cookbooks, though its ingredients and means of preparation are somewhat vague. “Hattes are made of eggs, veal, dates, saffron, salt, and so forth,” states the recipe—but they could also include tongue, honey, rosemary, kidney, fat, and cinnamon. The book makes it clear that the concoction was not particularly popular and that in the hands of an amateur cook it was essentially uneatable. So much so that a braggart who backed a bet by offering to “eat haste” had either a strong stomach or confidence in winning.
Give the Cold Shoulder. Today this is a figurative expression, meaning to slight a person with a snub. During the Middle Ages in Europe, however, “to give the cold shoulder” was a literal term that meant serving a guest who overstayed his welcome a platter of cooked but cold beef shoulder. After a few meals of cold shoulder, even the most persistent guest was supposed to be ready to leave.
Seasoning. Around the middle of the ninth century, when French was emerging as a language in its own right, the Gauls termed the process of aging such foods as cheese, wine, or meats saisonner. During the Norman Conquest of 1066, the French invaders brought the term to England, where the British first spelled it sesonen, then “seasoning.” Since aging food, or “seasoning” it, improved the taste, by the fourteenth century any ingredient used to enhance taste had come to be labeled a seasoning.
Eat Humble Pie. During the eleventh century, every member of a poor British family did not eat the same food at the table. When a stag was caught in a village, the tenderest meat went to its captor, his eldest son, and the captor’s closest male friends. The man’s wife, his other children, and the families of his male friends received the stag’s “umbles” —the heart, liver, tongue, brain, kidneys, and entrails. To make them more palatable, they were seasoned and baked into an “umble pie.” Long after the dish was discontinued (and Americans added an h to the word), “to eat humble pie” became a punning allusion to a humiliating drop in social status, and later to any form of humiliation.
A Ham. In the nineteenth-century heyday of American minstrelsy, there existed a popular ballad titled “The Hamfat Man.” Sung by a performer in blackface, it told of a thoroughly unskilled, embarrassingly self-important actor who boasted of his lead in a production of Hamlet.
For etymologists, the pejorative use of “ham” in the title of an 1860s theater song indicates that the word was already an established theater abbreviation for a mediocre actor vain enough to tackle the role of the prince of Denmark—or any role beyond his technical reach. “The Hamfat Man” is credited with popularizing the slurs “ham actor” and “ham.”
Take the Cake. Meaning, with a sense of irony, “to win the prize,” the American expression is of Southern black origin. At cakewalk contests in the South, a cake was awarded as first prize to the person who could most imaginatively strut—that is, cakewalk. Many of the zany walks are known to have involved tap dancing, and some of the fancier steps later became standard in tap dancers’ repertoires.
“Let Them Eat Cake.” The expression is attributed to Marie Antoinette, the extragavant, pleasure-loving queen of Louis XVI of France. Her lack of tact and discretion in dealing with the Paris proletariat is legend. She is supposed to have uttered the famous phrase as a retort to a beggar’s plea for food; and in place of the word for “cake,” it is thought that she used the word for “crust,” referring to a loaf’s brittle exterior, which often broke into crumbs.
Talk Turkey. Meaning to speak candidly about an issue, the expression is believed to have originated from a story reported in the nineteenth century by an employee of the U.S. Engineer Department. The report states:
“Today I heard an anecdote that accounts for one of our common sayings. It is related that a white man and an Indian went hunting; and afterwards, when they came to divide the spoils, the white man said, ‘You take the buzzard and I will take the turkey, or, I will take the turkey and you may take the buzzard.’ The Indian replied, ‘You never once said turkey to me.’ “
Chapter 5
Around the Kitchen
Kitchen: Prehistory, Asia and Africa
If a modern housewife found herself transported back in time to a first-century Roman kitchen, she’d be able to prepare a meal using bronze frying pans and copper saucepans, a colander, an egg poacher, scissors, funnels, and kettles—all not vastly different from those in her own home. Kitchenware, for centuries, changed little.
