Pretentious, effeminate, sinister and even obscene, the fork of folktale was a sign of loose morals, silly decadence or sexual deviancy. To insist on eating with a fork was a very bad sign until the 17th century. Italians were the first to relax their stance on ‘furcifers’ (fork bearers, like the devil) when they recognised that three prongs were better than one for twirling spaghetti; but even up until the end of the 19th century British sailors were still demonstrating their manliness by eating without forks. Consider the Fork is a delightful compendium of the tools, techniques and cultures of cooking and eating. Be it a tong or a chopstick, a runcible spoon or a cleaver, Bee Wilson approaches it with loving curiosity and thoroughness.
If you thought kitchen utensils a rather narrow field, think again. This book spans history, from fire and the first cooking pots through Teflon and gas ovens to the dizzying gadgets of the modernist chefs’ kitchens. With pithy bits of science, anthropology, history and literature, Wilson gives a sense of what life in the kitchen was like for a medieval spit-turner, a Victorian pastry chef, a Fifties housewife and a caveman. Undaunted by the task of writing about the whole of history, she goes global, taking in Chinese, Japanese and Indian cuisines along the way.
The range of her sources is a delight; she gets very interested in the work of the anthropologist Professor Charles Loring Brace, a man who ‘possibly held more ancient human jaws in his hand than anyone else in the 20th century’. He argued that the human overbite is a result of table manners rather than evolution; before the knife and fork, humans had edge-to-edge bites, like apes.
Wilson explains the physics of why food sticks to pans and why chips are delicious (something called the Maillard reaction).
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