Farewell, old friend

I didn’t want to see our old cooker being taken away. I get quite sentimental at times like that and tend to believe that inanimate objects have some sort of souls, whereas I have met human beings where it would be hard to make a case for them having any kind of soul at all. Our new cooker had been delivered and dumped, all white and shiny and wrapped in plastic and polystyrene, in the middle of the kitchen – and suddenly the kids shouted for me to come, to come at once and, not thinking, I did. So I saw our dear old cooker being wheeled unceremoniously away on a trolley and thrown, without much care, into the back of a van and driven off. And yes, I shed a tear and was mocked for it.

I have spent so much time with that old cooker. I have mopped it and polished it and cursed the stubborn spills; I have cooked all sorts of meals on it, from everyday suppers to celebration dinners, and baked all the birthday cakes for eighteen years. Half-witted with tiredness I have stood gormlessly and watched the kettle boil on it; I have leant against its comforting warmth on cold days and nights. It has been loyal always - I have burned toast, boiled milk over, and turned out a few entirely inedible productions, and always blamed the cooker, and it stood silently and never argued its innocence. And at the end of its life we just threw it away.

I daresay I shall get used to the new cooker, the nasty thing. But it is going to take a while.

Cooker-less cooking

Without a cooker we have been struggling. I had better explain, for the sake of younger readers, that we are old fogeys who actually cook our own food. By that, I mean that we go to the shops (or, sometimes, down the garden), acquire ingredients, and make them into a meal. It seems that we are in a minority and the rest of the world does things differently.

The first awful night, faced with no prospect of dinner of any kind, we went to the Chinese takeaway. On the second night, we went to the chip shop. On the third night, I was home alone and had a bit of salad and a toasted sandwich. Which brings us to the toastie-maker. This is just about the only piece of electrical kitchen kit that we possess which has the power to actually cook anything. It is extremely old and heavy and was one of Grandma’s cast-offs, about twenty years ago, since when, with the exception of the odd burst of enthusiasm, it has sat in the cupboard and gathered dust. We have had quite a number of toasted sandwiches over the last week with the result that enthusiasm waned quite fast but, even if they come out a rather odd shape and only lukewarm by the time they hit the plate, they were about the only hot food we could contrive. Did you know that you can make toast in a toastie-maker, just by putting in a plain piece of bread? The same qualities of weird shape and lukewarm-ness applied, but it is toast of a kind, even if not toast as we know it, Jim. I even found myself looking at the toastie-maker and wondering if it would be possible to fry an egg on it. After a few cooker-less days, you start to think like that.

The next night, we had salad. This was partly because we were getting heartily sick of takeaways and partly because there was food in the fridge which had just sat there and wasn’t improving with time. It was with deep solemnity that we ate the last three hard-boiled eggs, rather in the manner of a shipwrecked sailor eating the last ship’s biscuit when there was still no sight of land. It was a cold night and salad wasn’t the ideal choice of evening meal.

The next day we bought a microwave. 

We have lived with microwave cookers in various holiday accommodation, always regard them with deep suspicion and rarely if ever use them. Grandma has one, which was bought for her by various members of her extended family when she fell and broke her wrist some years ago, the idea being that she could quickly rustle up a hot meal for herself. She uses it now to store her stash of chocolate biscuits, which seems to me to be about the best possible use for it. However, the kids were adamant that a microwave was a wonderful invention and have been agitating for years that we should buy one; during their student years, they assured us that they used little else. Finally we kind-of agreed that it could be the house’s Christmas present this year, although still unconvinced that we would ever use it; and so, buying it last week just fulfilled a half-hearted promise.

It struck me as odd that the microwave, unlike just about every other cooking gadget that we have ever bought, didn’t come with a little recipe book. We got one with the breadmaker, for example, and one with the food processor. Our kitchen bookcase is full of little booklets that came with various bits of kit. Having absolutely no idea how microwave cookery works, we spent an hour wandering round the supermarket picking up items of food and reading the instructions. This way we hoped to get an understanding of what was possible, and what was not possible. A surprising number of things are labelled as “Not suitable for microwave cookery”, including pies and garlic bread. Why you can’t heat up garlic bread in the microwave I have yet to discover. And then the truth dawned that the only use its manufacturers envisaged for the microwave was to heat up ready-meals. Which, of course, we never buy. 

Our hopes dashed, we retired to the supermarket café and this is the time to give a big shout out to Morrisons all-day breakfast. Cold cereal and deformed toast doesn’t make a revitalising start on a cold winter morning, but a few minutes down the road you can get a plate piled high with eggs and beans and mushrooms and tomato and hash browns and hot buttered toast (hot! buttered!) for a derisory amount of money, as long as you don’t mind sitting with all the other poor people and none of your friends or neighbours see you there. I am not surprised that the café was full while the aisles were empty.

But back we had to go and try to find something to heat up for dinner, which was a dispiriting task. Even amongst the meals which didn’t contain meat, there was a lack of anything with vegetables in any recognisable form and portion sizes were tiny while the cost was exorbitant. “How much?” we kept asking.  “How much?” We had already lost our appetites, and reading the ingredients didn’t make us feel hungry. When we cook, we know what goes into what we eat, and I have never used most of the things which are to be found in ready meals. As ever, we compromised.

