V oi r s # 1110( 11S\N
Hell's kitchen
Amicrowave oven costs from £200 to £400 but it means social deprivation. People who interrogate food rather than cook it, use one to make the molecules in a pork chop jump. With an MO in the kit- chen the soul of the home is dead.
One lovely July morning I was watching a panful of indolent Cumberland sausages, when a colourful catalogue called Village Mill plopped in. (Just send a I 2 1/2p stamp to 16 Plantagenet Road, New Barnet.) Alors,' I said to Monsieur Daube, 'Listen to this.'
`Dear Enquirer, it is not difficult to boil an egg in a microwave oven. First wrap the egg in aluminium foil, then place it in half a pint of hot water in a Petit Tote Pot or similar container. Cook for about four minutes on high. It's easy when you know how!'
Sometimes one is a mere windsock flut- tering in the Zeitgeist. Before noon another modern thing happened: in crashed the Toshiba Book of Microwave Cookery, now in its fifth quick-fire edition. This book is as fascinating as a trip round a New Town mortuary with refrigerated pull-out body drawers (bring back the slabs) and a sponge-easy grief room.
Microwaving means you need only stir baked beans once when heating them, a boon to the very depressed. It means prick- ing a poached egg before you cook it, other- wise it will explode; ripening a Brie in two seconds and giving first-day-on-the-beach chicken legs a quick tan with McCormick microwave colouring because microwaved food does not go brown.
The microwave cook needs a recipe to make tea (`put cup of water in microwave over. Heat for 13/4 to 2 minutes. Drop in tea bag') and uses a Twist 'n' Turn table to rotate throw-away dishes made of 'oven- able board.' On the gracious side, people who grow herbs can dry them in a microwave oven (If left too long they will tend to disintegrate and could ignite' warns Toshiba). So much for trying wispy things in bunches and suspending them upside- down from the rafters along with onions, hams and fast-food hit men. Kitchen technology has a demonic life of its own. Toshiba says a microwave can make a Christmas pudding into a ball of fire.
After this microwave crash course I streaked to Hoxton to watch a priest mash potatoes. Anthony Symondson is a humor- ous man with a quick glinty mind. He cooks with lovable concentration, listening with a confessional stoop to dishes from the oven to hear if they are done. He adds butter and pepper to a pan of boiled potatoes, then mash, mash, mash like trampling down Satan.
Normality now has entertainment value. Watching someone cook in a plain way is like being in a New York night club. There people in perspex booths do the ironing for the amusement of city-crazed disco dancers. To make delicious soup, Anthony picks up the bruised vegetables left in the gutter after Hoxton market has closed. His favourite main dish is a savoury mould call- ed bacon pudding.
Anthony lives in a very new Church Commissioners' bungalow but he has cleverly contrived a rich Anglo-Catholic gloom. His kitchen has wipe-down 'Harvest range' work-tops in buff and his gas stove is called 'The Leamington'. On the window- sill is a large dominant crucifix (Trench ones are best'), super-value SqEzy, a very clean dishmop in a stone jar and a pot of chives in an earthy saucer.
Priests are usually quite poor but people give them things. Anthony received a pressure cooker on his ordination, a Russell Hobbs kettle from a grateful Confirmation candidate and a rusty Prestige plate-rack from a dying Gaiety Girl. He has a bread bin from an old lady called Ivy Gregg. It is dripping in lovely thick enamel like the white glace icing on a kup cake.
Elderly parishioners give him cookery books which he collects. They are mainly of the English economical plain fare sort in which a meat loaf is as dull as a maroon cardigan. The pages are spotted with transparent margarine marks and in the binding are crevices of ancient flour. When cooking Anthony follows a recipe closely. He weights down the page with a large plaster cast of a hand which he calls 'the dead hand of Taste'.
What you cook with says a lot about you. Teflon people are timid and suspend their handbags from café tables with little clips. The gentlewoman boldly riddles her solid- fuel Aga. Orange Le Creuset spells routier Pooter. A wok says you shop in Habitat when drunk. A microwave oven means you are put-upon, conned, abandoned, cynic- ally used for gain, dispossessed of good things in life. It is not microwaving but drowning. Evelyn Daube
Previous page
