Eatdrink #44 November/December 2013

56 www.eatdrink.ca
№ 44 | November/December 2013
books
For the Love of Kitchen Gadgets
Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat
by Bee Wilson
Review by Darin Cook
We all know someone who loves
kitchen gadgets: those people
who walk into a kitchenware
shop and instantly start
drooling, as if utensils for cooking are as
tasty as food itself; those people who are
infatuated with the latest hardware that
will get things done better and faster. I
can’t say for certain, but I suspect that
some days my wife loves her KitchenAid
mixer more than me. Those kind of people
— the home cook and professional chef
alike who take pleasure in having excellent
kitchen supplies. A book by Bee Wilson
called Consider the Fork: A History of How
We Cook and Eat has just been released
in paperback by Basic Books and could be
a handy gift this holiday season for any
gadget lover in your life, especially if that
special someone already has four colanders
in different shades of green.
Unlike our ancestors who, until the
eighteenth century, made do with a
single cauldron to cook everything
(the original one-pot meal), modern
kitchens are perhaps overly equipped
with an assortment of utensils, tools, and
accessories for cookery
— some everyday
essentials like knives and
wooden spoons, others
for special occasions
like the turkey roasting
pan that may only
make an appearance
once a year. Julia Child
herself approves of using
excessive equipment;
in Mastering the Art
of French Cooking she
wrote, “A pot saver is a
self-hampering cook. Use
all the pans, bowls
and equipment
you need.”
Wilson starts
her book by
talking lovingly
about wooden
spoons as
the most useful
of kitchen implements, even if
they are unsophisticated compared to
the buttons, levers, and flashing lights of
modern equipment. Along with knives,
wooden spoons are the most rudimentary
of utensils, but have been designed with
all sorts of engineering and technological
properties in mind — concave shape and
length of handle for spoons; thickness of
steel and serrated blades for knives. Still
very simplistic compared to state-of-theart
cookware that can seemingly turn
a kitchen into a laboratory these days,
like the sous-vide machines for cooking
vacuum-sealed food in temperaturecontrolled
water with delicious results, or
the next big thing in refrigerator technology
which boasts of “a self-cleaning fridge
that would also do a
constant inventory of its
own contents, moving
goods nearing their
use-by-date toward
the front.” In contrast
to these ultra-modern
inventions, some old
standbys that are still
useful are really quite
old, like the ancient
mortar and pestle to get
ingredients pulverized
Bee Wilson