centuries. Into the early seventeenth century, its use struck English tourists the tines they are as remarkable. In 1611, the eccentric foot traveler Thomas Coryat picked out a-changin’ fork use as an admirable and peculiarly Italian custom—a marvelous advance A history of table technology on the promiscuous placing of dirty fingers in the communal meat bowl— By Steven Shapin and he encouraged it when he returned to England, where it was widely re- garded as just the sort of fussiness that Discussed in this essay: foreigners went in for. In Jonathan Swift’s 1738 skit “Polite Conversation,” Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, by Bee Wilson. Basic fork use was condemned as effete and Books. 352 pages. $26.99. basicbooks.com. unnatural: “Fingers were made before forks, and hands before .” The distal end, and, fi- number of tines changed over time— nally, tines pointing from two to three to four—but the fork down, use the left remained a problem utensil into the hand to convey the early twentieth century: in 1905, H. G. whole package to Wells dramatized the tension attending the mouth. If you’re English social mobility through a par- American, you do venu’s fork anxiety at a posh London things differently. hotel, where a fork in the protagonist’s The securing-and- untrained hand was “an instrument of cutting business is chase rather than capture.” much the same, but The artificiality of the table fork you then perform a was just the point: you didn’t need a zigzag maneuver, fork for purely practical reasons the putting the way you might need the spoon and the down and shifting knife. (As shown by the occasional the fork to your invention of hybrid implements adver- right hand. If there’s tised as functionally superior—the just meat on the spork, the sporf, the spife, the knork, end, the usual prac- the runcible spoon.) The fork is a bit tice is to bring it to of table technology that makes mani- the mouth convex fest a changing moral order. surface up, but if has a special advantage in doing so, there are veggies since feeding happens, if you’re lucky, involved, it’s com- several times a day, and, if you’re so- mon to use the con- ciable, in the presence of other people. cave surface to The table is an intimate site; it’s where scoop them, spoon you find out about others and they find style. (Peas are a out about you. Here is the point of the problem and the pea problem: feeding isn’t only a mat- he fork is worth considering. It’s cause of much anxiety, and the only ter of the more or less practical; it’s considered a billion times a day certainty is that they’re a fork affair. You also about the more or less proper— Tas a tool for delivering food to don’t line them up on your knife or how things are rightly done in our sort of face. Some of that considering flows spear them one by one on the tip, society, by our sort of people. In 1848, from practical uncertainties about how though the temptation to do so comes Thackeray’s Book of Snobs used that to use the thing. If you’re British or from the fact that the fork isn’t well disgusting pea practice as a paradigm: European, you grip the fork in your left suited to dealing with peas.) “Society having ordained certain cus- hand, index finger on the back and Although some sorts of forks were toms, men are bound to obey the law convex surface upwards. You then se- around in antiquity and the Middle of society, and conform to its harmless cure a piece of meat on the tines as you Ages—think of Neptune’s trident or orders.” If I were to eat peas with my cut with the knife held in your right the peasant’s pitchfork—the fork as a knife, I would be “insulting society” hand. You can stabilize the cut-up meat standard table implement was un- just as much as if I were to go to a tea with some smooshed vegetables at the known in western Europe until it ap- party in a dressing gown and slippers. Steven Shapin teaches history of science peared in Italian court circles, probably Homer Simpson eats his peas with a at Harvard. between the eleventh and fourteenth knife, and that says it all.

