Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson Read Free Book Online

also had beautifully made metal colanders and bronze chafing dishes, flattish metal patinae, vast cauldrons of brass and bronze, pastry molds in varying ornate shapes, fish kettles, frying pans with special pouring lips to dispense the sauce and handles that folded up. Much of what has remained looks disconcertingly modern. The range of Roman metal cookware was still impressing the chef Alexis Soyer in 1853. Soyer was particularly taken with a very high-tech sounding two-tiered vessel called the authepsa (the name means “self-boiling”). Like a modern steamer, it came in two layers, made of Corinthian brass. The top compartment, said Soyer, could be used
for gently cooking “light delicacies destined for dessert.” It was a highly valued utensil. Cicero describes one authepsa being sold at auction for such a high price that bystanders assumed the thing being sold was an entire farm.
    Technologically speaking, Roman metal utensils have had few rivals until the late twentieth century with the advent of pans made from multilayered metals. They even addressed themselves to the problem of avoiding hot spots when cooking, which remains a bugbear for saucepan designers. A metal pan has survived from Roman Britain with concentric rings in its base, whose purpose, it seems, was to create slow, steady heat distribution. Experiments with corrugated cooking pots versus smooth ones have shown that texturing the bottom of a pan reduces thermal stresses (the rings make it less susceptible to warping over high heat, strengthening the pan’s structure) —and also gives more cooking control: heat transfer happens more slowly with a textured pan, so there is less chance of annoying boilovers. A similar pattern of concentric rings appears on the base of Circulon cookware, launched in 1985, whose “unique Hi-Lo” grooves are said to reduce the surface abrasion and enhance the durability and nonstick qualities of the pan. As with aqueducts, straight roads, arched bridges, and books, this was a technology in which the Romans got there first.
     
    D espite the ingenuity of the Romans, most domestic cooks from the Bronze Age until the eighteenth century had to make do with a single big pot: the cauldron (often called a kettle or kittle). It was by far the largest utensil in the Northern European kitchen, and the one around which culinary activity was focused. Once the Romans had fallen, the range of cookware shrank back to basics. From a pot for every occasion, the one-pot meal was once again the dominant mode of cooking. The cauldron tended to decide for you how you could eat. Boiled, stewed, or braised was usually the answer (though a covered pot could also be used to make bread, which baked or steamed under the lid). The contents of the cauldron could
be fairly repetitive: “Pease porridge hot / Pease porridge cold / Pease porridge in the pot / Nine days old,” as the rhyme goes. A typical modest medieval household owned a knife, a ladle, an earthenware pan, perhaps a spit of some sort, and a cauldron. The knife chopped the ingredients to go in the cauldron along with water. Several hours later, the ladle poured out the finished soup or “pottage.” Supplementary pots took the form of a few cheap earthenware pots, and perhaps a skillet, which is a long-handled pan much smaller than the cauldron, used for heating up milk and cream.
    If further kitchen tools were owned, they were most likely accessories to the cauldron. Iron pot cranes or sways, some of them beautifully ornate, were designed to swing the heavy pot and its contents on its hook over the fire and off again, a form of temperature control as instant as flicking a switch, if rather more dangerous. Those who could not afford such elaborate machinery might own a brandreth or two, ingenious little three-legged stands designed to lift the cauldron above the direct heat of the fire. Flesh-hooks and flesh-forks were other cauldron accessories, used for suspending meat over the