According to anthropologists cooking literally changed our lives! Before we learned to cook people spent hours hunting and gathering food and ate it raw, and then, because raw food was not easily digested, we quickly got hungry and had to feed ourselves often and in large quantities. Once we figured out the transformative nature of fire in making food more edible, digestible, and nutritious, a lot of the time we had spent in eating. hunting and gathering could now be directed in other ways to make life more safe and comfortable. It may be overstating it a bit, but learning to cook, may have helped invent the wheel!

Bee Wilson’s Consider the Fork takes us on a delightful journey through history using the everyday implements of cooking- the knife, fork, measuring cups, egg beater, toaster and even the ice cream maker- as our guides, telling their history and development and making the connections to help us understand the relationship between food, cooking and the tools that make it all possible.

Although everything in her book is fascinating there were a few things that I found particularly notable. Interestingly, the US is the only country in the world that measures dry ingredients by volume in measuring cups rather than by weight, a distinction that Wilson attributes to the fact that in our nation’s formative years we were constantly expanding territory, moving ever westward so it was difficult to carry scales that would remain accurate and thus we developed recipes that measured dry ingredients by volume instead.

Wilson also considers the difference that eating utensils had on the development of cuisines. In the West the first eating implement was the knife- a sharp dagger like utensil that everyone carried with them and then used to cut up the hunks of meat served at the table into relatively bite sized pieces. In China, however, chopsticks were the implements that were used to eat and thus each piece of food needed to be cut before cooking so that it could eaten easily with the chopsticks.

Another thing I found fascinating is the fact that the toaster was invented and became popular only after it became more difficult to have servants in your home and was marketed as a time saving device. Or what about the idea that the fork was considered a French affectation in much of the rest of Europe for quite some time before it was finally adopted.

Wilson’s wonderful and witty journey into the history of cooking has many surprising insights that will delight anyone who cooks or eats!

Brenda’s Rating: ****(4 Stars out of 5)

Recommend this book to: Sharon, Marian and Lauren

Book Study Worthy: Yes-but you need to cook and eat something together!

Read in ebook format.