Another Year Older...

It’s my bloody birthday again. I know this is happening because for the last few weeks I’ve been getting emails. They are all of roughly the same content and resigned timbre.

“It’s your bloody birthday in a couple of weeks. Is there anything, you need in the kitchen?”

And the answer is always a regretful, but emphatic ‘No’.

It’s not a crazy idea. I’m a bloke. I’m a cook. People think that I like gadgets. The algorithm is pretty sure because earnest manufacturers fill my mailbox all year suggesting their gadget as the ideal gift for the ‘cook who has everything’. This week alone they’ve proposed a pocket sized heat sealer, folding barbecue tools, a sous-vide egg boiler and a Japanese toaster, costing £300 that does a single slice of bread with surgical precision. And herein lies the problem… and probably the reason that, yet again, this year, I’ve begged my family not to buy me anything food related.

I’m a cooking zealot. It’s my life, my work, my hobby and my obsession. If I felt a need to toast shokupan to a perfect Pantone reference, I’d not only think £300 was a fair price to pay, but I’d have bought it for myself, instantly, two weeks before it was released to the public. I think I’ve got all the kit. I mean literally everything from a grinding stone for tef through to a digital induction ring that I can control to a tenth of a degree from my phone.

Every one of these things was vital when I acquired it, and I know that one day I’m going to want to use it again… One day. It’s just that the occasion when I’m going to fascinate and entertain my friends with authentic handmade pasta, cut on a chittara seems a very long time in coming and, meanwhile, the kipple is building up. I swear, sometimes, I don’t own it all, I’m just Curator of a Permanent Collection, and, in consequence, I’m riddled with guilt.

I owned, for a while, a Coravin. I first encountered them at a restaurant called the Quality Chophouse which, for reasons not unrelated to Jancis Robinson, has a cellar full of wines I was never able to afford to drink. “Not true, said my charming waiter, waving the appliance in front of him like a priest with a monstrance. For we have A Coravin”.

The Coravin is a sort of corkscrew, but instead of removing the cork, it inserts a slender, teflon-coated needle into the precious fluids below and injects inert gas so you can extract a glass of wine without taking out the cork. It’s close to a miracle. It meant the sommelier could sell me a glass of something, life-alteringly sublime and then put the bottle back in the rack for another customer. Buying one, suggested my lovely waiter, would let me savour the very best wines in my own cellar over time instead of having to commit to an entire bottle.

I was convinced. Pissed and delerious, but convinced, and two days later had taken delivery of their latest model. It looked like something an infinitely evolved alien species might use to extract semen samples from abductees in rural Florida. It would effortlessly broach my bottle, harvest a single glass and, via bluetooth, update ‘the cellar records on my iPhone’.

We know each other quite well by now, and I think you can see the flaw in the logic here. I took the first, large glass of Sassacaia and Lo, I saw that it was good. I poured another…though smaller. Just to be sure. Then I sat, pondered my good fortune, changed the gas cylinder and had another one. I used the damn thing eight times, according to the app on my phone. Did it delight me… yes. Did it resulted in keeping a single bottle of first class wine for longer than two hours? Emphatically not.

I know I am weak. I know I am easily seduced by gadgetry… and I know I am the wrong man for the Coravin.

Then there was the Mighty Thermomix; a hyper-efficient blender, capable, as far as I can see, of reducing the engine block of a 1958, Series 2 Land Rover to a smooth paste in under eight seconds. But this is just half the story, because the Thermomix can also cook the food inside it, with extraordinarily accurate temperature control. It also weighs its own ingredients.

The Thermomix has devotees across Europe. They use them to make soups, stews, risottos - simple family meals, for which it is a truly labour saving device. In fact the latest Thermomix comes with a bluetooth connection to your phone and an electronic recipe book which orders you to insert the ingredients in the right order and scolds you if you’re inaccurate in your weighing… a kind of fascist Satnav Delia

Chefs go crazy for the Thermomix, because you can stick a bunch of ingredients in it and get on with something else. Insert a lobster, get bisque. Drop in some eggs, butter, lemon juice, and it will produce a gallon of hollandaise without a hint of splitting. All of which is good, because when you finally decide buy one, you can only do so via the oddly cult-like process of inviting a Thermomix ‘Demonstrator’ into your house, to show you how to use it, and parting with roughly a grand.

I lived with mine for about a year and discovered three interesting things;

a) The kind of cook who’s obsessed enough to spend £1000 on a blender is not interested in its recipe for soup.

b) The kind of cook who’s obsessed enough to spend £1000 on a blender doesn’t need a gallon of hollandaise and quite likes making his own, and…

c) The kind of cook who’s obsessed enough to spend £1000 on a blender is a weak and credulous idiot, vulnerable to cultists.

Don’t think for a moment that my uncontrolled cupidity is restricted to expensive connected technology. Consider, as I have done, the positively Neolithic granite pestle and mortar. I first saw one when a smiling Jamie Oliver enthused about his on the telly.

So I bought one… in Chinatown - I was that ‘authentic’. I humped it home on the bus - secretly worrying that I should have forked out for the even larger one that I could barely lift - and I made a Thai green curry paste in it. And all the time I was beating the life out of the lemon grass, reducing it from an unappetising stick to a bowl full of unappetising splinters, I was thinking “God, this is hard going’. It would be OK if it was a bit more abrasive, or the thumper was a different shape, or if I had servants, or a bloody Thermomix”…but I persisted. I crushed coriander seed to precisely the gauge that it yielded no flavour but still stuck in your teeth. I chased garlic cloves around the bowl like greasy mice. I beat a cinnamon stick until my shoulder gave out.

It seemed SO important so I kept on. I tried a mayonnaise in it but I couldn’t get it up. I tried pesto but ended up with a kind of compost. I tried achiote seed but collapsed actually weeping in frustration. It seemed that there wasn’t a single job anywhere in the culinary world that couldn’t be done better with something else. It made a good doorstop.

I shared, I think, five kitchens with my mortar and pestle. In four of them it was never actually used. It marked so much of the arc of my life. A symbol of what was so important at that different time, and what we did to be involved in it, but eventually I realised I wanted the bastard off my bench. I took it to a charity shop, where they wearily placed it on a shelf next to four others in various sizes. Mine, shamingly, was the biggest.

You see? I really don’t need more stuff. In fact I need a lot less. When Elizabeth David died, they auctioned her kitchen equipment to adoring acolytes. I’d do that, next week, without dying, and spend the money replacing the Sassacaia. Or I would if I had acolytes.

I realise that this is probably the most first world problem that it’s possible to imagine. That it exposes me as the spoiled, toy-obsessed, nerd and fickle man-child that I probably am.

I know I am weak but please, as they say online, “don’t @ me”. Don’t hate me and, above all, please don’t buy me kitchen gadgets for my birthday.

(A version of this piece appeared in, I think, the FT, several birthdays ago).