Not until the industrial revolution, which shook society apart and reassembled it minus servants, did the need arise for machines to perform the work of hands. Ever since, inventors have poured out ingenious gadgets—the dishwasher, the blender, Teflon, Tupperware, S.O.S. pads, aluminum foil, friction matches, the humble paper bag, and the exalted Cuisinart—to satisfy a seemingly unsaturable market. The inventions emerged to fill a need—and now fill a room in the house that has its own tale of origin and evolution.
In prehistoric times, man prepared food over an open fire, using the most rudimentary of tools: stone bowls for liquids, a mortar and pestle for pulverizing salt and herbs, flint blades for carving meat roasted on a spit. One of the earliest devices to have moving parts was the flour grinder. Composed of two disk-shaped stones with central holes, the grinder accepted grain through the top hole, crushed it between the stones, then released flour through the bottom hole.
In the Near East, the primitive kitchen was first modernized around 7000 B.C. with the invention of earthenware, man’s earliest pottery. Clay pots and baking dishes then as now ranged in color from creamy buff to burnt red, from ash gray to charcoal black. An item of any desired size or shape could be fashioned, fired by kiln, and burnished; and a wide collection of the earliest known kitchen pottery, once belonging to a Neolithic tribe, was unearthed in Turkey in the early 1960s. Bowls, one of the most practical, all-purpose utensils, predominated; followed by water-carrying vessels, then drinking cups. A clay food warmer had a removable bowl atop an oil lamp and was not very different in design from today’s models, fired by candles.
Terriers were trained as “spit runners” to relieve a cook from the tedium of hand-cranking a turnspit.
Throughout the Greek and Roman eras, most kitchen innovations were in the realm of materials rather than usage—gold plates, silver cups, and glass bottles for the wealthy; for poorer folk, clay plates, hollowed rams’ horn cups, and hardwood jugs.
A major transformation of the kitchen began around A.D. 700. Confronted by the hardships of the Middle Ages, extended families banded together, life became increasingly communal, and the kitchen—for its food and the warmth offered by its fire—emerged as the largest, most frequented room in the house.
One of the valued kitchen tools of that time was the turnspit. It was to survive as the chief cooking appliance for nearly a thousand years, until the revolutionary idea in the late 1700s of roasting meat in an oven. (Not that the turnspit has entirely disappeared. Many modern stoves include an electrically operated rotary spit, which is also a popular feature of outdoor barbecues.)
In the turnspit’s early days, the tedious chore of hand-cranking a roast led to a number of innovations. One that today would incense any animal lover appeared in England in the 1400s. A rope-and-pulley mechanism led from the fired spit to a drum-shaped wooden cage mounted on the wall. A small dog, usually a terrier, was locked in the cage, and as the dog ran, the cage revolved and cranked the spit. Terriers were actually trained as “spit runners,” with hyperactive animals valued above others. Gadgets were beginning to make their mark.
A century later, in Italy, Leonardo da Vinci devised a thoroughly humane self-turning spit, powered by heat ascending the chi
mney. A small turbine wheel, built into the chimney, connected to the fired spit. Rising heat rotated the wheel with a speed proportional to the ferocity of the flames. But the centuries-old concept of cooking directly above an open fire was about to be replaced by a revolutionary cooking innovation: the enclosed range.
Kitchen Range: 17th Century, England
Bricking up the kitchen inglenook around the hearth formed the earliest range, which had a heated top surface and side hobs for keeping a kettle or saucepan warm.
In 1630, British inventor John Sibthrope patented a large metal version of such a device, which was fired by coal, a substance that would soon replace wood as the domestic fuel. But the idea of cooking above an enclosed fire instead of above or in an open flame was slow to catch on. And the cooking process itself was slower, since an intermediate element, the range-top, had to be heated.
An American-born innovator set out to develop a compact, efficient range but instead produced two other kitchen appliances.
