New & Improved (NOT!)

Remember the early Quisinart food processors? You could push a whole (small) russet potato through the feed tube and get thin, perfect rounds. You could also julienne your whole forearm. Those were the days. Now they’ve added so many safety features that the machine is useless for slicing and dicing. You pretty much have to julienne the carrot in advance just to fit it in the feed tube.

On the other hand, the safety features are so intense (you cannot turn the thing on until you’ve locked it down like a safe) that once I’ve got it set up, I let Enzo pretty much do what he wants with it. What he wants is to turn it on-off-on-off-on-off-on-off. Ooooooooon. Off! Ooooooooooooooooooooon. Off! He likes the pulse feature.

But the best cooking tools haven’t changed. Early Man (or Early Woman) braised mastadon shanks in a Le Creuset enameled cast iron pot. The design hasn’t changed since. I inherited my grandma’s, which we all think of as her bean pot, though she cooked many other things in it. The pot is persimmon colored, nine quart. The handle on the lid is a little melted, and in a few spots the enamel is almost worn through. How many millions of pink beans have simmered in that pot with onion, carrot, celery, and a big ham hock? Those beans are not complicated, but mine never turn out as tasty as hers. Maybe I’m over-complicating them. I can never resist adding coriander or forty cloves of garlic or some other innovation.

Speaking of over-complicating things: new and improved kitchen gadgets. They hold such promise, don’t they? The rocky path will be made smooth, the pits will practically jump out of the cherries, and you’ll conquer the world armed only with a mini-blow torch and a battery-powered vegetable peeler, as seen on Oprah. What a total lie. And yet I just went online to look for absurd and baroque gadgets to use as examples, and I almost bought an herb spinner. It was so adorable!

New cooking gadgets will not make your life easier. They will only clutter up the drawer and make it harder to find the tools you actually use. You don’t need a special gadget for making a perfect helix of citrus rind. You do need a wooden spoon, but you can’t find it because it’s buried under the helix gadget. You don’t need corn zipper, a tomato slicer or a mango pitter. You need a ten-inch chef knife. You don’t need an avocado masher or a fruit muddler. You need a two-year-old with a fork. You don’t need a Crockpot. You need my grandma’s bean pot on the back burner of a 1940’s O’Keefe and Merritt gas stove on low.

That brings me to my stove—that chrome curvaceous beauty. It’s older than I am and far more functional. It’s the opposite of a gadget. It’s more like a tank. When all the pilots are lit, it’s warm to the touch even when you’re not cooking anything. In the wintertime, before we had Enzo, I would toast my toes at the open oven door, as if it were a crackling fireplace. I would read about cooking and sometimes actually cook, and I would drink hot chocolate and be warm.

This winter I want to learn to make good beef stew. Mine never turns out right, I think because instead of browning the meat, I grey it. Maybe if I use grandma’s bean pot the patina of a thousand rich stews will rub off somehow and change my luck. Having that bean pot simmering on the back burner with rich meaty stew scenting the air seems like the definition of safe and warm.

When I launch Enzo into the world, I would like to send him with that bean pot. I hope he knows what to do with it. And I hope it keeps him safe and warm.