How your cooking teaches you about progress

Kitchen by Johnny Grey Studios

"THERE'S A STORY TOLD about kitchens since the start of the 20th century: between 1900 and 1960, almost everything about them changed, but since 1960, virtually nothing has. The story is meant to illustrate a wider point about the slowdown in physical technology that seems to have taken place in other walks of life — not just how we eat, but how we transport people and build things.

    "There is a lot of truth to this story ... But it misses another type of technological change that did happen and which might be even more important in determining the quality and deliciousness of the food we eat. ... The kitchen of 2020 looks mostly the same as that of 1960. But what we do in it has changed dramatically, almost entirely for the better—due to a culture of culinary innovation....

    "By 1960, home cooks were no longer surrounded by the noxious fumes of open flames and instead had chilled or canned ingredients and electric tools to prepare them.
    "These advances set the stage for a new way to cook. But that new way to cook depended on more than cooks and their new technologies alone; it required a change in goals and horizons. ...

    "Joel Mokyr, in A Culture of Growth, argues that innovation can be stifled by a fear of 'disrespecting the past' or an excessive adherence to tradition. In the kitchen, ... new cookbooks made it possible for cooks to replicate traditional recipes at home. But focus tended to be on how to best replicate those recipes that were born in professional kitchens, not to figure out what the home was best suited for. By the 1980s, a new idea began to emerge: that home cooks could even best restaurants if guided by a scientific approach....
    "[Cookbooks based on modern scientific home cooking] brought food science out of 'the realms of industrial production and laboratories' and into the home. Armed with [these], recipe writers, and sometimes even home cooks themselves, began to wonder if they could improve on traditional techniques instead of just copying them. After all, weren’t those fancy chefs we used to admire just stubbornly following tradition?
    "So began an explosion of popular food science. ...

"New publications began to popularise food science in the home for those unwilling to dig through [tomes like] 'On Food and Cooking.' 'Cooks Illustrated,' which launched in 1993, created recipes and techniques specialised for home cooks in their test kitchen. 'Serious Eats' joined it in 2006, giving each recipe a 'why it works' section to explain its food-scientific logic. Alton Brown’s 'Good Eats' premiered on the Food Network in 1999 and truly took the food science approach to the masses, with Brown as a funny and entertaining guide through the world of science and cooking.
    "By the 2000s, food science–oriented outlets were debunking dozens of common myths with the new approach. Pasta doesn’t need to be boiled in loads of water. That water doesn’t need to be 'salty as the sea' either. Sea water is about 3.5% salt; 1% is probably plenty. And it doesn’t matter whether the salt is added before or after the water comes to a boil (both sides had proponents). You don’t need to rest steaks before you cook them. Nor do you need to worry about just flipping steak once. Searing doesn’t 'lock in juices,' either, it creates the maillard reaction, and you can do it either before or after roasting a piece of meat for the same effect. Even the practice of marinating itself was called into question. The list goes on.
    "It’s not just little tips and tricks either. Food science created new recipes, and indeed whole new categories of recipes. Mark Bittman and Jim Lahey’s 'no-knead bread' (published in 2006) is an example of this new attitude in action: we don’t need to follow traditional bakers’ three-day sourdough recipes; we can make delicious bread overnight with almost no work ...

"IT'S A FAMILIAR PATTERN in how innovation seems to work. The central thesis of Anton Howes’s 'Arts and Minds,' a history of the Royal Society of Arts, is that the Industrial Revolution was driven by a new 'ideology of innovation.' This ideology held that everything could be improved by careful tinkering and experimentation. And this ideology spread from person to person. People become more inclined to experiment when they see others doing it and succeeding. Copying, not innovating, is the basic human skill.
    "Home cooking culture is now defined by this obsessive tinkering and experimenting. ...

"So kitchens might not have changed their outward appearance much in the last 60 years, but the cooking that takes place in them has been transformed. It’s transformed because of what home cooks have access to: the recipes, techniques, knowledge, and know-how for cooking food better. We’ve built up a vast array of knowledge and technique well tailored to the home, ranging across cuisines, styles, and goals. It’s what Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake call intangible capital, all the stuff in the production process we don’t see: our systems, our software, our skills, our techniques. We can’t touch this intangible capital, so it’s easy to underrate. But a new method for making bread overnight can be just as useful as a new machine that does it."

~ Nick Whitaker, from his article 'Better Eats'