Count von Rumford of Bavaria was born Benjamin Thompson in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1753. Loyal to the British crown, Thompson served as a spy during the American Revolution, and in 1776 he fled to London, leaving his wife and daughter behind. Knighted by King George III, Thompson studied physics in England, with special emphasis on the application of steam energy. His experiments led to his invention of the double boiler and the drip coffee maker. But his work on a compact kitchen range was interrupted by state business.
Entering the Bavarian civil service, Thompson was appointed the country’s grand chamberlain. In between instituting numerous social reforms, he found time to modernize James Watt’s steam engine and to popularize the potato—long regarded as animal fodder and sustenance for the poor—as a European table food among the upper classes. But his dream of producing a compact, closed-top cooking range became a reality in someone else’s hands. In 1802, while the then-renowned Sir Benjamin Thompson was establishing the Rumford professorship at Harvard University, British iron founder George Bodley patented a cast-iron even-heating range with a modern flue, which became the prototype of British and American kitchen ranges until the present century.
Gas and Electric Ranges. The same year that George Bodley brought out his closed-top, coal-powered range, German inventor Frederick Albert Winson cooked history’s first meal by gas.
Gas ranges, c. 1890, the year the electric range debuted. Whereas gas models once leaked fumes and exploded, early electric ranges, with crude temperature controls, could incinerate a meal.
Winson’s device was makeshift, designed merely to demonstrate gas’s cooking possibilities and its cleanliness compared to coal fires. Many of the experimental gas ranges that followed were hazards, leaking fumes and exploding. Thirty years would pass before a truly practical and safe gas range was manufactured in Europe; American homes would not have the clean-cooking innovations in any significant number until the 1860s.
Once homemakers felt safe and comfortable cooking with gas, they were reluctant to abandon it for the kitchen’s newest innovation, the electric range.
The first electric stoves appeared in 1890, and they made almost any meal cooked on them a disaster. With only the crudest of thermostats, heat control was not so much a matter of low, medium, or high as of raw or incinerated. And the price for this unpredictability was steep, since inexpensive home electric rates would not become a reality until the late 1920s. In addition, many homes in parts of America had yet to be wired for electric power. The electric stove proved to be even less popular than the early gas stove had been, and it took longer to become a standard feature of the American kitchen, never superseding gas, as had once been the prediction.
Gadget. It was during the early years of electric power that any small, handy item for the kitchen acquired the name “gadget,” a word that did not exist prior to 1886. Although the word—as well as the idea it conveys—sounds American to its core, according to popular legend it is French. And if we were to pronounce it correctly, we would be naming the man who gave us the eponym.
Monsieur Gaget was a partner in the French construction firm of Gaget, Gauhier & Cie., which built the Statue of Liberty to the design specifications of sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi. For the statue’s inauguration ceremonies in 1886, Gaget conceived the idea of selling miniature Liberty souvenirs to Americans living in Paris. Americans abroad bought the replicas and began referring to them as “gadgets,” mispronouncing Gaget’s name. Consequently, the 1986 centennial of the Statue of Liberty also marked the one hundredth birthday of the word “gadget,” though possibly only Monsieur Gaget’s descendants celebrated that event.
Porcelain Pots and Pans: 1788, Germany
The first real cooking utensil made in America was a 1642 cast-iron pot, the now-famous Saugus Pot, produced at the Saugus Iron Works in the old Massachusetts city of Lynn. The crudely fashioned, three-legged pot—with a lid and a one-quart capacity—marked the beginning of the kitchenware industry in America, for prior to that time every metallic item in a colonist’s kitchen was a British import.
Just as American foundries were beginning to produce black cast-iron pots with rough exteriors, the German kitchenware industry was moving toward something totally unheard of—and seemingly impractical—for cooking: porcelain. In 1750, inventor Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justy suggested coating the coarse exterior of iron pots and pans with the smooth, lustrous enamel glazes long used on jewelry. His critics contended that the delicacy of porcelain enamel would never withstand kitchen usage. Von Justy countered with the indisputable fact that hundreds of ancient porcelain artifacts had retained their brilliance and hardness for centuries; some Egyptian ornaments dated back to 1400 B.C.