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January Reviews CX2.indd_1120 68 11/20/12 5:45 PM Cutlery, then, offers rich potential cutlery, and the more substantial weap- deft use of two forks. The silver fish knife for getting things wrong. The “harm- ons used to carve the celebratory turkey was an implement that seemed posh— less orders” of table technique involve or suckling pig are invariably handed to ornate, dainty, and precious—but that, not just the use of the fork but knowing the senior male and then put safely away like a preference for the word “serviette” which fork, which spoon, knife, and once the beast has been dismembered. over “napkin,” missed its mark. (To put glass pertain to which purpose. During The only table implement now really it in terms of BBC comedies, Hyacinth periods of rapid social mobility in Geor- well adapted to separating muscle into Bucket would almost certainly own fish gian and Victorian England, special- bite-size bits is the , a re- knives, while Audrey fforbes-Hamilton purpose silverware proliferated: grape- minder of the table knife’s former glory. would not.) Since fish knives were a re- fruit, coffee, tea, mayonnaise, mustard, cent innovation, their possession be- salt, egg, and ice-cream spoons; marrow ee Wilson’s delightful Consider trayed the fact that you hadn’t inherited and Stilton scoops; butter and olive the Fork: A History of How We your silver but bought it. So the fish picks; fish knives, slices, and forks; oys- BCook and Eat does talk about knife was both an aspirational symbol ter, pickle, and cake forks; tongs for the fork, but that’s just one part of her and a target for those who wanted to sugar, sardines, and asparagus; grape ebulliently written and unobtrusively ridicule clumsy gestures toward social shears; cake and pea servers. The plea- learned survey of the tools we have climbing, as John Betjeman did in his sure of witnessing faux pas was probably used to prepare, preserve, and consume brutal poem “How to Get On in Soci- among the highlights of a well-supplied our food. She recognizes that there is ety”: “Phone for the fish knives, Nor- Victorian or Edwardian dinner party. something counterintuitive in think- man/ As Cook is a little unnerved;/ You Table manners are an approved form ing of forks, pots, pans, and stoves as kiddies have crumpled the serviettes/ of hypocrisy: they sustain the pretense technologies at all. The historian David And I must have things daintily served.” that something benign is happening Edgerton recently wrote about “the when, from another point of view, what’s shock of the old,” the technologies we ilson devotes one substantial going on is pretty bloody. In the 1930s, forgot to remember because they were chapter to fire, the energy the great German historical sociologist new so long ago and are now so taken Wsource that, until the advent Norbert Elias wrote about what he for granted. We’re accustomed to think- of the electric range and the microwave, called the “civilizing process” through ing of artifacts as technology insofar as cooked your food. As she writes: which both the modern world and the they are “high”—electronic, digital, modern self were brought into being. and, of course, very new—but few tech- In the modern kitchen, fire has not just The civilized self, in Elias’s view, kept the nologies have been as transformative been tamed. It has been so boxed off, you could forget it existed at all, amid body under control, managed or denied and are as pervasive as those in our the cool work- tops and all the on- off human carnality—and the hero of this kitchens and on our dinner tables. switches that enable us to summon story was the fork, which allowed its user An apparent distinction here is be- heat and dismiss it again in a second. to display a certain distance from the tween the utilitarian and the expressive violence of food preparation and con- aspects of kitchen and table technolo- That ability originated in a series of sumption. You didn’t seize your meat gies, though you come away from Wil- nineteenth-century inventions, start- with your fingers or stab it with your son’s story wondering whether any of ing with Count Rumford’s very large knife. A book of manners published in these technologies are, or ever have brick stove (which never really took the late seventeenth century prescribed been, purely practical. Consider that odd off) and getting a serious grip on the both proper fork use and the state of Georgian invention, the sterling-silver middle-class market with the develop- mind in which the instrument should fish knife. Wilson observes that silver ment of cast-iron “kitcheners” in the be employed: “You must not by any awk- implements for dealing with fish pro- middle of the century. First they were ward gesture show any signs that you are vided two advantages to those who fired by coal or wood, providing safer hungry, nor fix your Eyes upon the meat, could afford them: unlike steel, silver did and cleaner sources of heat; later, gas- as if you would devour all ... and be sure not react chemically with the lemon fired cookstoves made safety and you touch nothing but with your Fork.” juice that invariably accompanied fish cleanliness matters of course. William Burroughs wrote of “the naked on English tables (a reaction that made The kitchen had historically been an lunch” as that “frozen moment when the fish taste bad), and a fish knife’s scal- unsafe and unpleasant place, with heat everyone sees what is on the end of every loped shape was possibly a way of distin- management as the major cause of its fork,” but it was the fork that helped you guishing it from ordinary knives in the nastiness. An open hearth meant that not see the dead flesh for what it was. cutlery drawer. Metallurgical properties cooks got seriously burned; untended As fork use increased, so the table constituted a pragmatic justification for children often got killed. You had to be knife changed shape. The tip was once the silver fish knife, but the fact that it extremely careful about your hair and pointed, the cutting edge sharp: it was was silver also displayed social distinc- your clothing, so women, of course, were the sort of thing you could use, if you tion. Yet prejudice against fish knives at greatest risk. The kitchen was by far wanted, to kill. In came the fork, and developed and persisted among the the most dangerous room in the home, the tip of the table knife became round- nineteenth-century British aristocracy. so dangerous that in medieval great ed and the cutting edge could scarcely The authentically posh didn’t use fish houses, kitchens were often constructed cut. These days, you’d be hard put to knives but instead maneuvered the flesh as separate buildings, connected to the injure someone seriously with common off the bone and onto the plate by the house proper by covered passages.

