Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat Read Online Free PDF Page B

different from one belonging to a widow), and there are taboos against eating from another person’s designated food pot.
    Many of us cling to particular vessels, fetishizing over this mug or that plate. I do not care what fork I eat with, or if anyone else has eaten with it before me (so long as it is reasonably clean). Pottery is different. I used to have a large mug with all the American presidents on it that my husband brought back from a trip to Washington. It was what I drank my early morning tea out of. The tea didn’t taste the same from any other mug; it was a crucial part of the morning ritual. Gradually, the faces of the presidents faded and it was hard to distinguish Chester Arthur from Grover Cleveland. I loved it all the more. If I saw someone else drinking from it, I secretly felt that they were walking on my grave. Eventually, the mug smashed in the dishwasher, which was a relief in a way. I didn’t replace it.
    Fragments or shards of ceramics are often the most durable traces left by a civilization, offering our best window on the values of those who used them. Archaeologists therefore like to name people after the pots they left behind. There are the Beaker folk of the third millennium BC, who traveled across Europe, from the Spanish Peninsula and central Germany, reaching Britain around 2000 BC. They came after the Funnelbeaker culture and the Corded Ware people. Wherever they went, the Beaker folk left traces of reddish-brown, bell-shaped clay drinking vessels. They could have been named the Flint Dagger people or the Stone Hammer people (because they also used these) but somehow pottery is more evocative of a whole culture. We know that the Beaker folk liked to be buried with a beaker at their feet, presumably for the food and drink they
would need in the afterlife. Our own culture has so much stuff that pottery has lost much of its former importance, but it is still one of the few universal possessions. Perhaps many hundreds of years from now, when our culture has been buried by some apocalypse or other, archaeologists will start to dig up our remains and name us the Mug community, MC for short: we were a people who liked our ceramics to be brightly colored, large enough to accommodate high volumes of comforting caffeinated drinks and above all dishwasher-proof.
    The very existence of pottery marks a supremely important technological stage in the development of human culture. The potter takes sloppy, formless clay, wets it, tempers it, molds it, and fires it, and so gives it durable shape: this is a different order of creation from chipping away at rock or wood or bone. Clay pots bear the marks of human hands. There is a kind of magic to the process of pottery, and indeed, early potters often had a second role as shamans in the community. The archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, who unearthed numerous pottery shards at Jericho, dating back to 7000 BC, described the beginnings of pottery as an “industrial revolution”:
    Man, instead of simply fashioning an artifact out of natural material, has discovered that he can alter some of these materials. By making a mixture of clay, grit, and straw and subjecting it to high temperature, he has actually altered the nature of his material and given it new properties.
    Making a usable pot is not just a matter of lumping wet clay into the relevant shape, like making a mud pie. The clay itself has to be carefully selected (too much grit and it won’t form easily; not enough grit and it won’t stand up to firing). The potter (who would often have been a woman) knows how to use just enough water to make the clay slippery, but not so much that the wet clay slides apart in her hands or cracks in the fire. The fire itself must be scorching hot—maybe 1652°F to 1852°F—something that can only be achieved with a custom-built kiln oven. As for making pots specifically for
cooking, this is even harder, because they need to be both watertight and strong enough to withstand