Book Review
Consider The Fork
"Cooking is a technology that deserves exposition like any other."
5/5 stars

Biggest strengths of the book:

1. Its ability to tie together so many neat factoids and create a narrative arc and keep it interesting.

2. It gives a reader pause to think about how much technology yesterday went into developing things that we take for granted today.

It's the simplest thing to boil up some ramen noodles or go to the freezer and get some ice cream, but it took a lot of concerted effort to make it such that those things were available to the masses.

3. It's a magnificent vocabulary / concept builder. (I don't mean in the way that weird academics do, where they create a bunch of jargon to describe things that exist nowhere in reality. Or, they tried to sound really cute with excessive use of words such as "qua." I mean in the way that it introduces the reader to cooking techniques that he has likely never heard of before as well as giving a host of new recipe ideas.)

Of the book:

279 pps prose/8 chapters
~35pps/chapter
Bibliography~300 sources
Sources are not-so-tightly pointed back to each page.

Neat factoids (limited to three per chapter)

Intro. Smoke from indoor fire skills 1.5 million people every year in the developing world. Softer, more processed foods yield more calories because it takes less energy to digest them and the converse is true with tougher less processed foods.

Ch 1. Roasting is the oldest form of cooking, and boiling with has only been with us for 9 or 10,000 years. Geothermal cooking may have been one method of boiling, but was rare. Pots and pans were a leap of the technological imagination, and they are tools that are continuously being refined. (Teflon? Cast iron? Aluminum? Copper? Anodized?).

Ch. 2. The knife is actually the oldest tool in the cooks arsenal--even older than fire by 1 to 2 million years. A home with a Chinese cleaver needs no other type of knife.

Ch. 3. Three ways to cook things. First is radiation. (The heat and the surface do not touch each other.) Second is conduction (Material to material.) Third is convection. (Air/water/oil diffuses heat from one substance to another.)

Ch. 4. We take standardized amounts for granted, but it took a long time to get there. Recipes for thousands of years were done with quantities relative to some roughly known size. (Walnuts. Eggs. Etc.) The American system of cooking measurement uses mostly volumes, but weight is used in some other places. The invention of the thermometer was also a great technological leap.

Ch.5. Food processors and grinding technologies were brilliant inventions. Simple time savers. In earlier history (and in present times in developing countries), it is amazing how much time was taken grinding up different things to get them into an edible form.

Ch. 6. Spoons are used throughout all cultures - even those that don't use forks. (Japanese and Chinese both use chopsticks but they also have spoons.) Different types of eating utensils generate their own manners--some of which survive, and some of which do not. The now-ubiquitous fork has a history of only about 300 years.

Ch. 7. The can opener was only invented about half a century after canning itself was invented--and even then, with lots of trial and error. More generally, food storage is a technology that is not much more than a century old. (Before that time, you could only buy what you could immediately use and you could only sell what could immediately be bought. Even by 1948, only 2% of British households owned a fridge. p. 242.)

Ch. 8. Technology can be expanded in two ways: First by extrapolating on what already exists, and second by creating something wholly novel. Thought questions about the choice to cook either like a traditional "grandmother" or a "mad scientist." Who knew? Potato peelers have only been with us since 1990.

Second order thoughts:

1. Problem: in the Chinese section of the book, the author insists on using aggravating Wade Giles in preference to the almost universally used Hanyu pinyin.

2. The disgusting Wade-Giles spelling notwithstanding, the way that I know the author has done her homework is that her comments on Chinese cooking are extremely accurate and incisive. (I am married to her in Chinese woman, and indeed a Chinese house only needs one single cleaver. Knives are not considered quite disgusting to use at a Chinese table, but they just don't have the technique down.)

3. There are about 5 times as many people who speak English in America as in England. A lot of us have no idea what is a "rasher" of bacon or a "flash light" (that is English for "pilot light," and what we use for flashlight they call a "torch").

4. Excellent quote (p.264): "Yesterday's future is tomorrow's junk."

5. It seems that the United States leads the way also in kitchen technology--that is, at least, once you understand cookery as technology.

6. There's just so much in this book that I want to restudy and retain, but even to remember 1/2 or 1/3 of what is in this book is to learn quite a bit.

Verdict Strongly recommended.

New vocabulary:

bibimbap
cafe
isinglass
cafetière
siphon brewer
acrid limon
dolsot
pistou
cider owl
dangle spit
muffineer
moules marnières
haggis
chytra
konzo
cassava
chicken brick
patella/paella/Padilla
Mallard reaction
brandreth
dobrada
cocido
eintopf
ebullition
cocotte
ramekin
mandolin slicer
baton cut
béchamel
velouté
espagnole
allemande
cutlet basher
brunoise
onglet
pavé
entrecôte
tournet knife
Gorgonzola cutter
santoku
fumosities
mezzaluna
spiedo dropping
hasteners
tsin bean
curfew (in the kitchen tool sense)
hatelet
commis chef
salamander
scullion
turnspit
turnbroach
pastry jagger
cast iron kitchener
rasher (of bacon)
marzipan
daktylos
blue shimmer powder
shirasu
carbonized vegetable powder
Scoville scale
refractometer
saccharometer
pappy (mushy)
mortrew
stagiare
quern
romesco
rue
lovage
mortaria
barm
moliquet
syllabubs
quenelle
celeriac
taramasalata
trifid
trefoil
kafgeer
sucket
waribashi
splayd
knoon
spife
knork
kumiss
stockefish
stillroom
bully beef (English for "corned beef")
putanesca
amatriciana
shambles (unsold meat)
curio
bergamot
pacotizing
larder
sago
Turk's head (jello mold)
Mouli food meal
molecular gastronomy / techno emotional cookery / hyperquezine/vanguard cooking / modernist cuisine
bromelin
espuma
salsify
Frederick kitchen
Frankfort kitchen
Tufflex
Santoprene
Microplate grater
The Quooker
Turkish ibrik