• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 693 0

keep the blades separate and stable. Counter blocks are okay, but they rarely match up to an eclectic collection, and they tend to take up a lot of space. The best idea I’ve seen lately is a long skinny slot cut into the top of a butcher block deep enough for the knives to simply line up along the slot. Whatever device you choose, please make sure that the blades are completely enclosed. A friend had a rolling kitchen cart with a knife block attached to the side. One day he purchased a 12-inch slicer and put it into the block. Later that same day he reached down to the bottom of the cart for a pot, only to realize that the block was 11 inches long and had a completely open bottom. He had time to ponder this fact later as he sat in the emergency room.

Pots and Pans

Sometime during the last twenty years of the past century, the kitchen became the new living room. Not so much because cooking and eating are communal acts connecting us all via the collective rumblies in our tumblies, but because there was a lot of cash floating around and a plethora of expensive new kitchen pretties to spend it on. Suddenly kitchens that had never witnessed an egg boil were being fitted with five-thousand-dollar cook tops. And of course nothing befits a five-thousand-dollar cook top quite like a halo of silently shining geosynchronous sauce pans. Even I, with my two-hundred-dollar cook top, fell victim to pot-rack fever. Following several years of collecting I finally had to mount flying buttresses on my humble ranch house just to support the ceiling joists, which moaned at the butter melters, fry pans, sauce pans, sauté pans, Windsor pans, casseroles, stock pots, and griddles I had accumulated. Then came the day I dropped two C notes on a French potato pot. My family got together and applied some tough love, slipping in while I was at Williams-Sonoma and taking it all away, leaving me with nothing but my great-grandmother’s 12-inch cast-iron skillet. Some might call such intervention harsh, but once I quit my sobbing I found that I was free, finally, to cook. Really cook. My family slowly returned my pots and pans to me as Christmas and birthday presents, but in my new-found Zen-lightenment I gave most of them away. To this day, my rack remains light. Here’s the breakdown in order of importance.

12-Inch Cast-Iron Skillet

I recently got into one of those “What pan would you want if you were stuck on a deserted island” conversations you hear so much about. My 12-inch Lodge was the easy choice. Besides all the metallurgical and thermal reasons given in the Searing section, this remains a culinary chameleon. Not only is its shape versatile, the properly cured surface is hard and black and slippery as a newt in Vaseline.37 I’ve even turned mine upside down and used the bottom as a griddle—oh yes, I have. I’ve used it as a flame-tamer, too, by placing other pans on top of it. I’ve baked biscuits in it, baked quiche in it, baked apple pie in it, I’ve cooked on campfires with it, and one particularly rough winter during my college years I managed to rip a gas heater off the wall, set it up on coffee cans, and fry bacon-wrapped prawns over it. Take care of that cast-iron skillet and it will never let you down.

What it’s good for: this would take too long. What it’s not good for: boiling pasta—that’s about it.

Cooking was the only way I could get dates during college.

5-Quart Casserole

This is a relative newcomer to my collection, but it easily replaces three different vessels in my life, thus allowing for more downscaling. It is essentially a small, heavy stock pot with two loop handles. Since I like finishing things in the oven I’ve never been much of a sauce-pan fan—I don’t like wrestling with straight single handles, which I think are pretty darned dangerous. Although this isn’t a common piece, several companies make one (or something close). Mine was made by All-Clad, the Smith & Wesson of the pot-and-pan world, if you ask me. It costs more than just about anything out there, but you’ll only have to buy it once, and since