At the chopping edge

With more and more couples doing the cooking themselves, there is now a whole new range of kitchen hardware that has ushered in a culinary revolution. GEETA DOCTOR takes a look at the unusual gadgets that have hit the market.

NOT SINCE the plate ran away with the spoon has there been so much excitement in the artillery department of the kitchen.

We are not talking microwave here, or learning how to "zap!" a cup of coffee in 20 seconds flat, or peering into a built-in garbage disposal unit that has been built into the sink, or trying to promote the all-in-one skills of a food processor, but wandering through the hard-ware section of the once friendly kitchenware shop looking at the latest implements on display. Where have all the knives gone? What happened to that all-purpose stirring implement, the spoon? How does one slice, stir, chop and fry anymore these days? That is, how do you do these things without a cook, who once upon a time used do these things so efficiently, that there was no need to even get into this philosophical kitchen mode.

That is precisely where the answer lies. With more and more couples doing the cooking themselves, there is now a whole new world of kitchen hardware that is being displayed in the market. Just pop in at Poppat Jamals, once the housewife's paradise and the people you are most likely to meet there are the newly liberated husbands with food on their minds. Or stop by and check out the kitchen section at any Foodworld outlet or the even more exciting lifestyle stores and you will amazed.

You will discover implements, which at first glance defy human imagination. There are hammer like objects with small bumps. There are curling tongs with serrated edges, spatulas with holes, two-pronged forks and small handled slicers so deadly looking you wonder whether they might be useful for those contemplating a quick hijack or two.

"I just love buying the latest kitchen gadgets," confesses Kamlesh Patel, the car rally driver, who is also a new age foodie in his spare time. "At one time I used to be turned on by spanners and wrenches, any of the latest equipment for the garage, now I can't resist picking up any new kitchen gadget I see in the market. Sometimes I buy something for which I can't even find a use, like this hammer-like things that I once found. It looked good so I bought it. Then one day I was making some mince patties and I needed something to squeeze out all the water and that is when I found a use for my new hammer. Nobody told me that it was actually meant to mash potatoes!"

It's the men who are at the chopping edge of the culinary revolution. They are the ones for whom the "Zucchini Corer" has been invented. If you don't know what a Zucchini Corer is, don't worry, as one of them explained.

"It's just like a cucumber corer, except tougher. It helps you to get the skin off." These are the men for whom a "citrus zester" is quite different from an "orange zester" though both perform the same function of removing the top layer of the fruit skin in smooth slivers. Never mistake it, however, with the "lemon striper" which, though it might sound like an exotic form of entertainment in Bangkok, is actually meant to peel away the lemon skin, in neat parallel stripes.

Nor is it the only implement reserved for the intrepid lime. There's also a "lemon press" that is quite different from the "lemon squeeze" since the first is meant to regulate the number of drops that you might need to get from a slice of lemon, while the other will help you to extract the juice from each half sphere of the lemon.

Naturally, this is not to be confused with the garlic press, which as is obvious, is meant to mash each pod of garlic to a fine mash. Never mind that all those Chinese chefs do it so neatly with the flat end of their heavy machete.

The hammer-like implements that Patel mentions also come in various sizes. When used for meat preparations they are known as tenderizers, when used on potatoes they become mashers, but only a very inept cook would try and use one of these hammers to split open a crab claw or to crack open a walnut. Why should he need to do that when someone has actually invented a "Walnut Cracker" and a "Crab Cruncher"?

For those who eat fish, the memory of ancient cook women kneeling in patient penitence on their knees, holding down the traditional curved cutting blade of a fish scalar and slicer with one knee and levering the fish upwards against the knife in neat efficient movements, the idea of a special gizmo to scale the fish will sound absurd. There is actually a special comb like instrument to remove the scales. Perhaps it was invented in the spur of the moment by a chef who absent-mindedly took the comb out of his right pocket instead of his little scaling knife!

Talking of chefs, have you noticed how most of them have a dinky little pocket on their left side coat sleeve, somewhere high up, closer to the arm joint? This actually helps to bolster the argument that many of these new inventions are to keep the guys in the kitchen feeling somehow very superior.

