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

bubbling liquid or for retrieving things from its depths.
    Cauldrons came in many shapes and sizes. In Britain, they were usually “sag-bottomed” (as opposed to pot-bellied) and made of bronze or iron, so that they could withstand the heat of the fire. If they had three legs, this was a sign they were designed to sit in the embers. Iron cooking pots, which tended to be smaller, were round-bellied, with handles for hanging over the fire. Sticks or tongs were used to manipulate the handle, which would become prohibitively hot. Cooking with a single pot could give rise to strange combinations of ingredients, all jumbled together. It is not clear how often the cauldron was cleaned out, in the absence of running water and dish detergent. Mostly, the scrapings of the previous meal were left in the bottom to season the next one.
    European folklore is haunted by the specter of the empty cauldron. It is the old equivalent of the empty fridge: a symbol of outright hunger. In Celtic myth, cauldrons are capable of summoning up both
eternal abundance and absolute knowledge. To have a pot and nothing to put in it was the depths of misery. In the story called “Stone Soup” (which has many versions) some travelers come to a village carrying an empty cooking pot and beg for some food. The villagers refuse. The travelers produce a stone and some water and claim they are making “stone soup.” The villagers are so fascinated, they each add a little something to the pot—a few vegetables, some seasoning—until finally the “stone soup” has become a rich cassoulet-like hot pot, from which all can feast.
    Acquiring a cauldron required a sizable outlay. In 1412, the worldly goods of Londoners John Cole and his wife, Juliana, included a sixteen-pound cauldron worth four shillings (the cost of an earthenware pot at this time was around a penny, with twelve pennies to the shilling). Once bought or bartered, a metal pot might be repaired many times to prolong its life; if it sprang holes, you would pay a tinker to solder them. A bronze cauldron was dug up in County Down in a bog in 1857. It showed six areas of repair; small holes had been filled in with rivets; larger ones were mended by pouring molten bronze onto the gap.
    A cauldron might not be the ideal vessel for every dish. But once acquired, it was likely to be the one and only pot (supplemented, if at all, by a small earthenware vessel or two). Every culture has its own take on the one-pot dish, as well as variations on the specific pot that was used to make it: pot au feu, Irish stew, dobrada, cocido. One-pot cookery is a cuisine of scarcity: scarce fuel, scarce utensils, scarce ingredients. Nothing is wasted. It is no coincidence that food for the relief of poverty has almost always taken the form of soup. If there is not enough to go around, you can always add some more water and bubble it up one more time.
    Cooks devised some crafty ways around the limitation of the single pot. By putting vegetables, potatoes, and pudding in separate muslin bags in the boiling water, it was possible to cook more than one thing at once in a single vessel. The pudding might end up tasting a bit cabbagey, and the cabbage rather puddingy, but at least it
made a change from soup. In Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson describes how “tea” was made for the men coming home from the fields:
    Everything was cooked in the one utensil; the square of bacon, amounting to little more than a taste each; cabbage, or other green vegetables in one net, potatoes in another, and the roly-poly swathed in a cloth. It sounds a haphazard method in these days of gas and electric cookers; but it answered its purpose, for, by carefully timing the putting in of each item and keeping the simmering of the pot well regulated, each item was kept intact and an appetising meal was produced.
    In the 1930s, the Nazis borrowed the frugal image of the one-pot meal, putting it to ideological use. In 1933, Hitler’s government