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

stew in his cell and knew at once that his mother had visited, for only she knew how to cut the meat in such perfect squares.

    Tous look terrifying. Handled by the right person, however, these threatening blades are delicate instruments and can achieve the same precision in cutting that a French chef needs an array of specialist blades to achieve. In skilled hands, a tou can cut ginger as thin as parchment; it can dice vegetables so fine they resemble flying-fish roe. This one knife can prepare an entire banquet, from cutting fragile slivers of scallop and 5 cm lengths of green bean to carving cucumbers to look like lotus flowers.
    The tou is more than a device for fine dining. In poorer times, expensive ingredients can easily be omitted, so long as the knife work and the flavoring remain constant. The tou created a remarkable unity across the classes in Chinese cuisine, in contrast to British cookery, where rich food and poor food tend to operate in opposing spheres (the rich had roast beef, eaten from a tablecloth; the poor had bread and cheese, eaten from hand to mouth). Poor cooks in China might have far less ts’ai— far less vegetables and meat—to work with than their rich counterparts; but whatever they have, they will treat just the same. It is the technique, above all, that makes a meal Chinese or not. The Chinese cook takes fish and fowl, vegetable and meat, in all their diverse shapes and renders them geometrically exact and bite-sized.
    The tou’ s greatest power is to save those eating from any knife work. Table knives are viewed as unnecessary and also slightly disgusting in China. To cut food at the table is regarded as a form of butchery. Once the tou has done its work, all the eater has to do is pick up the perfectly uniform morsels using chopsticks. The tou and the chopsticks work in perfect symbiosis: one chops, the other serves. Again, this is a more frugal way of doing things than the classical French approach, where, despite all that laborious slicing with diverse knives in the kitchen, still further knives are needed to eat the meal.
    The tou and its uses represent a radically different and alien culture of knives from that of Europe (and thence, America). Where a Chinese master cook used one knife, his French equivalent used
many, with widely differing functions: butcher’s knives and boning knives, fruit knives and fish knives. Nor was it just a question of implements. The tou stood for a whole way of life of cooking and eating, one completely removed from the courtly dining of Europe. There is a vast chasm between a dish of tiny dry-fried slivers of beef, celery, and ginger, done in the Sichuan style, seasoned with chili-bean paste and Shaoxing wine in a careful balance of flavors; and a French steak, bloodied and whole, supplied at the table with a sharp knife for cutting and mustard to add flavor, according to the whim of the diner. The two represent diverse worldviews. It is the gulf between a culture of chopping and one of carving.
     
    I n Europe, the pinnacle of knife work was not that performed by the cook but by the courtly carver, whose job it was to divide up meat at the dinner table for the lords and ladies. Whereas the tou was used on raw food and rendered it all as similar as possible, the medieval carver dealt with cooked food and was expected to understand that every animal—roasted whole—needed to be carved in its own special way with its own special knife and served with its own special sauce.
    “Sir, pray teach me how to carve, handle a knife and cut up birds, fish and flesh,” pleads one medieval courtesy book. According to a book published by Wynkyn de Worde in 1508, the English “Terms of a Carver” went thus:
    Break that deer
Slice that brawn
Rear that goose
Lift that swan
. . . Dismember that heron
    The rules of carving belonged to a world of symbols and signs: each animal had its own logic and had to be divided up accordingly There was a connection between the