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January Reviews Final 8.indd_1116 69 11/16/12 6:20 PM Different modes of managing fire re- writes, “the dominant domestic activi- grandmother cooked with cast-iron pots quired different skills. In 1825, the gour- ties until 150 years ago, with the coming and skillets made since the 1890s by a mand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin of gas ovens.” (She reminds us that “cur- company in the Appalachians. I was a wrote that cooking may be taught, “but few” once referred not to a time when fool not to have made off with some of a man who can roast is born with the people must be off the street but to a their cookware, because the heat con- faculty.” Modern readers won’t have the piece of kitchen technology, “a large duction and retention of cast iron is slightest idea what he was talking metal cover placed over the embers at superb, and after long seasoning it’s about—why ever should roasters be born night to contain the fire.”) practically nonstick. rather than made?—and that’s because In her later discussion of modern Then there are the cookbooks, whose roasting is now practically synonymous technologies of cooling, Wilson specu- recipes have changed radically over with baking, both operations being car- lates that the refrigerator, avidly adopted time. An early modern recipe might, for ried out in dry heat in an enclosed oven. by many Americans in the first third of example, instruct the cook to take sev- Set the thermostat to 350˚F, throw in the twentieth century, eventually be- eral chickens “about the bigness of a the meat, baste occasionally, and wait came “a new focal point for the kitchen, Partridge” and “boyl them till they be for the digital thermometer to ping. But taking over from the old hearth. Once, half boyled enough,” but now we need a roast originally involved rotation: you we congregated around fire,” she writes; to know exactly how much the chickens had to keep the meat turning and care- “now people organize their lives around should weigh and exactly how long they fully manage its distance from the open the hard, chilly lines of the refrigerator.” should be cooked. The premodern cook flame. That’s very difficult work: get it Previously, if you wanted to preserve was presumed to know all this in a wrong and the precious roast is burned food you relied on salting, drying, or rough-and-ready, good-enough-to-be- or tough or raw at the center. Although smoking. The domestic refrigerator was getting-on-with form; the modern cook the overall control of the operation was a transformative technology, the final wants it all specified and, ideally, dem- usually in the hands of a master roaster, repository for fresh or frozen foods that onstrated on television or YouTube. In- the constant rotation of the spit was the traveled to it long distances along artifi- deed, when the modern recipe directs work of a now disappeared kitchen role, cially cooled channels. But families don’t the cook to “season to taste,” it takes for that of the “turnspit” or “turnbroach.” congregate around the fridge the way granted—perhaps wrongly—that the Tur nspits in medieval England were they once did around the hearth, the cook knows how the dish is supposed to typically boys, sometimes as young as glowing dial of the radio, or the flicker- taste. Such assumptions are the occasion five, and when, between the sixteenth ing television. Instead, much of the for Wilson’s bafflement at American and eighteenth centuries, tender con- fridge’s organizing significance is visible cookbooks’ use of the “cup” measure, sciences began to bridle at the use of on its exterior surfaces: fridge doors are originating with Boston’s Fannie Farm- children, specially bred dogs were im- where family members stick postcards er in the late