The Victorians (those people who lived in the mid to late 1800s, particularly in Britain and America) have a bad rep when it comes to cooking vegetables. Check almost any cookbook from the time period and you’ll see recipes advising you to boil vegetables for 45 minutes to an hour. This is not with the intention of turning them into mush, or to make them so soft they can be fed to infants–this is what was considered the normal cooking time to simply make them edible. Today, we would never think of boiling vegetables this long, so the question is, what were those people thinking?

Bee Wilson address the issue in Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, a book that looks at the history of kitchen tools. Wilson’s premise in the book is that the food we eat is, to some extent, based on the technology we use to cook the food.

Regarding the Victorians and their vegetables, Wilson explains that the problem is not their cooking time, but our misunderstanding of just how the Victorians cooked vegetables. There were really three things going on.

First, the vegetables were different then our vegetables today. Most modern varieties have been bred to make them more tender, so the Victorians’ tougher vegetables would have needed a bit more time to cook.

Second, the Victorians seem to have had a mania for cooking things in the smallest possible pot. Smaller pots boil faster, so the idea seems to have been to fill a small pot with, say, green beans, add a cup full or so of water, and boil away. While it seems logical, it actually takes longer to boil something using a small amount of water rather than a large amount of water that is already at a boil.

Third, the Victorians had a flawed understanding of just how boiling works. Enlightenment scientists had shown that water boils at 212 degrees at sea level no matter how fast the water was boiling – it was 212 degrees at a full rolling boil and 212 degrees at a slow simmer. Because it was always at 212 degrees, cookbook authors advised a slow simmer because that would use less fuel. However, while the water temperature is important, also important is the heat transfer – the rate at which bubbles rise up and break the surface. More bubbles means more heat is being transferred within the water, which means the food is getting cooked faster. Thus, a slow simmer cooks food slower than a full boil.

So the longer cook times advocated by Victorian cookbooks were because the vegetables were tougher, the pans were packed full of vegetables with relatively little liquid, and the vegetables were only supposed to be at a low simmer. This is why today’s cookbooks recommend boiling vegetables in lots of water at a high boil.

And the Victorian method? Wilson writes that she tried it. “I’ve tried slowly simmering sliced carrots crammed in a little pan for forty-five minutes. Amazingly, they still have some bite to them, though not as much as when they are thrown into a large stainless steel pan of water at a rolling boil for five minutes, or, better still, steamed in a steamer.” (page 28)