Smithsonian.com

An all-purpose utensil is great for backpacking, but probably won't make it to formal dinner settings. Photograph by Lisa Bramen

Last weekend I went on my first backpacking trip and was introduced to what might be called the super-spork. Superior to the spoon/fork combination found in school cafeterias, which is usually a poor substitute for either implement (just try eating spaghetti with a spork), this Swiss Army Knife of tableware had a spoon at one end and a fork at the other, and one of the outer tines of the fork was serrated to be used as a knife. The latest evolution in eating implements got me wondering about the history of the utensils we usually take for granted.

I found part of my curiosity satisfied in  an article about the origins of the fork, by Chad Ward, at Leite’s Culinaria. It turns out the fork is a relatively new invention. Although the first forks were used in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, the two-tined instruments were used only as cooking tools at the time. It wasn’t until the Middle Ages that a smaller version was used for eating by wealthy families of the Middle East and Byzantine Empire.

Spoons, by contrast, have been used as eating utensils since Paleolithic times. According to an online gallery of food technology at the California Academy of Sciences, prehistoric people used shells or chips of wood for spoons. The ancient words for spoon suggest which materials were used in different areas: the Greek and Latin words are derived from cochlea, meaning a spiral shell, while the Anglo-Saxon word spon means a chip of wood. By the Middle Ages, royalty and other wealthy people used spoons made from precious metals. In the 14th century pewter became commonly used, making spoons affordable to the general population.

Knives have also been used, not only for eating but as tools and weapons, since prehistoric times. Because of their potentially violent use (and possibly because Cardinal Richelieu, the king’s chief minister, found it disgusting when diners used the point of their knives to clean their teeth), King Louis XIV of France decreed in 1669 that knives brought to the dinner table have a ground-down point. This may have contributed to the difference in how Americans and Europeans use their silverware, which I’ll get to in a few paragraphs.

But first back to the fork, which has the most checkered past of all eating utensils. In fact, the seemingly humble instrument was once considered quite scandalous, as Ward writes. In 1004, the Greek niece of the Byzantine emperor used a golden fork at her wedding feast in Venice, where she married the doge’s son. At the time most Europeans still ate with their fingers and knives, so the Greek bride’s newfangled implement was seen as sinfully decadent by local clergy. “God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks—his fingers,” one of the disdainful Venetians said. “Therefore it is an insult to him to substitute artificial metal forks for them when eating.” When the bride died of the plague a few years later, Saint Peter Damian opined that it was God’s punishment for her hateful vanity.

Fast forward a few centuries, and forks had become commonplace in Italy. Again, international marriage proved the catalyst for the implement’s spread—Catherine de Medici brought a collection of silver forks from Italy to France in 1533, when she married the future King Henry II. In 1608, an English traveler to the continent, Thomas Coryate, published an account of his overseas observations, including the use of the fork, a practice he adopted himself. Although he was ridiculed at the time, acceptance of the fork soon followed.

At the beginning of the 17th century, though, forks were still uncommon in the American colonies. Ward writes that the way Americans still eat comes from the fact that the new, blunt-tipped knives imported to the colonies made it difficult to spear food, as had been the practice. Now they had to use their spoons with their left hand to steady the food while cutting with the right hand, then switch the spoon to the right hand to scoop up a bite. The “zig-zag” method, as Emily Post called it, is particular to Americans.

By the 1850s, forks were well established in the United States, where they have been used ever since. Although chopsticks (which I’ll cover in a future post) and inventions such as the spork (which was trademarked in the 1969 but probably has been around for at least a century) have made inroads, it doesn’t appear that we will change the way we eat any time soon.

I’m used to being invaded by squash at this time of year, as many of you probably are too—paper sacks full of zucchini left on the front porch by neighbors were a common perk (or hazard) of small-town Vermont summers.

Courtesy Flickr user Clayirving

This summer, I’m noticing squash all over the place again, but in a less familiar form.

It started at the Smithsonian NMAI’s Mitsitam cafe, where I ordered the vegetarian pupusa.

