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Consider the fork...

And just about everything else in your kitchen
food_glenda1

Consider the fork. And the pot, the pan, the spoon, and the knife, especially the important knife.

For that matter, nearly everything we use to cook and eat with deserves due thought and consideration, partly because it is so commonplace and partly because it is so greatly curious how we have come to land upon these utensils and related techniques in our pursuit of eating.

Fortunately, Bee Wilson came out with a lovely book published late last year called just that: Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, which nicely gets us out of the hot water when it comes to scooting about on the web looking for answers, and not always knowing how accurate or informed the informer is.

Consider the Fork is an assured balance of social and culinary history and anthropology. Besides making for a delightful read, it also includes wise culinary tips Wilson has culled from her deep well of knowledge.

A former research fellow in the history of ideas at St John's College, Cambridge, Wilson has been writing "The Kitchen Thinker" food column for The Sunday Telegraph's Stella magazine for years. Prior to that she was food critic for the New Statesman, a British political and cultural weekly published since 1913. One of her columns discussed Adolf Hitler's diet. In between she's written for numerous publications, including the London Review of Books, as well as two other unexpectedly quirky and interesting books on food: The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us and Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee.

But back to those culinary tips. One of them was particularly interesting to me after a recent conversation with my favourite farmers' market egg supplier. Mike knows we love his farm's full-flavoured eggs and he was assuring me they don't need refrigeration. Apparently he and his farm mates just grab their eggs out of the hen house and keep them on the kitchen counter until they need them. A quick wash off and Bob's your uncle, or at least your fried egg.

I was a little surprised at this news, especially given the hot and humid weather lately. Also, I wondered, if that's the case, then why all the expense of refrigeration for eggs in transport and at the store. So I put my eggs in the fridge once I got home.

Bee Wilson to the rescue. In her chapter called "Ice," which has to do with all things refrigeration, she explains that Mike and I are both half-right. In cool climates, eggs are better if stored out of the fridge, as Mike says, at least if we use them up quickly. "A room-temperature yolk is less likely to break when you fry it," she writes, a tip I could well use as I often break them. But, she warns, our room temperatures may not be the same as hers.

According to a 2007 study done in Japan, when eggs infected with salmonella were stored at 10 C (50 F) for six weeks, there was no growth in bacteria. Even at 20 C (68 F) bacterial growth was negligible. However, once room temperature rose to 25 C (77 F), which is as hot as our kitchen has been these past few weeks, if not hotter, salmonella growth is "rampant." So I'm glad I popped my eggs in the fridge, but I'll be sure to set them out before next Sunday's breakfast and see if I don't get fewer broken yolks when their sunny sides are up.

As for the historical bits, which will make you rethink so much in your kitchen, I'll start with basics. When it comes to recipes — where else would you start? — Wilson tells us that the earliest recorded ones found so far come from Mesopotamia (where Iraq, Iran and Syria are located today) and date back 4,000 years.

They were rendered in cuneiform on three stone tablets and, for the most part, are all about how to cook in one pot, mostly things like broths and court boullions. "Assemble all the ingredients in the pot" is a frequent instruction, she says.

It was about a thousand years prior to those Mesopotamian recipes, circa 3,000 BCE, that cooking, rather than fire roasting became the norm for cooking. Clay pots had been the first innovations, then with the Bronze Age big cauldrons became the norm — cauldrons which could be placed directly on a fire without exploding.

Once metal pots were created, other pots and pans followed. The Romans had a huge variety: metal colanders, chafing dishes, even metal pastry molds and fish kettles as well as a metal pan for shallow frying fish that was called a patella, from which sprang the Spanish paella and the Italian padella, which were much like our modern frying pans.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, and with it all their pot variations, most cooks up until the 1700s made do with one big single pot — the cauldron or kettle. Wilson points out how one-pot cooking, incumbent upon scarcity — scarcity of fuel, utensils and ingredients — took on a cultural identity, with dishes like the French pot au feu, Irish stew, Portugal's dobrada and the Spanish cocido.

Now here's the quirky bit: one-pot cooking as cultural signifier. According to Wilson, in 1933, "the Nazis borrowed the frugal image of the one-pot meal, putting it to ideological use." They announced that all Germans should eat a one-pot meal called an Eintopf the first Sunday of every month between October and March. People were to donate the money they saved making this frugal meal to a national charity called Winterhilfswerk. More than that, the meal was meant to symbolize, as Hitler's own belaboured, clichéd paintings did, a return to an idealized, old-fashioned time, in this case peasants cooking in a single pot hung from a pothook over an open fire.

As for that fork to consider, it pops up throughout the book, in the chapter called "Knife," its chief companion and from which it originated; in the chapter called "Grind" as a useful tool for whipping up eggs, at least more useful than a "birchen rod,"; and in "Eat" itself, which forks are the absolute most useful for. But then there are chopsticks. And spoons.

Yes, we have fork cultures and we have chopstick cultures, but everyone in the whole wide world uses spoons.

Consider that.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning journalist who has more spoons than forks in her drawers.