nineteenth century and prisoned in large wheels fixed on a wall from friends holidaying in Tuscany, since then distinguishing American near the fireplace and connected to the where they display tidbits of local news volumetrics from normal practice else- spit by a pulley. Dog wheels, Wilson and keep track of who in the household where. What in the world is a cup, even notes, were a feature of American res- is in and who is out, which provisions carefully leveled as Farmer firmly in- taurants into the nineteenth century. need to be got in, and whether a poem sisted it must be? It wasn’t just a matter Animal-rights campaigners targeted the can be created from a scrambled set of of which cup you used, as that could be, practice, but when one of them visited magnetized word chips. The fridge door and eventually was, standardized; the kitchens to check for dog wheels, “he has emerged as a virtual gathering place. enduring problem is that any measure of several times found that the dogs had Your family might not congregate there, volume is an unreliable guide to the been replaced at the fire by young black but you know that everyone will pass by amount of stuff contained in that vol- children.” By the mid-eighteenth cen- and take notice. ume. A cup of flour, Wilson notes, can tury, however, mechanization was doing vary from four to six ounces, depending, much to replace animate turnspits, and he domestic fridge is now fewer for example, on whether and how the Wilson estimates that about half of En- than a hundred years old, but flour has been sifted. glish homes—and not just the great Tthe modern kitchen is a palimp- houses—then possessed a technology sest of old and new technologies. My hen, in the early 1970s, I that few now will even have heard of: a own kitchen contains a rustic mortar moved into a tenement flat mechanical jack. and pestle made in Central America Win Edinburgh, it had a tiny Direct-fire cooking had many dis- from volcanic rock; rust-prone carbon- room called a scullery. In much of Brit- agreeable features, but the hearth his- steel knives bought from E. Dehillerin ain the scullery was a space for washing torically played a social role that no in Paris; several Japanese high- dishes or clothes, but in the north of Maytag or Viking can fill. The hearth chromium forged-stainless-steel knives; England and in Scotland the word of- was literally the focus of household life: a Chinese chef’s knife (or tou) and an ten designated a kitchen. Mine, scarce- it warmed, it lighted, it nurtured. (Focus iron wok; an Italian (which ly big enough for one person, contained is, after all, the Latin word for “fire- I rarely use, though its herb-chopping only a small stove. I was puzzled and a place.”) The tasks of attending to the virtues are rightly celebrated by Wil- bit irritated by this arrangement, but fire—starting it, fueling it, tamping it son); and, of course, a Cuisinart (which Scottish friends explained that the down for the night—were, Wilson I use a lot). Both my mother and my preparation of food was traditionally

70 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2013 REVIEWS 71

January Reviews CX2.indd_1120 70 11/20/12 5:45 PM “One helluva team of writers has produced a book you’ll be considered an unclean activity, best dipping into for years.”