My mother thinks that the modern dishes such as chilli con carne that I teach my London school children are a load of nonsense. But one modern 1970′s gadget has caught her eye. On my Christmas holiday visit she gleefully shows off her slow cooker.
Slow cooker
‘You can leave the pot on all day and it cooks over a light bulb. It really saves money – you should buy one.’
After several light bulb cooked stews, we sit down to evening meals with dread. The slow cooker is quietly renamed the slop pot as mother slopped in food in the morning, switched on the light bulb, left it all day and slopped out the food onto our plates at night. As my week progresses, the pot stores a magic brew of recycled food.
‘There’s no need to waste anything – you can just added to the pot’ she explained to my amazed silence.
So it was no surprise that lumps of Sunday’s roast lamb would appear in her Thursday’s shin of beef stew along with pieces of roast potato and brussels sprouts. Over the weeks her sloppot recipes became more adventurous. Her other kitchen gadget was the chest freezer, stuffed full of frozen fruit and vegetables from her garden and reduced food with yellow stickers from Sainsburys. One day, in a hurry to shop on Leicester market, she slopped in a bag of frozen chopped carrots into the pot. The light bulb did its best to defrost the vegetables, but we meakly ate the frozen pieces that night. My mother was too fierce for any criticism. She had been known to throw her cooking tools on the floor and storm out if we suggested that something was too cold, or raw.
‘You can cook next time!’ she shouts. But my bowl of tossed salad was dismissed with scorn. ‘Mucking up good food!’
Slow cookers soon became the rage, and in the thrifty seventies, saving fuel bills is important.
But then the slow cooker hits the headlines. The new cook on the Evening Standard, Delia Smith, uses raw kidney beans for chilli con carne.
‘Tip the dried beans into the mince, and leave it to cook during the day.’
But she’s wrong. The raw beans must be boiled for 10 minutes to destroy their natural toxin. Other wise you’ll get sickness and diarrhoea and feel really, really poorly. Some may blame it on the new ingredients – chillis – but really it’s Delia – what will become of her? What will the future hold for Ms Smith?
Slow cooker or slop pot
