Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat

Bee Wilson is the food writer and historian who writes as the 'Kitchen Thinker' in the Sunday Telegraph, and is the author of Swindled!. Her charming and original new book, Consider the Fork, explores how the implements we use in the kitchen have shaped the way we cook and live. A wooden spoon - most trusty and loveable of kitchen implements - looks like the opposite of 'technology', as the word is normally understood. But look closer. Is it oval or round? Does it have an extra-long handle to give your hand a place of greater safety from a hot skillet? Or a pointy bit at one side to get the lumpy bits in the corner of the pan? It took countless inventions to get to the well-equipped kitchens we have now, where our old low-tech spoon is joined by mixers, freezers and microwaves, but the story of human invention in the kitchen is largely unseen. Discovering the histories of our knives, ovens and kitchens themselves, Bee Wilson explores, among many other things, why the French and Chinese have such different cultures of the knife; and why Roman kitchens contain so many implements we recognize. Encompassing inventors, scientists, cooks and chefs, this is the previously unsung history of our kitchens.

About the Author :
Bee Wilson is a British food writer and historian. She writes a weekly food column in The Sunday Telegraph's Stella magazine, for which she has three times been named the Guild of Food Writers food journalist of the year. She has also contributed to The Sunday Times, the TLS, the New Yorker and the London Review of Books. She is the author of previous two books, The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us (2004) and Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee, the Dark History of the Food Cheats (2008), a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.

Review :
I love Bee Wilson's writing Bee Wilson's Consider the Fork, though a work of considerable scholarship, is also a cracking good read, as enjoyable as it is enlightening This scholarly and witty book, packed full of fascinating information and thrilling insights, is as enlightening as it is a joy to read Mind meets kitchen: Bee Wilson sizes up every kitchen implement from the wooden spoon to the ergonomic Microplane, and gives us its history, including versions that led up to each object but did not survive for lack of fitness. Her climax is the kitchen, the room itself, the affluent modern version of which has never been so highly designed; so well equipped; so stylish; or so empty. She conducts us on a sobering, entertaining, and instructive tour I was so enthralled by Bee Wilson's new book that I found it hard to put down. As always she is a completely reliable guide to her subject, and this history of how we cook and eat is full of surprises - how human table manners have changed our bodies, and how technological changes can affect our personal tastes in food. Her authority is complete, her scholarship lightly worn and her writing terrific A fast-paced and mind-opening investigation into the quirky stories behind our daily interactions with food [A] delightfully informative history of cooking and eating from the prehistoric discovery of fire to twenty-first-century high-tech, low-temp soud-vide-style cookery In her wonderful new book, food writer Bee Wilson unpacks the paraphernalia of the average kitchen ... Witty, scholarly, utterly absorbing and fired by infectious curiosity, Consider the Fork wears its impressive research lightly; Wilson has given us a long view on everyday life - the early experiments of our primitive ancestors cast a long and complex shadow over the meals we eat. Substantial and entertaining ... Bee Wilson belongs to a rare breed: the academic who can write. This book is dense with research, all of it rendered highly palatable ... A keen cook, Wilson has no trouble sorting the culinary fads from the game-changers. Bee Wilson has a knack for curating fact. Before you can get tired of reading about spitjacks in the Fire chapter, the subject matter hops into a page or two on tandoor ovens, then you find out about thermodynamics, cast-iron ranges and the blaze that set off the Great Fire of London. Throughout the book there are well-judged measures of historical information, alongside anecdotes and a touch of science. Oh, and anthropology ... a fascinating insight.