balmagowry

This is sort of a lateral outgrowth from the Other People's Kitchen thread. We all have these - kitchen habits that may have made sense once upon a time, but that now bear no special relation to rhyme or reason. But we keep doing them the same way because they're part of our rhythm, and if something thwarts us it throws us into a tailspin, even though there are plenty of sensible alternatives. These things constitute part of our cooking vocabulary - in fact, sometimes they're literally part of a language that outsiders can't follow. With me (embarrassingly enough, now that I've raised this I suddenly can't think of anything I do that's really wildly idiosyncratic) it's using certain pots/utensils/knives for certain tasks, and I guess also the way I organize storage and the containers I use for certain types of ingredients and leftovers. There is ONE POT that I always use to cook rice; if it happens to be unavailable I throw up my hands and mutter dire imprecations and feel thrown off my stride. This is silly, because I have five other pots that would be perfectly appropriate... but they aren't My Rice Pot. And I've been known to declare "but you CAN'T put that into that square container - it's WRONG!" when of course there's no earthly reason NOT to use said container, because it fits the whatever perfectly - it just happens not to be the one I've always used for the purpose. OK, here's a dumb example. I grew up putting away glasses and mugs upside-down in a cupboard, because that's what I was taught and it seemed the logical thing to do. In my present house, however, there is one exception: the cupboard where the mugs live, in which I always place them right-side-up. This came about because when we moved into the house certain parts of it (even after an industrial-strength professional cleaning) still carried unpleasant odors left by the previous owner; that cupboard in particular had something nasty about it, and even though I had scrubbed it out myself I still wasn't comfortable thinking about the business end of my coffee cup coming in contact with its inside surface. But that was TWELVE YEARS AGO. All trace of the taint disappeared long ago... and still my mugs face up and I refuse to let them do otherwise. Go figure. There's also a system of shorthand names for things and processes, developed over the years between me and my mother. Much of this has evolved from long you-had-to-be-there anecdotes into absolute nonsense, but if I find a package with a cryptic notation in her handwriting I always know exactly what it contains and why she wrote it the way she did. "CI ch. br." or "br. cr. H" or "1 BIG lencho" or - well, you get the idea. Like decoding someone's Private Freezer Cypher. Anyone else? Habits you cling to? Where'd they come from? Make sense? Did they ever? Why?

I call it my pusher. Where is my pusher?! I yell from the kitchen. Great name. Unfortunately I can't use it because it belongs to something else: the little silver rake thing that I had when I was a baby just learning to eat at table; used to shove things like peas into the matching spoon. Talk about nostalgia - hardly anyone uses those any more, either. (The good thing is, if I give one as a baby present I can generally be pretty sure it won't be competing with half-a-dozen similar gifts!)

Fair enough. Does individual mileage vary more in anything than in cooking? I doubt it, somehow. That's the thing about cooking in other people's kitchens: if they care at all about cooking they have their working environments set up to suit all their own little quirks and habits. Walk into someone else's kitchen with your own set of quirks and habits, and no wonder you feel like you're on the wrong planet. Creatures of habit we really are, and not all of them make any sense at all - some of them probably never did. But we cling to them and feel uncomfortable without them; they are part of us. As it happens I don't consider my weakness for wooden spatulas to be particularly irrational, given the application, but I know a lot of the other things I do probably are. But it doesn't matter: they're what makes me comfortable in the kitchen. and they work for me. Which is precisely what makes one's own kitchen such a deeply personal environment, no? And that's also why you feel that delighted little thrill of recognition when you spot, in a new acquaintance's kitchen, that same unusual and indispensable whatsis that you have in yours but have never seen anywhere else. With my above-mentioned close friend it was the Colony Cup, another of those brilliant gadgets that far surpass anything on the market now and that therefore inevitably are long gone, discontinued, unavailable. I treasure mine, and hers is the *only* other one I have ever seen, so the discovery sparked one of those "Aha!" moments. I figured, clearly there's something very *right* happening here. And there was.

Thank you! Yes, the best time imaginable - we were the most perfect of colleagues and collaborators. There were quite a lot of adventures like that, and every now and then we had to look at each other and stop laughing long enough to gasp, "Can you believe they're actyually *paying* us to have this much fun?" Ain't it the truth - and not just for dark roux. I really don't understand how people make béchamel or velouté or gravy or - well, anything thickened like that - without them. I mean, obviously they do it, and obviously I too must have done it on occasion (though I've blocked the traumatic memory), but... talk about wanting to have the right tool for the right job! nothing else feels right in my hand. What creatures of habit we are.

I thought the same - and then found I couldn't get them any more! If you know where they're to be had, please tell. I want to stock up. Broke one in half once - kept the pieces, though I don't really think it can be fixed. Alas. Maybe I could make them - shouldn't be too hard. I got lucky at a garage sale a couple of years ago, scoring three or four of them. But when I go to look for them in shops I've only found that poor approximation, the paddle end too big, bent, not angled enough. Most disturbing. Whose law is it that only the best things are guaranteed to become unavailable just when you learn you can't live without them?

