Consuming Interest
Well Oiled
By LESLIE ADRIAN Olive and groundnut oil are the two which most recommend themselves to those who believe, with Dr. Magnus Pyke, that the fat you eat affects your heart by way of cholesterol in the blood. As far as I can make out, the link between cholesterol and heart disease is still unproved; but if you feel like avoiding cholesterol anyway, you may like to know that olive and groundnut oils are neutral in this respect, whereas maize, cottonseed, sunflower seed, soya bean and fish oils actually lower the cholesterol level.
There are also some branded oils which are easily obtainable in most areas : Jessamine (said to be a blend of cottonseed oils), Twirl (a blend of peanut and cottonseed oils) and Mazola (maize oil). Most of these I have tried myself and found them certainly pleasanter and easier to use in cooking than any of the solid fats. Their chief merit is usually an absence of taste—Rakusen's, at 2s. 6d. a bottle, for instance, is tasteless and odourless and admirable.
But there is no substitute for good olive oil when its distinctive flavour is essential to the character of the dish. A tomato salad or a ratatouille made with cottonseed oil would be meaningless.
Olive oil varies in flavour as much as it does in price. The bland oil from Spain is usually the cheapest, and the rich, fruity Italian oils the most expensive. Home blending is worth trying. The addition of a little of an expensive oil such as Sasso to one of the cheaper olive oils, will have a marked effect on the flavour of a salad dressing.
Boots stock olive oil and several of the other cooking oils (all made up to British Pharmacopoeia standard), and they are probably the cheapest. Their olive oil (from Spain) is 33s. a gallon (bulk buying wins hands down with oils—at 5s. 3d. a pint bottle, the same oil would cost 42s. a gallon), arachide oil is 19s. a gallon, maize oil is 3s. 31d. a pint, sunflower seed (not BP) 4s. a half-pint, and almond oil 15s. a pint. None of the last three is sold in larger quantities.
The Soho shops all stock olive oil and cooking oils of various kinds, but it is particularly worth mentioning S. Parmigiani (8 Old Compton Street, WI), who sell excellent soya bean oil at 21s. a gallon. The Health Food Stores (Wigmore Street, WI, 1023 Finchley Road, NW 1 I and 137 Ken- sington Church Street, W8) specialise in vegetable oils. Their groundnut, maize and soya oils all sell at 27s. 6d. a gallon, but at 63s. a gallon the oil of the sunflower, good as it is, is more expensive than the most luxurious olive oil ever made.
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I usually dislike modern door handles, knobs, hooks, drawer-pulls and the like. I realise that their chromium plate is hardy and easy to clean, but they look like part of a cafeteria or a car to me. I recently moved house and found myself con- fronted with a glaring, obtrusive array of them, and for months since I moved in I have been trying slowly to replace them, one by one.
It has been amazingly frustrating, for even the largest ironmongers and department stores have a limited and unvaried stock, and the Portobello Road people charge the earth for an occasional battered oddment which stands little chance of ever being matched. However, the other day I finally found the answer in J. D. Beardmore and Co., which spreads its unprepossessing yellow- i painted frontage along both sides of Cleve13'',, Street (W1) between numbers fifty-eight 3r"( seventy-one. As well as being ironmongers g'7, locksmiths, they are also brassfounders; in r°‘'') of venerable drawers and cardboard lII'gy reach the ceilings, lie every brass fitting one cap imagine, a few of them modern, but mostly 1'1" same hand-made beauties that have .0°,1 decorated our homes since the seventeenth cc'i tury, when brass came out of the church and I°. the fireside.
They are not cheap—probably the leas' ° could pay would be a shilling for a small kilt
t and one huge ram of a Georgian door-loec' sells for eleven guineas—but they are lovingtY8 accurately wrought, and, to me, well worth Dura-Glit and elbow-grease necessary to V them at their not-too-shiny best.
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