A gem of childhood destroyed by adult information
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- April 29, 2024
- 263
I did a dumb thing last week, and I have the blister to show for it. Ignoring a hard and fast rule about not cooking in bare feet, I sloshed boiling pasta water onto my foot, which was clad only in a thin sock. It didn’t burn that badly, and I gave it little thought until my young son pointed to my foot the next evening and said I had a boo-boo.
Sure enough, there was a big, angry blister I hadn’t noticed and that created no problem while wearing shoes. I was lucky but still dumb. You really should at least have some slippers on while cooking. Any number of hot things can splash you, or you can drop a sharp or heavy object onto your unprotected tootsie.
I can add it to the many other scars and boo-boos accumulated over the years. If you cook very much, you’re going to get cut, burned, briefly blinded and have a finger or two smashed. Restaurant chefs I’ve known have arms that look like they operate a chain saw with all the screws loosened.
A knife sharpener I bought last year came with a cut-resistant glove. It’s useless for using the sharpener because surely no one is that ridiculously clumsy, but it works a treat for using an oyster knife. Opening oysters is a job that breaks all the rules: you have a pointy metal object that you’re driving directly toward your own hand. I don’t know how the guys who open hundreds of oysters a day do it without a biblical-scale bloodletting. I know that’s a factory job I do not want, no matter how much it might pay.
Some of the knives we’ve collected over the years come with a nice plastic sleeve to protect the blade, but every time I slide them back into their cover, I wince. I’m sure that thing is going to fail and allow me to slice my hand open like at a secret society initiation in the movies.
One thing I’ve spoken about here before and poo-poo’d may require some rethinking. There are many things in the kitchen that are not safe to eat raw, but flour actually shapes up to be a real risk you should not take. This is going to come as brutal news to most of my family, as everyone lines up to munch the raw cookie dough from the mixer paddle.
The problem is with the wheat crop and how it is grown. I had thought that E. coli outbreaks from flour were surely the result of buying cut-rate generic flour from wonky sources, but that’s not the case. The problem starts if wheat is fertilized naturally with cow manure. Cows naturally have the E. coli bacteria, which makes us as sick as can be, in their gut, causing them no harm. But it is retained in their waste and can make it into fields and, of course, into crops in quantities great enough to cause illness in people.
So whether you’re buying the scary flour from the super discount store or the pricey boutique, bougie stuff milled from the tender shoots of protected heirloom hybrids, you can still get yourself a trip to the ER if you aren’t careful. It’s best to scrape every crumb of cookie batter from the mixer paddle and get it into a tub of soaking water before anyone can show up asking to lick the scraps. “Oops. Sorry, I already washed it.”
Such precautions seem silly. I think all of us grew up licking the mixer beaters of cake or cookie batter, and I don’t remember any health scares. But it happens enough to warrant great caution. Mark this off as another gem of childhood destroyed by reasonable adult information.