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.