“What’s in it?” I asked the server. “Squashed flowers,” he said, or at least that’s what I heard. (I later learned they were actually loroco flowers, but the cafe has often used squash blossoms in its ever-changing menu.)

Soon after that, I walked by Oyamel, Jose Andres’ excellent Mexican restaurant in downtown DC, and discovered that they celebrate an annual “Squash Blossom Festival” (sorry, it just ended). At the taco stand that has bloomed on the restaurant’s sidewalk for the summer, I tried the squash blossom taco, a delicious little work of art.

And last night, squash fever struck again—this time at my favorite DC pizza place, 2 Amys, where the special involved thin strips of zucchini and luscious puddles of buffalo mozzarella topped with those now-familiar orange and green blossoms.

Curious, I did a little research. I learned that squash blossoms are “extraordinarily perishable,” which explains why I’ve never seen them at the supermarket, and that most of the ones I ate were probably male, culled from zucchini plants after they’d done their duty pollinating the fruit-producing females. (The female blossoms are even yummier, since they come with bite-sized baby squash attached, though for obvious reasons they may be more expensive.)

Squash blossoms are cheap and plentiful in Latin America, where they are called flores de calabaza, but around here they’re mostly a farmers’ market delicacy. If you’re a home gardener, maybe you already have some right under your nose—to answer the oddly clairvoyant question my aunt called to ask me as I wrote this, yes, all types of squash blossoms are edible, from patty pans to pumpkins!

Nutritionally, the flowers are similar to lettuce; you’d have to eat a lot to get much out of them. Aesthetically, however, they can bring a dish to life with a splash of color and texture. Depending on who you ask, they taste like popcorn or something slightly sweet and nutty; or, more poetically, like pure summer and squash perfume.

There are many ways to cook and enjoy these beauties—fried, baked, souped-up or stuffed—although I’ve personally not tried any yet. If I do get my hands on some fresh blossoms, I’ll start with this super-simple risotto recipe, and perhaps work up the courage to try a more complicated quesadilla recipe.

 Loading ...

Hot ice cream by experimental chef H. Alexander Talbot. Photograph by Aki Kamozawa

Indulge me in a dubious metaphor: ice cream is the Madonna of desserts. Unlike chocolate chip cookies, or brownies, which rarely get wilder than the addition of chopped nuts, ice cream seems to beg for constant reinvention, with ever-more-bizarre flavors and strange textures (think Dippin’ Dots). I don’t know why that is, but maybe it has to do with the fact that it is one of the few foods eaten frozen.

Well, usually. New York magazine has an article this week about some of the latest wacky things being done to ice cream by chemistry-adept cooks. One of the most surprising, I think, is the hot ice cream developed by experimental chef H. Alexander Talbot, who writes a blog with his wife, Aki Kamozawa, called Ideas in Food. By adding a chemical called Methocel food gum, Talbot was able to create a banana split-like dish with the texture and flavor of ice cream that could be poached and served warm. The expectation of ice cream to be cold is so strong that the first person Talbot served it to didn’t even register that the dish was the wrong temperature until he pointed it out.

Also in the “Is it still ice cream?” category: Last month, Cold Stone Creamery introduced a pair of Jell-O pudding-based flavors that are purported to never melt. If that sounds like something you want to try, sorry—yesterday, July 28, was the last day for the limited-time product. Personally, the idea doesn’t sound that appealing to me anyway. Part of the fun of an ice cream cone is having to eat it before it drips down your arm.

Ice cream experimentation has been going on for decades, at least. I remember the first time I encountered deep-fried ice cream on the menu of a Mexican restaurant, when I was a kid. I was amazed and perplexed by this feat of ice cream wizardry—why didn’t the ice cream melt? But I never bothered to find out how it was done, until now. It turns out not to require any magic skills: you just freeze crunchy-coated scoops of ice cream until they’re hard, then quickly fry them before the ice cream inside has a chance to melt. Emeril Lagasse has a recipe, if you want to try it yourself.

Perhaps the strangest ice cream innovation, though, was the freeze-dried version developed for NASA astronauts to bring into space in the late 1960s. It’s still the top-selling product at the Smithsonian stores, though apparently it wasn’t very popular with the actual astronauts. In space, I guess, no one can hear you scream for ice cream.

