Quotes from Bee Wilson

When we say we lack time to cook -- or even time to eat -- we are not making a simple statement of fact. We are talking about cultural values and the way that our society dictates that our days should be carved up.

Our kitchens are filled with ghosts. You may not see them, but you could not cook as you do without their ingenuity: the potters who first enabled us to boil and stew; the knife forgers; the resourceful engineers who designed the first refrigerators; the pioneers of gas and electric ovens; the scale makers; the inventors of eggbeaters and peelers.

Your first job when eating is to nourish yourself.

It is the technique, above all, that makes a meal Chinese or not.

Technology is the art of the possible.

The subtext of all table manners is the fear that the man next to you may pull his knife on you.

The technology of food matters even when we barely notice it is there. From fire onward, there is a technology behind everything we eat, whether we recognize it or not. Behind every loaf of bread, there is an oven. Behind a bowl of soup, there is a pan and a wooden spoon (unless it comes from a can, another technology altogether). Behind every restaurant-kitchen foam, there will be a whipping canister, charged with N2O.

When we lament the decline of time spent on cooking, we need to be clear what it is that we are lamenting. Many of the female cooks who devoted so many hours to preparing food in the past did so because they did not think their own time was worth much.

For much of the twentieth century, American visitors to Britain found that everything was the wrong temperature: cold, drafty rooms; warm beer and milk; rancid butter and sweating cheese.

In the West the word "delicious" is likely to conjure up something laced with sugar, fat and salt, whereas in Japan it signifies a flavour found in mushrooms, grilled fish and light broths.

For thousands of years, servants and slaves--or in lesser households, wives and daughters--were stuck with the same pestles and sieves, with few innovations. This technological stagnation reflects a harsh truth. There was very little interest in attempting to save labor when the labor in question was not your own.

No home-cooked food, no matter how delicious, can match the power of bringing people together in misty-eyed recollection of industrially produced food.

Siblings have always marked out territory through food.

The power siblings have over our eating habits is no small thing. yet we hardly ever talk about these familial influences.

Many of us cling to particular vessels, fetishizing over this mug or that plate.

Kitchen technology is not just about how well something works on its own terms—whether it produces the most delicious food—but about all the things that surround it: kitchen design; our attitude to danger and risk; pollution; the lives of women and servants; how we feel about red meat, indeed about meat in general; social and family structures; the state of metallurgy.

Anything can start to taste good if you have enough positive memories of being fed it by a parent.

How were they to square the tremendous wealth they accrued with their image of themselves as frugal and virtuous? Easy: just argue that commerce was itself virtuous. To be rich in corrupt old Europe must be a sign of droneishness; but to be rich in fresh young American was the fruit of hard work. The beehive provided Americans with the ideal image for their religion of work.

It is possible to educate children in the pleasures of food; and that doing so will set the children up for a lifetime of healthy eating. Feeding is learning.

Hunger is always a kind of emptiness - an absence of nourishment - but what it will take to replenish it is far from obvious.

Here's a quick translation: spork = a spoon with added tines; splayd = a knife, fork, and spoon in one, consisting of a tined spoon with a sharpened edge; knork = a fork with the cutting power of a knife; spife = a spoon with a knife on the end (an example would be the plastic green kiwi spoons sold in kitchenware shops); sporf = an all-purpose term for any hybrid of spoon, fork, and knife.

When eating becomes a matter of life or death, and each new bite is a celebration, you may discover that none of the other stuff was quite as important as sitting and breaking bread together.

It is not about learning to like this or that vegetable; but developing an overall attitude to eating that is more open to variety and less governed by the simple sugar-salt-fat palate of junk food.

Molds are driven by fantasy and a desire for the spectacular, and our sense of spectacle changes over time. Medieval gingerbread molds, hand carved from wood, might depict harts and does, wild boars and saints. The stock of images available to us now is far larger; but our imaginations are often smaller. In kitchen shops today, you can buy a large cake mold resembling a giant cupcake.