Book description
Bee Wilson is the beloved 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.
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.