Would you try hot ice cream?

Our prehistoric ancestors didn’t have supermarkets stocked with corn flakes (or crunchberries, fortunately), but they apparently found ways to stock up on cereal grains as long as 11,300 years ago—even before they managed to domesticate plants.

Anthropologists Ian Kuijt and Bill Finlayson have discovered the remains of some of the world’s earliest granaries at a Neolithic site called Dhra’, near the Dead Sea in modern-day Jordan.

What the prehistoric granary may have looked like. The exposed area illustrates the upright stones supporting larger beams, covered with smaller wood and reeds and finally mud. Image courtesy of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS.

They found four round, mud-walled structures of about 10 feet across. Each had raised floors made by laying wooden beams atop notched stones—which reflects some smart thinking, since keeping food off the ground would help protect it against rodents and moisture.

Wild barley husks were found inside one granary in “a concentration…not identified elsewhere on the site,” according to the pair’s recent paper about their find, and they also found several surrounding buildings which appear to have been used for food processing and/or residences.

These days, silos and granaries are no big deal, just part of the scenery in farm country. But back in what’s called the “Pre-Pottery Neolithic A” (PPNA) era, such a structure represented not only an architectural feat, but a “major transition in the economic and social organization of human communities,” as Kuijt and Finlayson put it.

Combined with evidence found at other sites from the PPNA period, their discovery points to a marked shift from the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more settled existence. (Seasonal settlements had begun to appear in the previous Natufian period, but there’s little evidence of food storage.)

The granary also reflects “active intervention in normal plant cycles,” in other words, the first footsteps on a path that eventually arrived at agriculture, the fulcrum for a host of social changes. And it shows that this society was thinking ahead, protecting itself from potential future food shortages.

Was this perhaps the first time that the concept of “extra food” entered humans’ frame of reference? It’s interesting to consider how far we’ve come since then, especially in America, where many of us take it for granted that we will always have access to plenty of food (much more than we need, in some cases).

Nobel laureate Nelson Mandela. Courtesy of Flickr user daveblume

Perhaps no world leader’s eating habits have been more scrutinized than Barack Obama’s. The guy can’t bring home a bag of burgers without making the evening news.

But imagine having an entire book written about what you ate throughout your life. That’s what food writer Anna Trapido has done with Hunger for Freedom: the Story of Food in the Life of Nelson Mandela.

At first, it sounds a little odd to write about something as seemingly trivial as food in relation to a hero and Nobel Laureate such as Mandela, who spent years as a political prisoner for fighting against apartheid in South Africa. But, as Trapido explains, “We all reveal our most elementary social, economic and emotional truths in the ways that we cook, eat and serve food. So why not ask those who changed the world what they were eating while they did it?”

Trapido’s “gastro-political biography” traces Mandela’s life, starting with early reminiscences about the simple foods of his Mvezo birthplace, such as the corn porridge called umphokoqo. She explores how apartheid and racial discrimination was manifested in what South African blacks ate. ”In the 1950s,” she writes, “parties given by anti-apartheid activists saw drinks served in very short tots so as to ensure that if the police raided the event black people would not be found engaged in the illegal act of consuming alcohol…. The racially discriminatory food conditions for prisoners on Robben Island and the prisoners’ fights to improve their diet mirrored those of their broader struggle.”

The book includes recipes, such as for the chicken curry smuggled in to Mandela in prison, where blacks were given smaller and lower-quality rations than prisoners of other colors. There are also happier dishes, such as the hearty casserole that was the first meal Mandela ate as a free man, after he was released from prison in 1990, and the sweet koeksisters, an Afrikaans cake, served to him in reconciliation by the widow of one of the architects of apartheid.

Trapido writes, “Mandela media coverage has a somewhat saccharine tendency to deify South Africa’s most famous son. Asking what he had for lunch restores humanity to a living legend.”

It makes me wonder, what other contemporary or historical figures are deserving of a gastro-biography? Any suggestions?