A 19th-century print of a French country kitchen. Credit Stapleton Collection/Corbis

LONDON — One of the most sought-after objects in Ancient Roman homes was an elaborate cooking contraption known as an authepsa. Made of the finest Corinthian brass, it fulfilled a similar function to a modern steamer. Cicero recalled one selling for such a high price at auction that some onlookers thought that a farm had been sold, not a cooking pot.

Not that today’s trophy cookware costs quite as much as a farm, but the authepsa was the Ancient Roman equivalent of the stratospherically expensive ovens that now promise to bake soufflés at a temperature set to the nearest 0.01 degree, and fashionably laboratorial gizmos like centrifuges, compressors and homogenizers.

The evolution of the tools we have used for cooking and eating is the theme of a new book, “Consider the Fork: A History of Invention in the Kitchen,” by the British food writer and historian Bee Wilson. Every so often a book appears that may not necessarily have set out to be about design, but provides fascinating insights into its impact on a particular field. This book does so by exploring how the design not only of the fork, but of everything else that has been used to prepare and consume food over the centuries has determined what has been eaten in different eras, and its impact on people’s health, well-being and behavior.

An illustration from 1957 showing off a fashionable, pink kitchen. Credit PoodlesRock/Corbis

The story begins with prehistoric cups and bowls being made from whatever material was readily available and fit for purpose. Some cultures continued this custom, with American Indians cooking in clamshells, certain Amazonian tribes favoring turtle shells, and vegetable gourds, animal stomachs and bamboo stems being deployed in other parts of the world. As Ms. Wilson points out, you can still see echoes of those makeshift utensils in New England clambakes and the Scottish tradition of boiling haggis in sheeps’ stomachs.

The emergence of ceramic cooking pots made it possible to customize individual containers that suited different types of food. Boiling up grains like wheat, maize and rice enabled humans to make more productive use of the time they had once spent foraging for meat and fish as hunter-gatherers. Ms. Wilson traces the impact of the culinary innovations of the Bronze Age and Iron Age, then Ancient Greece and Rome, where numerous food tools were invented, including the pricey authepsa. Diets became richer and more varied, but after the fall of the Roman Empire, many of those utensils disappeared, and for centuries most cooks were dependent on a single pot, typically a cauldron, that they used for everything.

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Those cauldrons were cooked on blisteringly hot open hearths, which could be dirty, smelly and dangerous. The cooks in wealthy households were almost all men, because women’s flowing robes were considered to be fire risks. As male cooks often worked naked or in their underclothes, it was deemed unseemly for female servants to see them, and they were confined to dairies and sculleries. Open hearth cooking disappeared in many European countries with the adoption of closed brick chimneys and cast iron fire grates during the 16th and 17th centuries. Kitchens became cleaner, women were hired as cooks, shiny brass and pewter pots replaced grimy cast iron cauldrons, and the trophy kitchenware phenomenon began.

The design of new kitchen tools has since been triggered by unpredictable combinations of instinct, ingenuity and technology. Sometimes, the catalyst was the development of a new material or manufacturing process, like carbon steel, which was used to produce sharper, more intricate knives from the 18th century onward. Until then, most Europeans had eaten using a single knife and carried it with them for the purpose. The availability of more sophisticated knives enabled cooks to be more inventive. French chefs proved to be particularly adept at devising new uses for them and the cutting techniques they developed, including slicing food into long, thin julienne strips or chopping it finely into mince, became the foundation of haute cuisine, which was to dominate fine dining for centuries.

Students at the New Oriental Cuisine School in Beijing. Credit Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency

Other innovations were the work of doughty individuals who pursued specific goals. The automatic pop-up toaster was invented in 1921 by Charles Strite, a mechanic in Minnesota, who was fed up with eating the burned toast in his factory canteen. Similarly, the Cuisinart food processor was developed in the early 1970s by an American engineer, Carl Sontheimer, who loved classic French food and sought a simpler means of making it. After acquiring the U.S. distribution rights for a 1960s French processor, the Robo-Coupe, he dismembered it in his garage and redesigned it.

The frozen food phenomenon was hatched by an American biologist-turned-fur trapper, Clarence Birdseye, when he and his family were living in the icy Labrador region of northern Canada in the 1910s. Having noticed that their fish and game tasted better in winter than summer, he realized it was because it had frozen faster and worked out how to replicate that process on an industrial scale. There are parallels between his experiments and those of the pioneers of molecular gastronomy, like the Spanish chef Ferran Adrià, who works with designers to develop the specialist tools required to make his dishes, and to eat them.

The origins of other kitchen tools are more enigmatic, having evolved by trial and error. Like the formidable Chinese knife, the tou, which is equally adept at mincing meat, chopping firewood, slaughtering pigs and crushing garlic. “Perhaps no knife is quite as multifunctional, or quite as essential to a food culture,” Ms. Wilson writes.

One of the delights of “Consider the Fork” is that her fascination with the history of food is balanced by the pleasure she takes in preparing dishes herself, watching others do so and, best of all, tasting the results. Ms. Wilson’s design critiques of different utensils, from the humble wooden spoon to a snazzy sous-vide water bath, are all the more convincing for being made by a knowledgeable and passionate cook, who isn’t afraid to admit to her failures, yet longs for delicious successes.

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