Consider The Fork

Bee Wilson is the food writer and historian who writes as the ''Kitchen Thinker'' in the Sunday Telegraph, and is the author of Swindled!. Her charming and original new book, Consider the Fork, explores how the implements we use in the kitchen have shaped the way we cook and live.

This is the story of how we have tamed fire and ice, wielded whisks, spoons, graters, mashers, pestles and mortars, all in the name of feeding ourselves. Bee Wilson takes us on an enchanting culinary journey through the incredible creations, inventions and obsessions that have shaped how and what we cook. From huge Tudor open fires to sous-vide machines, the birth of the fork to Roman gadgets, Consider the Fork is the previously unsung history of our kitchens.

Bee Wilson writes a weekly food column, ''The Kitchen Thinker'' in The Sunday Telegraph, for which she has three times been named the Guild of Food Writers Food Journalist of the Year. Her previous books include The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us and Swindled!. Before she became a food writer, she was a Research Fellow in History at St John''s College, Cambridge. She has also been a semi-finalist on Masterchef. Her favourite kitchen implement is currently the potato ricer.

''A cracking good read, as enjoyable as it is enlightening'' Raymond Blanc, Chef-Patron ''Le Manoir aux Quat''Saisons''

''Wonderful ... Witty, scholarly, utterly absorbing and fired by infectious curiosity'' Lucy Lethbridge, Observer

''[A] delightfully informative history of cooking and eating from the prehistoric discovery of fire to twenty-first-century high-tech, low-temp soud-vide-style cookery'' ELLE magazine

''A graceful study'' Steven Poole, Guardian