TGIFOOD

THE FOODIE’S WIFE

Ducking and diving the mad fads

Ducking and diving the mad fads

I have been terrified by a pressure cooker, rendered legless by a fondue and chased by a mad cow. But the food trends keep coming and with them the gadgets to make them.

The latest gadget in our house is a smoker. Apparently you can smoke anything from fresh fish to a strong cheese and the foodie is setting out to prove it. I am quite happy with a gas ring or an open fire to braai on but ever since I can remember, it seems food needs a trend, something to complicate it with.

Last year it was a pasta maker, now retired. It seems you can make your own pasta – why? It’s right there in the shops, between the powdered soup mixes and the condiments. I know this because I was persuaded by lockdown to buy an insane amount of pasta and we are still thinking up new ways to use it. 

I have survived sun-dried tomatoes, patty pans, deep fried grapes, coconut in many forms, hummus and pita and even beetroot, which made a terrifying return to our tables. But they don’t really compete with the gadgets.

The first cooking fad I encountered was the pressure cooker in 1970. It was the culinary equivalent of the Concorde – fast and sleek and destined to fall from favour.

I was living in a crazy little commune on the Bluff in Durban. It had been a series of holiday shacks some 30 years before and had a long, rickety flight of stairs going down to the beach. My then boyfriend decided to go down to the rocks and gather mussels, to be cooked in wine in his pressure cooker.

We scrambled around the rocks risking life and limb and eventually gathered enough hairy mussels to fill the thing. The cooker was then plugged in and sealed and after making alarming noises and threatening to explode and toss the foul smelling contents around my kitchen, it was opened up to reveal a terrible mush. What a waste of wine.

I asked Pierre to remove his pressure cooker and never darken my door with it again.

Now we move to the fondue, a Swiss contraption under which you placed a flame and dipped forks topped with various foodstuffs into a hot substance. Variations that were popular as dinner parties in the Seventies were cheese and chocolate, not together, and others went with hot oil and little fillets of steak.

The cheese fondue was the most popular. I imagine you were supposed to melt a superior sort of Swiss cheese in the fondue but our group could only afford cheap Cheddar. The idea was to mix the cheese with Kirsch to dilute it and you sat around the thing dipping in slices of bread on your fork, trying to remember which one was yours.

Trouble is, the cheese would very soon get lumpy so the hostess threw in more fire water. Pretty soon the fondue was filled with Kirsch and we were getting off our faces on cubed bread liberally soaked in booze.

The fondues themselves came in bright Seventies colours, the most popular being virulent orange. I still have an electric blue bowl but it has a succulent in it now as does just about every other rejected household object in our Karoo home. I draw the line at the old Wellington boot, a plant container much loved in the suburbs of Britain.

Next to pop up was the electric frying pan and the only mystery surrounding this object was why you would need one when you had an electric stove. But tell an enthusiastic cook that this is the coming thing and before you know it, it’s a craze.

The only thing I ever managed to cook in mine was chilli con carne which involved a lot of mince and beans, slowly cooked in hot condiments. It was hardly show stopping and I soon started keeping the bread in it. Around about that time we developed a mouse problem and Elvis, as we called him, had gnawed through the plastic bread bins, so you could say the electric frying pan saved his life. He was too cute for poison with his little whiskers and pink nose.

Our cupboards are filled with ice cream makers, bread makers, cutting and slicing devices, coffee plungers, tagines, casserole dishes of varying provenances, electric carving knives and electric mixers dating from 1965 to 2020. I don’t know what you call those coffee makers that come in two parts and gurgle and steam alarmingly before issuing two tiny cups of coffee but I know I have one.

I mean, for Heaven’s sake, why make ice cream? Buy it from the shop and fill it with rum and raisins, then fib like hell. Scatter a Flake chocolate over it, who cares?

Those cooking programmes promising foolproof souffles have seen the last of me. And sharpen your knife on a stone, what’s the matter with you? Don’t be convinced that certain steelware is used by eight out of 10 Ninjas in Japan. That stuff has never been further than Benoni.

And now we come to the encounter with the mad cow, which was a direct result of food propaganda. When I was about 12 years old I was staying at a country hotel run by my best friend Lindsey’s family as I always did in the holidays. Around about that time there was an outcry about pasteurised milk, that we were being robbed of the real thing and that pasteurisation was “nuclear”, a big no-no in 1962, what with the Cuban missile crisis and the Russians and Americans conducting a Cold War and a space race.

Lindsey and I decided to milk a cow. It did not occur to us that the Soviets had no interest in rural Thornville Junction in KwaZulu-Natal. We had seen the news reels at the movies of those kids practising to “duck and cover” when the bomb dropped and we wanted to do our bit.

We went for a walk with my trusty transistor radio, itself something of a fad. I remember it was playing a Cliff Richard hit.

We spotted a few cows in a field and decided to investigate but for some reason they were antagonised by us and one of them made a mad rush for Lindsey, knocking her over and putting its front paws or whatever on her chest.

I didn’t know what to do so I threw the radio at the beast and it took off. Lindsey got up none the worse for the bit of bovine fury but we were pretty sure that we would not be trying to milk a cow again.

I am happy to report that the radio kept playing and in fact did so for a number of years. Try throwing your cellphone at even a small domestic animal and see how that goes. Just an aside.

All this goes to show, keep it simple, don’t fall for the latest fad and trust the retailers when it comes to dairy products, they know best.

If the good lord had intended us all to milk cows he would have made them smaller and put them in petting zoos.

It’s a good rule to follow when the next cooking gadget crops up. Duck and cover. DM/TGIFood

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