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

of around 18 to 28 cm (7 to 11 inches) long. So far, very similar to a European chef’s knife. What’s dramatically different is the width of the blade: around 10 cm, or 4 inches, nearly twice as wide as the widest point on a chef’s knife. And the tou is the same width all the way along: no tapering, curving, or pointing. It’s a sizable rectangle of steel, but also surprisingly thin and light when you pick it up, much lighter than a French cleaver. It commands you to use it in a different way from a chef’s knife. Most European cutting uses a “locomotive” motion, rocking the knife back and forth, following the gradient of the blade. Because of its continuous flatness, a tou invites chopping with an up-down motion. The sound of knife work in a Chinese kitchen is louder and more percussive than in a French one: chop-chop-chop as opposed to tap-tap-tap. But this loudness does not reflect any crudeness of technique. With this single knife, Chinese cooks produce a far wider range of cutting shapes than the dicing, julienning, and so on produced by the many knives of French cuisine. A tou can create silken threads (8 cm long and very thin), silver-needle silken threads (even thinner), horse ears (3 cm slices cut on a steep angle), cubes, strips, and slices, to name but a few.
    No single inventor set out to devise this exceptional knife, or if someone did, the name is lost. The tou —and the entire cuisine it made possible—was a product of circumstances. First, metal. Cast iron was discovered in China around 500 BC. It was cheaper to produce than bronze, which allowed for knives that were large hunks of metal with wooden handles. Above all, the tou was the product of a frugal peasant culture. A tou could reduce ingredients to small enough pieces that the flavors of all the ingredients in a dish melded
together and the pieces would cook very quickly, probably over a portable brazier. It was a thrifty tool that could make the most of scarce fuel: cut everything small, cook it fast, waste nothing. As a piece of technology, it is much smarter than it first looks. In tandem with the wok, it works as a device for extracting the most flavor from the bare minimum of cooking energy. When highly chopped food is stir-fried, more of the surface area is exposed to the oil, becoming crispy-brown and delicious. As with all technology, there is a trade-off: the hard work and skill lavished on prepping the ingredients buys you lightning-fast cooking time. A whole, uncut chicken takes more than an hour to cook in the oven. Even a single chicken breast can take twenty minutes. But tou -chopped fragments of chicken can cook in five minutes or less; the time is in the chopping (though this, too, is speedy in the right hands; on YouTube you can watch chef Martin Yan breaking down a chicken in eighteen seconds). Chinese cuisine is extremely varied from region to region: the fiery heat of Sichuan; the black beans and seafood of the Cantonese. What unites Chinese cooks from distant areas is their knife skills and their attachment to this one knife.
    The tou was at the heart of the way classical Chinese cooking was structured, and still is. Every meal must be balanced between fan— which normally means rice but can also apply to other grains or noodles—and ts’ai, the vegetables and meat dishes. The tou is a more essential component in this meal than any single ingredient, because it is the tou that cuts up the ts’ai and renders it in multiple different forms. There is an entire spectrum of cutting methods, with words to match. Take a carrot. Will you slice it vertically ( qie ) or horizontally ( pian )? Or will you chop it ( kan )? If so, what shape will you choose? Slivers (si), small cubes ( ding ), or chunks ( kuai )? Whichever you adopt, you must stick to it exactly; a cook is judged by the precision of his or her knife strokes. There is a famous story about Lu Hsu, who was a prisoner under Emperor Ming. He was given a bowl of meat