Consider the Fork

wok-frying remains the basic Chinese cooking technique, a cuisine born of fuel poverty. Every meal had to be founded on frugal calculations about how to extract the maximum taste from the minimum input of energy. ‘Les Rosbifs’ had no such worries. The roast beef of England reflected our densely wooded landscape, and the fact that we had plenty of g

Many people think that spit-roasting meant roasting over the fire, but in fact the cooking took place a good distance to the side of the fire, the meat only getting moved close up right at the end to brown it. This is a similar technique to a modern Argentine asado, where a whole animal is slow-roasted at an angle several feet from an outdoor charc

Historians of technology often quote Kranzberg’s First Law (formulated by Melvin Kranzberg in a seminal essay in 1986): ‘Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.’

on YouTube you can watch chef Martin Yan breaking down a chicken in eighteen seconds). Chinese

‘Give me a sun, I care not how hot,’ wrote the poet Byron when he visited Istanbul in 1813, ‘and sherbet, I care not how cool, and my Heaven is as easily made as your Persian’s.’

Most days, my breakfast consists of coffee; toast, butter, marmalade; and orange juice, if the children haven’t drunk it all. Described like this, as bare ingredients, it is a meal that could belong to any moment of the past 350 years. Coffee has been consumed in England since the mid seventeenth century; oranges for the juice and the marmalade sin

On paper, therefore, the Victorian logic looks sound: once you have got cooking water at or near 212 °F/100 °C, it shouldn’t really make much of a difference whether the water is vigorously bubbling or only simmering. Yet our eyes and tastebuds tell us that it does. The reason is that properly boiling water moves chaotically and transfers heat to t

John Macdonald (1741–96), a Scottish Highlander, was a famous footman who wrote memoirs of his experiences in service. An orphan who had been sacked from a previous job rocking a baby’s cradle, Macdonald found work in a gentleman’s house turning the spit. He was aged just five.

But look closer at one of your wooden spoons (I’m assuming you have at least one because I’ve never been in any kitchen that didn’t). Feel the grain. Is it a workmanlike beech factory spoon or a denser maplewood or olivewood whittled by an artisan? Now look at the shape. Is it oval or round? Slotted or solid? Cupped or flat? Perhaps it has a pointy