The Weird Kitchen Secrets You Won't Read In Cookbooks
By Bee Wilson
ALL DESIGNED BY: MARTIN NICOLAUSSON.
Look around your kitchen. Big or small, it’s probably full of gadgets and tools. We use these things daily, but we never think that hard about where they came from in the first place. Look closer, though: There are hidden stories in your kitchen.
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Sure, you can roast a chicken without much thought in an electric-powered oven. But not too long ago, your ancestors may have used the help of a certain four-legged animal instead. And while the Victorians figured out how to make ice cream faster than we can today, they didn’t realize that what they were eating could kill them. Read on to discover some surprising facts that are guaranteed to change the way you look at your kitchen.
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Man’s Best Friend Used To Help Cook Dinner
If you think cooking is hard work now, imagine what it was like in the days of open-hearth roasting. The job of turning meat in front of the fire as it roasted was so unpleasant that special short-legged dogs — called “turnspits” — were bred to do it. In Tudor times, these poor dogs were forced to trundle around on a wheel attached to a spit. There are signs that these pups were too intelligent for the job; people said they used to run away and hide when they saw meat being prepared.
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You Can Blame Utensils For Your Braces
Cutlery has left its mark on our teeth as well as our food. It looks as if, astonishingly enough, the alignment of human teeth in an “overbite” goes back to the adoption of the table knife and fork, around 250 years ago. Our ancestors used to clamp hard food in their mouths, preventing the incisors from developing into an overbite. When we started cutting food into small morsels, our jaws changed. In China, however, the overbite emerged 800 to 1000 years sooner. The reason? Chopsticks.
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Canned Food: Talk About The Cart Before The Horse!
Kitchen inventions don’t always come exactly when you need them. In 1810, a Frenchman called Nicholas Appert announced his great new invention: canned food. Yep, Appert brought canned apricots, peas, chestnuts, and asparagus into the world. But it would be another 45 years before anyone thought to invent a can opener. In her book Pickled, Potted, and Canned, Sue Shephard explains that until the 1860s, canned food would come with instructions to “cut round the top near the outer edge with a chisel and hammer.”
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There Are 692 Ways To Beat An Egg
In the late 19th century, cooks in the United States went eggbeater-crazy. No fewer than 692 separate patents for eggbeaters were granted between 1856 and 1920, including the famous Dover whisk. But not one of these designs was an improvement on the French balloon whisk, which has been around since the 16th century and shows no sign of going out of fashion.
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How Our Favorite Comfort Food Changed Eating Forever
We take forks for granted now, but when they were first introduced in Britain during the Renaissance, they were seen as a strange joke. Why would you want to put metal prongs in your mouth along with food, instead of just using your fingers? Diners thought forks were ridiculous and unnecessary. Even Queen Elizabeth I, who owned forks, preferred to use her fingers. For centuries, the only people in Europe who ate with forks were Italians. Why? Because forks have always been the perfect tool for eating long, slippery strands of pasta.
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The Surprising Unit Of Measurement You Can Eat
Cooks the world over — from Italy to Afghanistan — have used the size of a walnut as a handy unit of measurement. The walnut has been used to measure carrots, sugar, parmesan fritters, and above all, butter. Why the walnut? The great thing about the Persian walnut, apart from its rich oily taste, is its consistent size — around 2.5 to 3.5 cm in diameter. A walnut of butter is somewhat more than a smidgen and less than a dollop.
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Homemade Ice Cream In Five Minutes? Watch Out
Homemade ice cream in five minutes flat? It sounds impossible. But in 1885, a brilliant Victorian inventor named Agnes Marshall marketed a hand-cranked ice cream maker that did just that, using only ice and salt. Marshall’s gizmo really works; I’ve used one. You rotate a horizontal handle, and the wide, circular bucket freezes the mixture almost instantly. It’s way faster than any electric model on the market today. The only flaw is you can’t eat the finished ice cream. Marshall made her machine out of zinc, because it was cheap — not realizing it would make the finished product toxic to eat.
Worried About Being Poisoned? These Chopsticks Are For You
More expensive does not always mean better when it comes to cutlery. One Chinese emperor used silver chopsticks for a while, not just because they were so luxurious, but to keep him safe from poisoning. The idea was that the silver would corrode and turn black if it came into contact with arsenic. But, silver chopsticks turned out to be heavy, bad at picking up food (too slippery), and could turn burning-hot. So in the end, they were abandoned in favor of porcelain chopsticks.
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