— Jim Bouton, author of Ball Four carried out in private. The scullery represented kitchen Calvinism. That division of domestic space RULES OF THE GAME didn’t survive gentrification, and the scullery underwent a conversion—in THE BEST SPORTS WRITING FROM my flat, into the place where the fridge sat, and, in others’, into a small loo, a HARPER’S MAGAZINE space whose privacy was taken as a mat- PREFACE BY ROY BLOUNT JR. ter of course. The stove was brought out into the dining room, which then be- came known as the kitchen. This shift- Rules of the Game: The Best Sports Writing from Harper’s Magazine ing about of bourgeois space happened uncovers funny, touching, exciting, intriguing stories of the sporting in much of the Anglo-American world life, both professional and amateur. These essays show that how we play in the second half of the twentieth century. Food preparation came out of and write about sports reflects and celebrates our nation’s character. the closet: what was private became This collection includes some of the finest writers of the past cen- sociable, what was dirty and unpleasant tury, such as Mark Twain, Shirley Jackson, Lewis H. Lapham, A. became delightful, and what had been Bartlett Giamatti, Tom Wolfe, Gary Cartwright, George Plimpton, done by servants was now presided over and Rich Cohen. by the mistress of the house—and, in- creasingly, by the master. Changing Edited by Matthew Stevenson and Michael Martin technology had a lot to do with that, creating the physical conditions under FRANKLIN Order today through www.harpers.org/store which cooking could be transformed SQUARE Published by Franklin Square Press PRESS from drudgery to pleasure and offering ISBN 978-1-879957-58-9 new means of displaying social distinc- Softcover $14.95 tion: the smooth granite work surfaces, the grill and professional-grade extrac- Distributed through Midpoint Trade Books tor hood, the gleaming AGA range, the espresso machine, the celebrity- authored cookbooks with sumptuous shallow-focus photography, the cohabi- tation of the technologically avant- A N G U I S H R U M P S garde and the nostalgically artisanal. SOluTION TO ThE L A R D T E L E P O R T DECEMBER puzzlE New technology has not released I T E R A T E U S H E R food preparation and consumption from its expressive role; it has just M I B O L Y M P I A N A changed the ways in which we say who E V E R I O N I Z I N G we are and what we value. Indeed, N E W S C A S T E R S G though many aspects of food prepara- NOTES FOR “SEASON’S tion have become vastly less time- GREETINGS”: T H E F I R S T N O E L consuming and onerous than they once A S S I Z E S Y A X L E Puzzle editing by Dan Asimov. were, some of us now spend far more L A M A A D D E R E E R time in food preparation than is strict- Note: * indicates an anagram. ly necessary for fueling our bodies. P R I N T S Y A R N C H Seeking to recover “the tastes we have The entry at 23A, the first I N K C I A U R E A T E lost,” we aim to recover the modes of noel, is a direction to remove N O E E O N L L A S E R work that produced those tastes—the the first l from each Across an- lost arts of baking, butchery, sausage- swer in a red row. E N D I N G E A R N E D making, preserving, and even, in Wil- son’s case, roasting using a mechanical jack in front of an open fire. Our kitch- ACROSS: 1. languish*; 7. lumps*; 10. C(l)ard; 11. *; 13. l(iterat*)e; 14. lush*-(d)er(rev.); 15. *; ens highlight the modern tensions be- 16. lever, rev.; 17. l(1-on)1(rev.)-zing; 20. *; 26. homophone; 27. a(X[mas])le; 28. llam-a, rev.; tween labor and leisure, between the 31. lad-de(E)r; 33. leer, rev.; 34. homophone; 36. (chimne)y-a-r(ibbo)n; 38. l(etter)-in-K(ringleland); technologies of efficiency and those of 40. hidden; 41. la(s[ky])er*; 42. (b)lending; 43. lear(n)ed*. authenticity, between modern food preparation as a way of freeing up time DOWN: 1. (Sant)a-l-1-mental*; 2. (1-Magi)native; 3. E-berg, rev.; 4. it-it-liza-a-coin*; 5. two mngs.; 6. *; 7. (c)upsize; 8. hidden in reverse; 9. St.-ra(GG-£)er*; 12. l(evantine)-E-M(agi); 18. *; 19. initials; for important things and as itself the 21. hidden; 22. s(el-ect*)ee; 24. fi(N[ativity])ance; 25. (b)ox-en; 27. (st)ar-rear; 29. (me)nora(h)*; ultimately important thing. 30. first letters; 32. (y)ear-l(ose); 34. (o)pine; 35. *; 36. homophone; 37. homophone.

