Imperative cooking: Big Batterie de Cuisine 4 •
ONCE there were no shops in Britain selling proper cooking equipment and the faithful had to turn their annual holiday in France into an expedition to buy Sabatier knives, mandolines and daubieres. Now there are so many shops they have to promote their goods with 'themes'. 'Cook- ery kits' are what we are meant to buy according to a recent Homes and Gardens. There's the wok kit, the Moroccan tajine kit (`comes with a recipe leaflet and sachets of appropriate spices'), the Boots five- piece Deep Pan Pizza Set 'which has a pan-gripper, stainless steel spatula and pizza cutter, and recipe book'. Why a cutter not specifically designed for pizzas will not do is unclear.
Homes and Gardens sternly warns that `even the best equipped kitchen can lack the specialist gadgets and utensils needed to cook some foreign foods in an authentic manner.' Imperative cooks would do bet- ter to heed Mrs David's advice: certainly learn about 'authentic' equipment, but often only to identify a suitable substitute. They have already learned to buy the cheap and un-manked about equipment increasingly available from Asian and Chinese shops.
All in all, it is better to avoid specialist `cook-shops'. First, they smell awful. I don't know what it is — perhaps those raffia bowls full of dead leaves, the candles in 'tasteful' shades, the stale bunches of authentic Provençal herbs or the shop assistants themselves. Then, there's the Albinoni, played quietly but incessantly, and the junk: to find your olive de-stoner you have to wade through shelves stacked with junk, not just kitchen junk — wok kits, aprons with jokes on and smoked glass jars with 'COFFEE' written on in large letters (what on earth would anyone mis- take coffee for anyway? They don't write `FORK on forks) but any junk; bedroom mirrors in pine frames, anything in imita- tion pine, and thank-you-notelets with robins on and, of course 'Thank you.' And where do they find the identikit ladies who serve, the ladies who smell? They obvious- ly come in kit form too: they smell the same, wear the same cool, uncreased blouses and produce the same wet smile.
There's only one thing worse than visit- ing these shops and that is visiting some- one's kitchen equipped from one. The kitchens of half the middle classes are now indistinguishable from the shops them- selves, the same pine, the Albinoni, the dead leaves and that dreadful smell. Like the shops, the kitchens are full of non- kitchen junk; huge straw bowls full of the children's school 'projects', ornamental tiles from Portugal, mugs with enormous penCils in and plastic units for making your own, rapidly flat tonic water. The cooking equipment itself is usually unusable, even if you can find it under the junk. All such houses seem particularly proud of knives which resist any sharpener which they don't have anyway and banks of unneces- sary electrical apparatus dedicated to shredding carrots.
But can you find, say, a chopping board? Oh, yes. There will be a thing with a handle, perhaps heart-shaped or with a picture on the other side, whichever is the other side. But it's no use them insisting that it is a chopping board because it is marked `CHOPPING BOARD' or proudly explaining that it is of the right sort of wood. I said a chopping board and the first requirement of a chopping board is that it be big enough. Next to none of the cookery books explain this: even Mrs David, though she gives a charming picture of a chopping board in French Provincial Cook- ing, omits its dimensions. Perhaps she thinks such elementary advice is Unneces- sary: her readers are intelligent enough to work that out. It isn't: they aren't.
I have seen grown men and ladies, graduates of our finest universities, trying to chop up an equally full grown goose on a thing the size of a soup-plate. It's pathetic to see a man trying to beat an octopus on a matchbox top while his wife runs round him returning the various bits which have shot off the edge, lest they damage the formica in some magical way. I know one otherwise formidable lady who, confronted with three one-pound aubergines to chop, timidly cuts each into three portions which are then serially conveyed to a doll's chopping board for dissection.
Birthday? Anniversary? That's the pre- sent for the cook in the house, a 24" by 18" board. Not only will it be welcome but the junk you'll have to throw out to get it in, you'll be well rid of. Oh, and you can't chop on a chap's board to Albinoni. Try Aida.
Digby Anderson
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