Over the next couple of days it became clear that yes, the children had used microwaves extensively as students; and no, they had no idea of using them for anything other than quickly heating expensive little plastic trays of questionable content. When I asked them for suggestions as to what we could cook for supper in this exciting new gadget, they had no answer. We began to fear the onset of scurvy, assuming that poverty didn’t do for us first.

None of our old-fashioned cookery books had much advice about microwave cookery. It doesn’t figure in the works of Jane Grigson or Elizabeth David. My trusted old Good Housekeeping book predates it by decades. But never underestimate the value of research skills, allied to logical analysis and the BBC website. Last night my daughter came up to me conspiratorially and said, “Do you know what Dad’s doing? He’s cooking fish – raw fish – in the microwave!” She plainly thought that she had hard evidence at last that her father had reached senility. I smiled serenely. “Yes, my dear”, I replied. “It’s going to be delicious!” And it was.

Gas

We had a domestic tragedy last week.

For weeks, possibly months, Daughter and I were sure that from time to time we could smell gas in the kitchen. Sometimes there was a logical cause – someone had turned on a ring and then not lit it – but often there was not. Eventually Husband was persuaded to call the number and report a possible leak; which he did on Thursday morning just after I had cut up several pounds of oranges and prepared them to make marmalade.

The workmen came with surprising alacrity; confirmed that there was indeed a gas leak from the oven; and, instead of just taping shut the oven door (the gas was leaking only when the oven was in use), disconnected the whole cooker and, cheerfully and full of tea, disappeared away up the road.

We looked at the dead cooker and the large pan of ur-marmalade.

There was nothing to be done but to replace the cooker as soon as possible. With a bit more notice, we might have thought carefully about all the possible alternatives, but with an immediate need we decided just to replace the cooker with one as like it as we could find. After all, for 18 years we had cooked happily on our old faithful friend and had not found it lacking in any important respect. We knew that a replacement would be difficult because our one absolute requirement 18 years ago had been an eye-level grill; and I recall vividly the young salesman explaining that only old people wanted eye-level grills, everyone else had moved on. And I recall telling him that for the purposes of cooker purchase, he had better regard me as an old person. 18 years later, we assumed that even the old people who had wanted eye-level grills then would themselves have moved on to a better place. 

Perhaps I had better explain about the necessity for an eye-level grill. I like toast. I like thick toast, crisp on the outside and soft within. I have not found anything that makes it better than a gas grill (the only alternative is an open fire and a toasting fork, and those are not to hand in the morning) – those nasty electric toasters either leave the bread damp and limp, or cracklingly dry. And when I am making toast, I am probably doing half a dozen other things at the same time, and want to keep an eye on it as I pass to and fro between clearing the draining board and feeding the cats. If it is out of sight, then I won’t notice the point at which it is absolutely perfect. 

If finding an eye-level grill was difficult 18 years ago, we were sure that it would be equally difficult, if not impossible, today. But with hope born of desperation, off we went to our usual local appliance shop. The salesman explained things slightly differently this time. Yes, there was one firm who made gas cookers with eye-level grills; and they made just the one model. He looked at us and said that he could see why we wanted one – it was more difficult to keep bending down when you were elderly, wasn’t it? I bit my tongue. The choice was remarkably easy and quick – with only one to choose from, yes, that was the cooker we would have. In black or white? We wanted green. We settled for white. I couldn’t resist telling the salesman that I would ask Husband to paint it green. He looked worried, as if he believed me. It was revenge of a kind. 

It will be a week before the new cooker arrives.

Master & commander, by Patrick O'Brian

How did I get on with Patrick O'Brian, an author and a genre that I have been rather sniffy about in the past? Very well indeed is the reply, thank 'ee kindly (that of course is one of the problems with reading historical fiction - read too much of it, and you end up sounding like an eighteenth-century midshipman).

Certainly it is true that you do not need to understand very much about the technicalities of sailing ships, which is one of the fears that have put me off this kind of book in the past.  400 pages later, I still do not know what a studdingsail is, or where you would find the mizzen. Although there is a good deal of technical detail, you can glide over it and not lose very much of the narrative. It was a romping good read, excellent for the Christmas period, when I want to escape from the festivities and jollities into a different world. This one is set in and around Minorca, familiar from family holidays, and many many miles away from where I was sitting to read. (One of the problems with reading, say, Dickens, over Christmas is that the world you are reading about looks not unlike the world outside your window). It is quite a long book but gallops along at a decent speed, and I did want to read on and on and see what happened next. I am not so sure that, if I had laid the book aside for a week or two, I would ever have gone back to it; and I am quite sure that I am not such a fan as to embark immediately upon the next nineteen (nineteen!) books in the series. But maybe I will read another one in a while.

Since starting this book I have reverted to an old habit, of reading a chapter each night in bed before I settle to sleep. It is the only way that I can read a book reasonably quickly, as I never seem to find the time and opportunity to read during the day. I never thought I would say this, but in some ways I miss the commute, which was when I used to get my reading time. However, this book wasn't ideal for bedtimes - it is hard to sleep just after reading about a fierce encounter with a xebec-frigate, shot whistling through the rigging, thundering broadsides and desperate hand-to-hand fighting. So for my next book I shall look for something a little calmer, though I do not as yet know what.