Lucky me, I have no trouble at all cooking in my mother's kitchen; it's where I learned to cook, and feels as natural to me as my own, perhaps even more so. Both are eccentric in roughly the same way. My closest friend and my closest cousin both have huge kitchens compared to mine, each overflowing with implements - unexpectedly ill-supplied for my tastes, however, though I must admit I do covet my cousin's huge gleaming prep table. (As well I might, my own kitchen being far too small to hold anything like it.) I kind of enjoy the challenge of improvising, though. The two things I miss most - and really ought to start bringing with me - are my tiny tiny paring knife and my wooden spatulas (that's probably not the right term, but you know what I mean, they're flat paddle-ish things with an angled tip - I adore them and use them for stirring/scraping just about anything as it cooks). The knife was a present from my mother when she bought her own (so there's one in her kitchen, making me feel right at home), and I think that was shortly before they went out of production. You can't get 'em any more - I haven't seen one like it in, oh, about 25 years. My husband calls it "Dr. Paring's Prototype," and he clearly understands that it is simply off-limits to him. It has a 1-1/2-inch blade and just the right curve in the handle, and I always feel a bit lost if I have to peel an onion with anything else. Once it accidentally went into the garbage, and I spent an interesting hour in the basement of the apartment building, rooting through the garbage compactor. Found it, of course - they'd have had to demolish the building around me before I'd have given up the search. My mother's vanished too, for several months, and she went into intense mourning; eventually it turned up in the compost, unscathed if a bit smelly, oh happy day. But what this thread really reminds me of is the occasion when my mother and I were invited to give a lecture and tasting at the San Diego Maritime Museum. Since that's on the opposite coast, of course all arrangements had to be made by proxy. The museum director, a good friend, had written to ask me what "special equipment" we would need for our preparations - big pots, serving dishes, utensils, etc. - and I had sent back a comprehensive list and was pleased to hear that everything on it would be available and ready to hand. What I hadn't realized, however, was that the one item they didn't have for us was... a kitchen! It turned out that the whole operation was to be conducted aboard the paddle-steamer Berkeley (permanently docked on San Diego Bay, it forms the main part of the museum), and our "prep area," for lack of a better term, was the afterdeck of the steamer itself. The museum had borrowed a couple of those huge propane camping stoves - four powerful burners - and there *was* a small faucet nearby (cold only); and they had borrowed everything on our list from the hotel across the street. But of course it had never occurred to me to specify any of the ordinary everyday stuff that you just assume will be available in even the worst of kitchens: spoons, knives, bowls, little dishes, whisks, cutting boards, measuring cups, doodads, odds and ends to improvise with. Nothing! The blessed docent came to our rescue - scurried off to her own house and brought back a large bouquet of miscellaneous kitchen utensils - and in the event we managed very well. One of the funniest pictures I've ever taken of my mother is of her improvising a mortar and pestle out of two odd-sized pan lids, giggling uncontrollably the while. We had another near-panic when an adventurous gull tried to steal a bag of cubed ham from where it was thawing on the deck - this crisis too was averted in the nick of time, the two of us flapping dementedly at the bird until it dropped the tasty morsel and retreated. Whew. And the event was a huge success. Can you tell that this theme chimes with something I'm working on? A piece not only about cooking in other people's kitchens but also about the kind of people with whom it's possible to share a kitchen. I haven't met very many of them, but there are a few out there, and it's wonderful to meet a new one and to know instantly and mutually (this happened to me a few weeks ago and it really was kind of like love at first sight) that you won't have to explain anything, that you'll just fall into each other's rhythm and tastes and know instinctively where to look for the Tellicherry pepper.

Just looked on eBay. A couple of bucks, did I say? Sheesh - there's one going for over $22. There's another, though - *not* labeled Gilhoolie but clearly the same thing, at $1.99. Oh, and I also spotted a couple of the other kind, the one I prefer: turns out it's made by Edlund, and at least two listings that I saw indicate same in the title. Going rate seems to be 5 bucks or so - well worth it, I think.

It does seem a bit much, though - especially at the price. There used to be a marvelous gadget called a Gilhoolie - hard to describe, but it had a double handle and adjustable jaws which you could clamp sort of like a vise-grip - worked brilliantly. Torque, don't you know. Don't think they've been made for, oh 40 years or so, but every now and then I spot one selling for a couple of bucks on eBay; over the past couple of years this has resulted in unusual house-presents for several of my friends. I have another marvelous old mechanical jar-opener, which actually I like even better; again, adjustable jaws, and a T-shaped handle above that makes for a really solid grip. That and a good wide rubber band around the jar itself - I always find with the reallyseriously stuck ones that the worst of the job is gripping the jar so it doesn't turn with the top. Not that either of these would be any use with those huge Costco jars.... For those I too use a 6' tall photographer (and former wrestling coach, which is probably the real critical factor).

Coming a little late to this party, I'd like to range myself with Marie-Antoine Carême on this subject. He it was who wrote that the fine arts are five in number, the fifth being architecture, of which pastry is a branch (sorry, that's paraphrased, but it's pretty close). He also called it perilous and heroic - look at his pastry designs and you can't argue. More generally, though, I think cuisine can be both art and craft, and that the demarcation between the two can vary infinitely according to context. But I think the decisive factor, as in any other art form, is inspiration. You can cook as a job, you can cook by rote, you can cook as a chore; but if you enjoy cooking and have any instinct for the process, for how flavors and textures can come together and harmonize, then you transcend the purely functional and you create something wonderful, something that communicates and resonates with everyone who tastes and smells it, so that they *have* to exclaim about it. That's inspiration; that's art. And it doesn't have to be anything complicated. It can be an elegant soufflé or it can be a humble tomato sandwich. If it strikes the chord - it's art.