Tools In Hand

When Julia McWilliams was learning to cook, her then-boyfriend Paul Childs teased her about her love of cooking gadgetry. “Julie Jackdaw” he called her, and mocked her for her multiple rolling pins.

We’re not quite as big of collectors of cooking tools as Julia Childs was. Since moving to the UK, we’ve had to pare down — first the KitchenAid mixer (*gasp!* *sob!*), then the food processor and waffle iron (aargh!) and every other electronic item which would quickly be blown out and destroyed in contact with the higher UK voltage. We left a lot behind for our renters, sold a lot more, and we’ve made do with much, much less. There are some things we miss (*sniffle*), and some things we are seriously considering replacing in May when we move for what — please God — we hope is the last time (do waffle irons exist in this country? No, we do NOT want a sandwich toaster. What is this national obsession with paninis?), but for the most part, less, for us, has been more.

D. is much more of the machine-tech guy, anyway, while I love things that are manually operated. I love rolling pins. I love hand grinders and molds and things without electrical cords I can make “go” under my own power. Two of my very favorite kitchen items are old and glamor-less, but I couldn’t do without them.

The first is my mortar. It’s not fancy — it’s a cheap hunk of streaked marble, imperfectly cut and polished on the outside, and rough on the inside. It was maybe $3 at a crazy-busy Asian market on the outskirts of Rohnert Park, and I’ve had it since college. It’s absolutely essential to me for grinding things like cumin, cracking peppercorns and making pastes of fresh herbs and spices for my continued attempts at Thai food. Sometimes I think about poking around in antique-y/junque stores for an old-fashioned coffee grinder to at least do the dry herbs, and I miss my $10 coffee grinder that I used, but I’m glad to be here and to be forced into using this hunk of rock. There’s something cathartic about pressing the pestle against the bowl of the mortar and going ’round and round, ’til everything is fragrant and pulverized. Someday I’d like to find a big piece of granite and make my own, but that’s a loooong term project for which I’d need a lot of patience and a backyard!

The other kitchen tools are very, very old. They are Miss Emily’s pewter measuring spoons. Miss Emily was my great-grandmother. She was blind, when I met her, and she was in her late eighties. She was in her nineties when she died. I inherited her figure — minus the hands and the almost six feet of height, darn it — and her love of utter weirdness — she was a HUGE Monkees fan. Seriously.

Miss Emily was a New Orleans flapper in the Prohibition Era 1920’s, and lived a life so vivid — and so dangerous — that there are Stories About Her, if you know what I mean. She never went very far from home — New Orleans is about forty minutes from where my grandmother lives, and half an hour from where Miss Emily died, in Lafayette — but she certainly caused a stir. When she died, the pair of brass knuckles in her trunk just caused my grandmother to make that little “Hmph” noise she does so well. Miss Em was, to put it politely, kind of a hell-raiser.

When she died, my mother’s six sisters chose what they wanted from her. My mother got her washboard, which Miss Emily used ’til she lost her sight, and my Aunt Gertrude took a few of her kitchen things, including her spoons. After years of moving, Aunt Gert left them at my mother’s house for safekeeping, and Mom used them for years. When I left, with my mother’s blessing, I brought them with me.

Miss Emily never went anywhere, but her spoons are five thousand miles from where she used them. I imagine her humming with the radio, putting a fingertip down the edge of her coffee cup and carefully filling it, wrapping her long fingers around mine as we measure the salt and baking powder for biscuits. I imagine her slow teasing voice, and see her cocking head, listening to the world go by.

A cooking blog isn’t where you tell family stories, but I have to tell this one — Miss Emily divorced my great-grandfather — or one divorced the other, who knows, years before I was born. They lived apart — a block apart — for years, and walked by with their noses in the air, always being sure to cross the street when the other was coming, as well as being sure to walk on the same streets. No one even remembers why they divorced — what their argument was about, but by the time I was a small child, it had taken on the gigantic proportions of A Real Tiff. They would speak to each other through intermediaries — usually to insult each other. My great-grandfather loathed the man Miss Emily took up with (we all just called him Vader, as in Darth), just as she genially hated the women he dated. They kept up this bickering for years and years.

When Miss Emily took sick, Daddy Willie took sick as well, and they both went into a coma at the same time. My grandparents died… within a day of each other… in the same hospital room.

You have to love someone a lot to “hate” them that much.

In my kitchen are the echoes of old stone and dull pewter, and long lives gone by.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.