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

cooking laboratory near Seattle at his company, Intellectual Ventures (which deals in patents and inventions), Myhrvold and his team of researchers questioned the thinking behind numerous cooking techniques that had previously been taken for granted. If Myhrvold wanted to find out how food really cooks in a pressure cooker or a wok, he sliced one in half and photographed the results, midcooking. Among Myhrvold’s many surprising and useful discoveries were that berries and lettuce stay fresher for longer in the fridge if you first plunge them in warm water, and that duck confit does not need to be cooked in its traditional fat—a sous-vide water bath works just as well. Myhrvold also applied himself to the problem of the ideal pan.
    After extensive experiments, the author of Modernist Cuisine found that “no pan can be heated to perfect evenness.” He noted that many (wealthy) people have expensive copper pans “hanging in a kitchen like trophies.” But even the most highly conductive pan could not ensure even cooking. In all the obsessing over pots and pans, people had forgotten another basic element of the cooking process: the heat source. Myhrvold’s experiments taught him that the typical small domestic gas burner, only 6 cm in diameter, was not big enough to diffuse heat evenly “to the far edges of the pan,” no matter how fancy that pan might be. His advice? “Skimp on the pan, but choose your burner carefully.” Assuming you have a sizable burner—ideally, as wide as the pan itself—Myhrvold found that an inexpensive aluminum-stainless steel bonded pan cooks “with nearly the same performance as that of the copper pan.” Which is good to know, though not all that helpful if you are cooking in a normal, ill-equipped kitchen with average-sized burners.

    There is also the question of skill. I decided to try out Myhrvold’s theory on my own decidedly inferior gas burners (though at least the switches work most of the time, which is better than the stove in our old house). I took my smallest skillet and set it to heat on the largest burner to saute some sliced zucchini. The heat conduction was appreciably more even and powerful. The discs of zucchini practically jumped out of the pan. Then they burst into flames. Since then, I have happily returned to my imperfect mishmash of too-big pans and too-small burners. I’d rather put up with the annoyance of hot spots than suffer scorched eyebrows.
    The ideal pan—like the ideal home—does not exist. Never mind. Pots have never been perfect, nor do they need to be. They are not just devices for boiling and sauteing, frying and stewing. They are part of the family. We get to know their foibles and their moods. We muddle through, juggling our good pots and our not-so-good ones. And in the end, supper arrives on the table; and we eat.

    Rice Cooker
    WHEN ELECTRIC RICE COOKERS ARRIVED IN Japanese and Korean homes in the 1960s, life changed. Previously, the whole structure of the evening had been dictated by the need to produce steamed sticky white rice—the bedrock of every meal. The rice needed soaking, washing, and careful watching as it cooked in an earthenware pot, lest it burn.

    The rice cooker—a bowl with a heating element underneath and a thermostat—removed all this work and worry In today’s versions, you just measure out the rinsed rice and water, and flip the switch. The thermostat tells the cooker when the water has been absorbed, and it switches from hot to warm. More deluxe cookers keep the rice warm for many hours and even have a time-delay function so that you can set the cooker before you leave for work. Rice cookers were an ideal match between culture and technology. Early models replicated the slow simmering of a traditional earthenware Japanese rice pot. Unlike the microwave, which changed the entire structure of family meals, rice cookers enabled Asian families to eat the same traditional meals, but with far greater ease.
    “Where There