Read Online Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson - Free Book Online
Authors: Bee Wilson
Ads: Link
asparagus would have been stalkier, as a rule; greens and carrots would have been tougher. Even with our
tender modern vegetables, the Victorian method of boiling does not result in total sogginess. I’ve tried slowly simmering sliced carrots crammed in a little pan for forty-five minutes. Amazingly, they still have some bite to them, though not as much as when they are thrown into a large stainless steel pan of water at a rolling boil for five minutes, or, better still, steamed in a steamer.
The Victorian mastery of boiling technology was flawed. It’s perfectly right that at normal pressure you can never get water hotter than 212°F (at higher pressures, it can get much hotter, which is why a pressure cooker cooks food so fast). But this is not the only factor determining how fast food boils. Also important is ebullition—the extent to which boiling water bubbles. In basic terms, heat transfer in cooking is determined by the difference in temperature between the food and the source of heat. On paper, therefore, the Victorian logic looks sound: once you have gotten cooking water at or near 212°F, it shouldn’t really make much of a difference whether the water is vigorously bubbling or only simmering. Yet our eyes and taste buds tell us that it does. The reason is that properly boiling water moves chaotically and transfers heat to the food several times faster than simmering water. The heat transfer also works quicker when there is more water in the pan in proportion to the food. A large pan with plenty of water and not too many vegetables in it will cook far faster than a perfectly tailored little copper pan crammed to capacity. This explains why even when Victorians advise boiling vegetables “briskly,” as Isabella Beeton sometimes does in Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, the cooking times are still long.
We of the pasta generation know this instinctively. We may not be able to rustle up a meat glaze or a charlotte russe. If you gave us a copper turbot kettle, we would have no idea what to do with it, not that this matters, because the fillets of fish we mostly consume are fine when poached in a normal pan. But we mostly understand how to fast-boil far better than the Victorians: we take a package of fusilli, get out our largest pot, and boil it as fast as we can in an abundance of water for ten minutes until perfectly al dente, before tossing with
butter or a rich tomatoey sauce. The single thing we look for in a pasta pot is large volume. Having mastered this skill, we can easily transfer it to vegetables: four minutes for broccoli, six for green beans, anoint with sea salt and a spritz of lemon and eat. Victorian cooks performed many feats far more daunting: jellies shaped like castles, architectural pies. But the simplicity of boiled vegetables was beyond them.
Victorian boiled food had another drawback: the pans themselves. Copper is a wonderful conductor of heat; the only pan metal more conductive is silver. But pure copper is poisonous when it comes into contact with food, particularly acids. Copper pans were thinly lined with neutral tin, but over time the surface of the tin wore down, exposing the copper beneath. “Let your pans be frequently retinned” is common advice in cookbooks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If human beings then were anything like human beings now, cooks must often have postponed retinning the pans and ended up poisoning those they cooked for. Cooks ignorant of the ill effects of copper actually sought out its greening powers, using unlined copper pans to make pickled green walnuts and green gherkins. In short, copper pans are great, apart from the fact that they potentially make food taste bad and poison you. Suddenly, those shiny Victorian batteries de cuisine. do not look quite so desirable.
T he search for the ideal cooking pot is not easy. There is always a trade-off. As the great food writer James Beard once put it: “Even in this best of all
tender modern vegetables, the Victorian method of boiling does not result in total sogginess. I’ve tried slowly simmering sliced carrots crammed in a little pan for forty-five minutes. Amazingly, they still have some bite to them, though not as much as when they are thrown into a large stainless steel pan of water at a rolling boil for five minutes, or, better still, steamed in a steamer.
The Victorian mastery of boiling technology was flawed. It’s perfectly right that at normal pressure you can never get water hotter than 212°F (at higher pressures, it can get much hotter, which is why a pressure cooker cooks food so fast). But this is not the only factor determining how fast food boils. Also important is ebullition—the extent to which boiling water bubbles. In basic terms, heat transfer in cooking is determined by the difference in temperature between the food and the source of heat. On paper, therefore, the Victorian logic looks sound: once you have gotten cooking water at or near 212°F, it shouldn’t really make much of a difference whether the water is vigorously bubbling or only simmering. Yet our eyes and taste buds tell us that it does. The reason is that properly boiling water moves chaotically and transfers heat to the food several times faster than simmering water. The heat transfer also works quicker when there is more water in the pan in proportion to the food. A large pan with plenty of water and not too many vegetables in it will cook far faster than a perfectly tailored little copper pan crammed to capacity. This explains why even when Victorians advise boiling vegetables “briskly,” as Isabella Beeton sometimes does in Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, the cooking times are still long.
We of the pasta generation know this instinctively. We may not be able to rustle up a meat glaze or a charlotte russe. If you gave us a copper turbot kettle, we would have no idea what to do with it, not that this matters, because the fillets of fish we mostly consume are fine when poached in a normal pan. But we mostly understand how to fast-boil far better than the Victorians: we take a package of fusilli, get out our largest pot, and boil it as fast as we can in an abundance of water for ten minutes until perfectly al dente, before tossing with
butter or a rich tomatoey sauce. The single thing we look for in a pasta pot is large volume. Having mastered this skill, we can easily transfer it to vegetables: four minutes for broccoli, six for green beans, anoint with sea salt and a spritz of lemon and eat. Victorian cooks performed many feats far more daunting: jellies shaped like castles, architectural pies. But the simplicity of boiled vegetables was beyond them.
Victorian boiled food had another drawback: the pans themselves. Copper is a wonderful conductor of heat; the only pan metal more conductive is silver. But pure copper is poisonous when it comes into contact with food, particularly acids. Copper pans were thinly lined with neutral tin, but over time the surface of the tin wore down, exposing the copper beneath. “Let your pans be frequently retinned” is common advice in cookbooks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If human beings then were anything like human beings now, cooks must often have postponed retinning the pans and ended up poisoning those they cooked for. Cooks ignorant of the ill effects of copper actually sought out its greening powers, using unlined copper pans to make pickled green walnuts and green gherkins. In short, copper pans are great, apart from the fact that they potentially make food taste bad and poison you. Suddenly, those shiny Victorian batteries de cuisine. do not look quite so desirable.
T he search for the ideal cooking pot is not easy. There is always a trade-off. As the great food writer James Beard once put it: “Even in this best of all
Similar Books
