Spurtles and Fireless Cookers

January 28, 2000

SPURTLES AND FIRELESS COOKERS

The first kitchen curiosity that I remember is the dutch oven my father hung over a rod in the empty space above the Hudson engine. Mother filled it with stew ingredients and it cooked on the way to the next campground. I don't remember any strange taste. Old car hoods covered a lot of empty space. The next such was the Fireless Cooker that sat in the cellar. It was the size of a cedar chest, gray metal, with two round hollow spaces inside. The theory was that you heated the food to boiling, then set it into these holes, and the food would continue to cook by itself, because of the heavy insulation. I don't remember that we ever ate anything cooked thus.

I still have the only implement mother considered suitable for whipping egg whites for Angel Food Cake. It is a large empty mixing spoon shape with a wire frame and curly wire cross pieces. People came to watch mother make this cake. If the humidity in the house didn't suit her she took the bowl and whipper outside. Her cake never failed. We lived in a commuter suburb and didn't keep chickens but drove 10 miles or so to get fresh ones each week. The "egg lady" lived in a tiny farmhouse. On the way we looked with awe on the McAlpin estates, related to a big hotel in New York. Nearby was a bakery in someone's house. We always stopped in. I don't know what mother bought, but I always had a big white sugar covered Soft Sugar Cookie. I have sometimes made some almost as good, but not quite, and not dependably.

Mother went on making her famous Angel Food and insisting there was nothing to it, until one day at my brother's house she was inveigled into trying a box mix for it. She never made another Angel Food from scratch. Of course the family never thought the box equaled her cakes, but she said there wasn't enough difference to bother.

The wire whip sits unused, along with the new spurtle, the spaetzle maker, and the funnel cake pitcher. The family searches for strange kitchen gadgets, hoping to find one I don't have, or even better, can't name. The ceramic owl egg separator from Canada gets used. The Mexican hat pie steam release is too pretty to use. The pasta machine and the pasta drying rack were used quite a lot, in their day. The cherry pitter, the apple pealer, the lemon zester, the shrimp sheller are retired., but on call. The string bean french cutter works, but a fresh green bean tastes good no matter what shape you cut it. The melon baller still gets used to make quick festive Fruit Cups. A glass disk that you drop into the kettle to keep pasta from boiling over works, but I never understood why. There is a folding wire thing that seems to be meant for bending tortillas, but then what? There are molds that you dip into batter and then into hot fat, creating a delicacy that no one would eat nowadays.
What's a spurtle? The Scrabble dictionary says "a stick for stirring porridge." Mine is ten inches long, turned on a lathe, shaped to be pleasant to hold, and polished to a finish so beautiful I wouldn't think of getting it dirty. We think it is intended for polenta.
I have a cookie mold tube with lots of different plates, cookie molds that you press into the dough, cookie pans that you press the dough into, a wheel that cuts a bunch of shapes in one revolution, graduated cake pons for wedding cake construction, a cake pan insert that makes a checkerboard cake.
There are rubber molds for ice statues.
The most treasured of all is the cast iron sitting rabbit mold. The first born carried this object home on the bus from New York. It must have felt like 50 pounds by the time she got here. I have indeed made sitting rabbit cakes, settled on paper grass and surrounded by colored eggs.

I still gaze wistfully at store pegboards full of gadgets, wishing there were some reason to buy another. But I know now that for me a knife and spoon are better for setting out drop cookies than that thing you squeeze to push the dough off the blade. There isn't space for another thing. Cooking for one doesn't require many gadgets. Still, maybe I should have one of those thermometers that chefs keep in a pocket to check on hot dishes to see if they're at the legal level …..