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

announced that Germans should put aside one Sunday, from October to March, to eat a one-pot meal: Eintopf. The idea was that people would save enough money in this way to donate whatever was saved to the poor. Cookbooks were hastily rewritten to take account of the new policy. One recipe collection listed no fewer than sixty-nine Eintopfs, including macaroni, goulash, Irish stew, Serbian rice soup, numerous cabbagey medleys, and Old German potato soup.
    The Nazi promotion of the Eintopf was a shrewd piece of propaganda. Many in Germany already viewed the Eintopf as the ultimate frugal meal, a dish of sacrifice and suffering. It was said that Germany had managed to beat the French in 1870 in part because the armies had filled their bellies with Erbswurst, a one-pot mixture of pea meal and beef fat, a kind of pease pudding. The Eintopf came with a sea of nostalgic memories.
    The Nazis’ celebration of the Eintopf was actually a sign of how most kitchens—in Germany, as elsewhere—had moved beyond one-pot cookery. Like many other fascist symbols, it harks back to the archaic. You could only see the Eintopf as a money saver in a society in which most meals were cooked using more than one pot. By reviving
the fairy-tale peasant ideal of a single cauldron hung on a single pothook, the Nazis inadvertently showed that the days of the cauldron were over. Even though times were tough in 1930s Germany, most cooks—which meant most housewives—expected to have an assortment of pots and pans to cook with, not just one.
     
    P etworth House in Sussex is one of the grandest residences in England. It has descended through the same aristocratic family, the Egremonts, since 1150, though the current building dates to the seventeenth century: a stupendous mansion set in a seven-hundred-acre deer park. It is now managed by the National Trust. Visitors to the kitchen can marvel at the gleaming copper batterie de cuisine. on display, more than 1,000 pieces in all: rows of saucepans and stewpans, plus multiple matching lids, all immaculately lined up, from large to small, from left to right, on several vast dressers. The kitchen at Petworth gives you a sense of what it meant to have “a place for everything and everything in its place,” as the cookery writer Mrs. Beeton said. The Petworth cooks would have had exactly the right pot for cooking each dish.
    The equipment at Petworth includes stockpots with taps at the bottom to release hot water (like tea urns); multiple stewpans, saute pans, and omelette pans in every size you could wish for; a large braising pan, with an indented lid designed to hold hot embers, so that the food was cooked from above and below at the same time. The pans devoted to fish cookery are a world unto themselves. In the grand old days, there would have been excellent fish from the Sussex coast, and the Petworth cooks were expected to do it justice. The house’s kitchens contain not just fish kettles (with pierced draining plates inside so that a fish could be lifted from its poaching water without disintegrating) and a fish fryer (a round open pan with a wire drainer) but a special turbot pan (diamond shaped to mimic the shape of the fish) and several smaller pans specifically for cooking mackerel.

    The kitchen at Petworth was not always so well-equipped. Historian Peter Brears studied inventories of the kitchen, documenting “every single movable item” used by the cooks; every pot, every pan. The first inventory took place in 1632; then 1764; then 1869. These documents offer a snapshot, century after century, of what cooking equipment was available in the richest British kitchens. The most telling detail is this. In 1632, during Stuart times, for all its wealth, Petworth owned not a single stewpan or saucepan. The devices for stewing or boiling at that time were: one large fixed “copper” (a giant vat that held boiling water, used to supply hot water for the whole house, not just for cooking); nine stockpots