For a while, the technical problems of annealing a heat-resistant porcelain to cast iron seemed insurmountable. But in 1788, the Konigsbronn foundry in Württemberg produced the first kitchen pots with a shimmering white enamel finish. The development ushered in a new era in culinary ware, providing homemakers with a wide range of utensils that cleaned more easily than anything previously known. Porcelain was the Teflon of the eighteenth century. One early advertisement punned: “No longer can the pot call the kettle black.”
But the porcelain innovators had not anticipated one surprising public reaction. The glistening pots, pans, and ladles were simply too attractive to use for cooking only. Thus, for a number of years, German housewives proudly displayed their porcelainware as objets d’art—on knickknack shelves, atop pianos, and on windowsills for passersby to appreciate.
The British, in sharp contrast, took the artful German breakthrough and gave it a highly practical if thoroughly mundane application: they produced the first porcelain-enamel bedpans and urine bottles for hospitals and homes. Again, it was the material’s nonstick, nonstain surface that contributed to the utensils’ rapid acceptance.
It was not until the final year of the American Civil War that porcelain-enamel cooking utensils were manufactured in the United States—initially in three cities: Sheboygan, Wisconsin; Woodhaven, New York; and St. Louis, Missouri.
Aluminum Ware: Early 19th Century, France
While the Germans were cooking in porcelain and the British were using it to sanitize homes and hospitals, Napoleon Bonaparte in France was serving his guests on the world’s first aluminum plates—which then cost more than gold ones. The newly mined metal sold for six hundred dollars a pound, and by the 1820s Europe’s nobility was packing away some of its goldware and silverware to highlight aluminum plates, cups, and cutlery.
Aluminum, however, rapidly lost its social luster. Aggressive mining of the metal, coupled with electric extraction techniques, caused its price to plummet to $2.25 a pound in 1890. Despite the lower price, American homemakers had yet to discover the advantages of cooking with aluminum. Two events—a technical advance and a department store demonstration—would soon change that.
On February 23, 1886, twenty-two-year-old inventor Charles Martin Hall, a recent college grad
uate in science, was experimenting with aluminum in his laboratory in Oberlin, Ohio. Hall’s notebooks record that on that day he perfected a procedure for inexpensively producing an aluminum compound that could be cast into cookware. Hall founded his own company and began manufacturing lightweight, durable, easy-to-clean cooking utensils that yielded a remarkably even distribution of heat and retained their sheen. Their durability suggested a trademark name: Wear-Ever.
Hall’s products met formidable opposition. American housewives were reluctant to abandon their proven tinware and ironware, and the country’s major department stores refused to stock the new product, whose benefits sounded too fantastical to be true. The turning point came in the spring of 1903. At the persuasion of a buyer, the renowned Wanamaker’s store in Philadelphia staged the first public demonstration of aluminum’s cooking abilities. Hundreds of women watched in amazement as a professional chef cooked apple butter without stirring. Once the onlookers were allowed to step forward and assure themselves that the ingredients had not stuck to the pan or burned, orders poured in for aluminum cookware. By the time of Charles Hall’s death in 1914, his line of Wear-Ever products had spawned a new aluminum-cookware industry, transformed the American kitchen, and rewarded Hall with a personal fortune of thirty million dollars.
S.O.S. Pads: 1917, San Francisco
In 1917, Edwin W. Cox of San Francisco was a door-to-door salesman whose line of merchandise included the new, highly touted aluminum cookware. Sales were mediocre; West Coast housewives had not yet been sold on the latest in pan technology. Cox found it difficult even to get into a kitchen to demonstrate his products. He needed a gimmick. So, in the best salesmen’s tradition, he decided to offer each potential client a free introductory gift for allowing him to display his line.
Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things Page 13