Equipment and Logistics

With food processors, microwave ovens, electric slow-cookers, Crock Pots, mini-fryers, hamburger grills, and almost restaurant-sized mixers permeating the market, it's become amazing to some people that excellent food can be produced with rather simple, even primitive, equipment. A three-quart saucepan, a ten-inch skillet, a sharp knife, a large mixing bowl, and a wooden spoon supplemented by a soupspoon, a dinner fork, and a coffee cup can get you pretty far. I don't recommend it but it can be done.

To that list I would at least add:

A teakettle for boiling water
A filter drip coffeepot
An eight- or ten-inch French chef's knife
A slotted metal kitchen spoon
An enameled cast-iron or earthenware casserole that can be used on top of
of the stove and in the oven and is attractive enough to go to the table
An eight-inch skillet for cooking eggs, among other things
A deep twelve-inch, straight-sided heavy aluminum sauté pan with cover
for cooking chicken, stews, and Chinese stir-fry dishes
An eight-quart enameled cast iron casserole for boiling pasta, making
stews, pot roasts, and large quantities of soup

It also would be helpful to have:

Another wooden spoon
A rubber spatula
A large strainer for draining pasta and other foods and also for pureeing
some foods
One-cup and four-cup heatproof glass measuring cups
Metal measuring spoons on a ring
An attractive ceramic pie plate to double as a baking dish that can go to
the table
A four-sided stainless steel grater
A stainless steel wire whisk
A stainless steel swivel-bladed vegetable peeler
A baking sheet, preferably a jelly roll pan that has four half-inch sides
A can opener
A small mixing bowl

In fact, with the exception of some baking pans and an inexpensive electric hand mixer, you could prepare almost all the recipes in this book with just this equipment. Certainly you can eat quite well. There are a few additional utensils, however, that I feel are necessary for a small kitchen or are simply valuable tools beyond this basic kitchen battery.

Two touted pieces of culinary equipment are the food processor and the microwave oven. Food processors are the best thing to happen to kitchens and cooks in a long time, but I think the case for owning a microwave oven is somewhat dubious. A well-made food processor will slice, chop, puree, grate, and mix. It takes up very little counter space and can save enormous amounts of time and effort, especially if you cook often. I'm not sure it's worth the investment to someone who doesn't cook much, and I'm quite positive it is worthless unless you have the counter space to keep it handy at all times. But even if I had just a tiny amount of space to spare for it I would own a food processor. And I'd much prefer to clutter the counter with a food processor than a toaster. I toast bread in the broiler or oven.

A food processor is not an absolute requirement of any recipe in this book, but it is suggested for special jobs, such as pureeing, for which it has no peers. Until food processors became available a few years ago, almost everyone used a blender for pureeing foods. And if you have a blender you will find a number of uses for it here. If you don't own one, however, I don't recommend going out now and buying it. A food processor, although more expensive, is a better value. An old-fashioned food mill, which forces food through a sharp mesh, can also puree well and it is, of course, the least expensive pureer you can find. It also has the virtue of having a hole in the handle for hanging it out of the way of the work surface, but obviously more time and energy is required to puree with a food mill than with a food processor.

Microwave ovens seem to me to have limited uses considering their expense and the amount of space they consume. From my experience, they do not cook many foods nearly as satisfactorily as conventional methods do — roasts emerge with a steamed taste and texture, bread and cheese become rubbery even at low temperatures, large amounts of vegetables take much longer to cook, it's impossible to cook an egg with the yolk runny and the white set. What a microwave can do beautifully is soften or melt butter in seconds, fry bacon crisp between paper towels, reheat leftovers, defrost frozen foods, and reheat coffee without ruining the flavor — none of which seem to me worth its considerable cost. There also still seems to be some question about the safety of microwaves in general.

At the other end of the kitchen equipment spectrum, there is a very inexpensive kitchen gadget that I would't be without — a plastic Mouli nut and cheese grater. This is a small rotary grater that will grind nuts without their becoming pasty and grate cheese without fuss. I recommend the plastic model because, unlike the metal models with interchangeable graters, large pieces cannot leak from the plastic grater. The carriage cylinder is sealed.

The biggest problem of all in a small kitchen, however, is finding a place to chop, slice, and otherwise prepare vegetables and other foods for the pot. Assuming you have little or no counter space, the most useful piece of equipment you can probably buy is a board that will hinge over your sink. You can buy both wooden and sturdy plastic models with a strategically placed hole through which water can run into the sink. Some of these models also have strainers that fit into the hole so that you don't stop up the sink with vegetable scraps. Slicing, dicing, and other less vigorous ways of cutting up food can be done on a sink board, but heavy chopping of such things as parsley or garlic may have to be done on a sturdier surface. It's also a good idea to learn how to cut up some foods directly over the pot without cutting yourself. Cutting carrots against the thumb is an old homemaker's habit and a good one to acquire if you have no other place to cut carrots.

In older buildings, no matter how tiny the kitchen, there is often a double sink with a drainboard that fits over one half. It should not be used as a drainboard if it can be put to better advantage. In modern kitchens there is generally a single sink sunken into a counter, or at least a counter ledge, and no drainboard. In both cases, look into the possibility of hanging a plastic-coated wire or wooden dish-drain rack over the sink area. These are now widely available in housewares stores. One acquaintance of mine had her two cabinets moved up higher than usual so she could fit a drain rack under one and a combination cookbook and spice shelf under the other. She has to stand on a stool to reach the top shelves of her cupboards, but she has gained about four square feet of working space in a kitchen that has a total of about six square feet of floor space.

Portable surfaces can also be used to...