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January Reviews Final 8.indd_1116 71 11/16/12 6:20 PM But that story about the “some of us” orities: “If anyone gives you a shiny new equipment, the better.” And the less who “love to cook” captures only one cooking utensil for Christmas, you’re as said about it, the better: “Your cooking mode of modernity and only one mod- thrilled as a janitor with a new bucket is a personal thing, like your sex life, ern iteration of the kitchen. There are of cleaning solvent,” she writes. “The and it shouldn’t be the subject of gen- other scenes, and these are absent from less attention paid to your cooking eral conversation.” n Wilson’s engrossing book, though they’re almost certainly a lot more com- mon than her absorbing AGA saga. One scene is, of course, the kitchens of the chameleon the poor and struggling; another is the kitchens of middle-class people unen- Thornton Wilder’s multifaceted life and work chanted by food and its preparation. What’s a pleasure for Wilson and me is By Michael Dirda a pain in the ass for a lot of people. In the past few years, fiftieth-anniversary editions of two of America’s most popu- lar cookbooks appeared. One—you’ve Discussed in this essay: guessed it—was Mastering the Art of Thornton Wilder: A Life, by Penelope Niven. HarperCollins. 848 pages. $39.99. French Cooking, by Julia Child, whose harpercollins.com. batterie de cuisine is now a foodie shrine Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays and Writings on Theater, edited by J. D. in the Smithsonian. The other—which McClatchy. The Library of America. 888 pages. $40. loa.org. I bet you haven’t guessed—is The I Hate Thornton Wilder: The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Other Novels 1926–1948, edited to Cook Book, by Peg Bracken, whose by J. D. McClatchy. The Library of America. 731 pages. $35. loa.org. pots and pans are now presumably in a Thornton Wilder: The Eighth Day, Theophilus North, Autobiographical Writings, landfill. More than 3 million copies of edited by J. D. McClatchy. The Library of America. 864 pages. $35. loa.org. I Hate were sold, and, after the book had been out of print for some years, the rights were eagerly snapped up by pub- oor Thornton Wilder! He was a land of the living and a land of the lishers who reckoned it was “in sync awarded the Pulitzer Prize three dead and the bridge is love, the only with lifestyles today” and that there Ptimes, produced not one but two survival, the only meaning.” were millions of home cooks still yearn- high school classics—the short novel Alas, the strikes against Wilder ing to whip up something quick and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) and the don’t stop there. He remained unmar- tasty with a packet of onion-soup mix, play Our Town (1938)—and essentially ried, enjoyed the company of elderly some canned peas, and that indispens- wrote the book for the phenomenally ladies, liked to pal around with hand- able tin of cream-of-mushroom soup popular Broadway musical Hello, Dolly! some young men, and seems to have without using any piece of kitchenware Most of his seven novels became best- been either that old-fashioned thing, more exotic than a Jell-O mold. The sellers, as well as selections of the Book a confirmed bachelor, or that politi- middle classes, too, know their way very of the Month Club. Throughout his cally incorrect thing, a closeted ho- well in and out of the microwave; they career, Wilder served as U.S. literary mosexual. Whichever the case, Wild- are a profitable market for Whole ambassador to the world, going on good- er hardly lived up to his last name. Foods’s ready-made Harvest Squash will missions to South America, attend- Worst of all, he was your father’s kind Soup and Marks & Spencer’s heat-and- ing conferences in Europe, and appear- of writer—successful. serve chicken Kiev; they eat out a lot; ing on the cover of Time magazine with As Penelope Niven demonstrates in they often eat alone; and with many of the American flag in the background. her capacious and authoritative Thorn- them, the made-from-scratch meal for All of these were, of course, terrible ton Wilder: A Life, Wilder was in fact the whole family is an endangered spe- career moves. Even before Wilder’s among the most cosmopolitan of men, cies. Just as the kitchen has become a death in 1975 at the age of seventy-eight, a writer who never repeated himself, a more social space, so the dining room he had come to be widely, if wrongly, fastidious stylist with a flair for every has fallen into relative disuse. perceived as the gray-flanneled Rotarian kind of comedy, from the most ironic to We talk a lot about food, but much of American letters, at once middlebrow, the most farcical, a major interpreter of of it is just talk: our kitchens may be patriotic, and—pick one—sentimental Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, fluent well appointed, but the equipment, like or sententious. That his work repeat- in French, German, Italian, and Span- the cookbooks—and a bit like the fish edly obsessed over the family and family ish, and a guy who could hold his liquor knife—is often for show. Bee Wilson life didn’t help. Out of context, even his at least as well as his friends Hemingway speaks to some of us, Peg Bracken to most-quoted sentence—from the close and Fitzgerald. Just as nearly all of Wild- others. Wilson’s people sit around in of The Bridge of San Luis Rey—sounds er’s novels remain fresh, readable, and their kitchens, trading stories about as hokey as a Hallmark card: “There is remarkably difficult to categorize, so sous vide machines and immersion Michael Dirda is the author, most recently, of some of his plays, such as the famous The blenders. Bracken’s people are just as Classics for Pleasure (Harcourt) and On Skin of Our Teeth (1942) and The Long contemporary but have different pri- Conan Doyle (Princeton University Press). Christmas Dinner (1931), could almost be

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