Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson

(Basic, $27)

Most every kitchen drawer silently harbors “a rich history of technological promise and dashed hopes,” said Christine Sismondo in the Toronto Star. But until British food writer Bee Wilson came along, no one had thought to yank open all our drawers and cupboards in order to recount the tale of how certain kitchen tools changed the way we eat while others merely promised revolution and flamed out. Wilson’s “clearly written and methodically researched” new book isn’t just about all the useless gadgets that TV has sold us. It’s comprehensive enough to also unmask the trusty measuring cup as a “wildly” inaccurate tool that snuck into our kitchens mostly because of a hit 1846 recipe book.

Wilson appears to leave no device uncovered, from the braising spit to the cleaver, said Alexandra Lange in NewYorker.com. In fact, it’s only when we get to Chapter 6 that we finally consider that “Johnny-come-lately” of the dinner table, the fork. Spoons, we learn, have been around forever; even chimpanzees fashion spoons to scoop termites up to their hungry mouths. And knives have an immensely long history, too. But for centuries, Western civilization suffered fork anxiety. The implement, which made its first appearance in the hand of an 11th-century princess, was for several hundred more years “mocked as useless and even obscene.” Eating with the hands was considered more civilized.

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As fascinating as the ways our tools have changed are the ways they’ve changed us, said Christopher Kimball in The Wall Street Journal. Take that “single greatest achievement in cookware—the cooking pot.” As Wilson notes, cooking in water extended lives by removing toxins from food. It also changed human anatomy, eliminating the need for meat-tearing teeth and thus hastening the advent of our now-standard overbites. Alas, Wilson sets forth such “tasty but loosely connected facts” without ever venturing an organizing theme. Consider the Fork makes a “digestible, entertaining meal.” But it could have accomplished more had it stuffed in less.