"Yes, of course", agrees Rishi Negi, the ebullient Food and Beverage Manager at the Taj Coromandel. "Whenever I am in the kitchen, I have to impress my wife.

So I ask her to get this and to get that for me and by the time I have finished cooking one dish, she says that I would have used up half the kitchen utensils."

Gautam, the chef at "The Patio", the Coromandel's Conti cuisine restaurant, displays his secret hoard of weapons, that he carries in his sleeve pocket like one of those American Red Indians and Cowboy movies, where Tonto suddenly fishes a knife that he has hidden away in some part of his inner arm, or leg. "I always keep a meat thermometer with me," he says revealing a pencil-like gadget, which has a dial at one end.

Apparently, the catering industry has become so safety conscious, that no chicken or meat dish is allowed to leave the kitchen without the temperature being checked. After a certain degree of heat, any threat of salmonella will be gone, he tells me, also reeling off the temperatures required to cook steak to various degrees of preparedness. One is inevitably reminded of the story of the Tartars, those intrepid horseman who galloped across Central Asia, with chunks of fresh meat they kept under their saddles, to be eaten at a later date, still warm from the friction of the saddle over the horse's flank and (vegetarians please stop reading at this point) marinated perhaps with horse sweat! They still call it Steak Tartare but obviously the chefs have to stick in their temperature gauges to check whether it's raw enough.

Gautam also displays a small spoon that he uses for tasting and a tiny knife in case of emergency, both of which are nestled in his sleeve pocket.

"I used to have a full set of Swiss knives", he tells me. "They were the best quality knives and I kept them very carefully with me at home, you need different knives for different types of work. One day, I noticed that most of my knives gone. When I asked my mother, she said. "Why does anyone need so many knives, just one will do so I gave them away to all my neighbours!" As Gautam says, he could only watch in shock as he saw his mother's friends using his best steak knives to chop their daily vegetables and fruit.

Knives are as close to a chef's occupation as a cello is to a musician, as I discovered when I met a famous Swiss chef, who 47,1,0called for the tools of his trade. They had been neatly wrapped in a long canvas bag, with compartments.

There were more than 20 of them, including an instrument for cracking bones and an electric sharpening device for keeping his knives in order.

"Whenever I travel, I have to check this in with the pilot. He keeps it for me in the cockpit," he said. Will he be allowed anywhere near a cockpit with his collection of knives today, one wonders. Finally, this brings us to a fascinating question. Why is it that amongst all the people of the world, we in India have stuck to eating our food with our fingers? We share this trait with most of the Africa tribes, Arabs and also the Eskimos.

According to Harry Petroski who has written a fascinating account on "The evolution of useful things" after early human being progressed from the stage of pointed flint stones to cut and chop at pieces of food, they found that a long pointed stick with a stone tip and gradually a metal tip was good to both stir the food on a hot fire and take it out of it, to be offered to special guests. In short the first eating implement must have been a knife. As the design evolved, it became a two-pronged fork.

The spoon must have started life as a scooped out shell or leaf. From this it was a long haul to the refinements of different types of knives and forks for every type of fruit, vegetable, fish and meat. The Chinese learnt to make do with a pair of chopsticks, he tells us, because Confucius believed that having a knife on the table would definitely upset the delicate feelings of the guests, who might have been reminded of the slaughterhouse.

He also tells us that because they use chopsticks, the Chinese prefer to serve their food in small bite seized bits. So what does this say about us? It is because we are so sensitive to the idea of taking life that we have never even tried to eat with knives and forks? Is it that we enjoy the sensual pleasure of feeling the different textures of food on our fingertips as we roll the morsels up into bite-seized bits that we toss into our mouths with joyous abandonment?

We shall perhaps never know. Meanwhile, there's a whole new world of butter curlers and spaghetti cutters waiting for us, out there on the kitchen shelves of the latest shops that will make sure that when it comes to the preparation of food, we will be right there waving our balloon eggs whisks, like the rest of the world.

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