CHOP

 A few days ago I picked up a copy of PPC 112 - 

that’s ‘Petits Propos Culinaires’ – a title guaranteed to keep out the riff raff, and 

subtitled far more engagingly, ‘Essays and notes on food, cookery and cookery

books.’  

 

Inside, among others, was an extraordinary article titled ‘Chinese Chopsticks’ by A.R.T. Kemasang who I’d never heard of but is apparently, or was in 2018 when the magazine was published, an Indonesian writer and researcher living in London.  I think it’s a man though I can’t be 100% sure.

 

Kemasang is very pro-chopstick especially the Chinese version. He’s less keen on Japanese chopsticks because they have pointed ends.  He writes, ‘The Japanese most probably use the pointed ends of their chopsticks as the prongs of a fork, to stab some of the food especially the spherical shaped meat balls.  It is, as you may guess, an action natural to predators of all kinds.’

 

Well I probably wouldn’t have guessed that, but it’s when we come on to noodles that Kemasang gets especially intense. Yes, we know that chopsticks can be used to eat noodles, he says, but why haven’t the Italians invented an equivalent for eating spaghetti?

 

In a footnote he adds, ‘the best brains in the Occidental world have failed to fashion the right tool for eating spaghetti … Europeans invariably fashion special tool(s) for each specific requirement such as, inter alia, fish fork, oyster fork (andoyster knife), sucket fork, bread knife, cheese knife, ham knife, steak knife, knives for fish, onion etc, spoons for caviar, honey, ice cream and salt, marrow spoon, mustard spoon, olive spoon, apple/pineapple corer, (boiled) egg scissors, cherry pipper, nut crackers, nutmeg grater, mote spoon etc. etc.’

(I wish he’d listed the strawberry huller, one of which I bought for my mum and I think it was the most successful present I ever gave her.)

 

Kemasang seems to think this inventiveness is in some way a bad thing, but if these things are uniquely Occidental, I do wonder how the Chinese open oysters or crack nuts.  Not with a chopstick surely.

 

And in any case I had to look up a few of these ‘tools’ – not least sucket fork and mote spoon.

 

The mote spoon, I learn, is a kind of tea spoon with a perforated scoop to filter loose tea from a cup, and also had a spiked handle to unclog tea from a teapot spout.  I had no idea.  It looks like this

Likewise the sucket spoon was for eating sucket - a 17th century desert consisting of dried fruit and citrus peel in a syrup.  But as you see below the sucket spoon has a bowl at one end and a two-pronged fork at the other, which I’d say makes it a spork (op cit).

I never knew there was any such thing as an onion knife or a marrow spoon though I can see that they would both occasionally be very useful.

It also seems to me that inscrutable those Occidentals have indeed devised an implement or two for eating spaghetti.

 

The multipronged fork:

and more commonly the revolving, wind up fork:

 

I’m not sure how well these work. Personally I’ve always been pretty happy with an ordinary western fork for eating spaghetti but I’m glad I don’t have to eat it using chopsticks.  

 

But wait – OMG – my researches reveal the existence of something called a chork – a cross between chopsticks and a fork.  I don’t want or need one and yet I feel pleased to know  that such a thing exists.

 

 

SPITS AND SPORKS

I was recently sent a copy of Bee Wilson’s new book Consider The Fork.   (The publisher is Basic Books.)  The subtitle is “A History of How We Cook and Eat” although it might equally be called a “a curious history of kitchen technology.”

It’s a splendid volume, serious but by no means solemn, and full of the most surprising information.  Who knew for example that the Kenwood mixer was devised by someone named Ken Wood?  Or that the first food processor to be marketed in the USA  - the  Cuisinart - originally sold for the equivalent of $800?

There’s also a terrific section about the spit.  Wilson goes to visit Ivan Day (that's him above), a hands-on food historian, whose name crops up frequently in the wilder highlands of gastronomy, and who cooks the best roast Bee Wilson has ever tasted, using a spit and an open fire.  Day insists that spit roasting is a far from crude or primitive method of cooking, and the reader is left with the realization that most modern roasting is actually a form of baking:  true roasting involves fire not an oven.

Spits, of course, have to be turned, and we know that young boys were sometimes used to turn spits.  Wilson tells the story of John Macdonald (born 1741) who rose to the rank of footman, but was initially employed as cradle rocker, a job from which he was sacked at the age of 5, and he had to change career to become a spit turner.

Most of us know that dogs were sometimes used instead of boys, hence the now extinct breed of Turnspit. But who knew that geese were sometimes used too?  Dogs apparently were too smart and ran away.  And geese could go on for twelve hours at a time.

In the United States, that bastion of freedom and morality, animal rights protestors railed successfully against the use of dogs in kitchens, and so in the later 19^th century Henry Bergh, founder of the ASPCA, was able to report that small black children were being used instead.

I don’t suppose a child can really be considered a kitchen gadget, but the book did get me thinking about which kitchen gadgets we really need and which we don’t.  I was given an electric lemon squeezer as a wedding present, and squeezing lemons really isn’t a task that requires much automation.  I believe I used it once.  And who really needs an electric pepper grinder, a pneumatic bottle opener, a motorized cocktail shaker, or even one of those acrylic bagel slicers?  (OK, OK, I know some people are bound to say these items are absolutely indispensible).

And then I started thinking about non-existent or fantasy inventions that we really could use – a foolproof oyster opener, a device for extracting salt when you’ve over salted, a device that absolutely guarantees you can crack an egg without ever breaking the yolk.  Ah, dream on, Geoff.

Anyway, life being as it is, Michael Kupperman’s latest ironically deranged cartoon strip features a parody of the new Bond film Skyfall and imagines a low-budget MI5 in which the old firm can no longer afford, say, an Aston Martin with ejector seats and instead comes up with this:

You can see and read the whole Kupperman thing here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-kupperman/james-bond-in-skymall-par_1_b_2032322.html

Some say the spork is one of the most significant inventions in the history of eating.  Bee Wilson devotes four pages to it.