GREAT UNKNOWN

Evening Star, Issue 22572, 13 February 1937, Page 24

GREAT UNKNOWN

GENIUSES OF THE KITCHEN As long as the oldest of us can remember there has been a roller towel available in the scullery, but each time we change it we wonder who invented the strong, simple roller, writes hlyn Walshe in the ‘ Manchester Guardian. ■ It is so admirably suited for its purpose, and lasts as long as the door to which it is screwed. . The same genius who invented the roller for the towel may have also thought of the rolling-pm, although this household treasure probably underwent some changes before the exact weight and thickness were decided. People have used other kinds of rolling pins, made of glass or other substances, but on the whole the plain wooden rolling-pin has kept its place in millions of kitchens for hundreds of years, and will go on doing so until we all give up cooking at home and buy all oue pastry from a factory where it has been rolled out by the half-mile with chromium steel rollers worked by electricity. „ ~ , . There arc dozens of other devices, strong and simple, in the kitchen, such as the wooden spoons which must be the oldest form of implement now in use, probably much older than steel knives. The cave-woman, no doubt, used a stick, and then one day when her husband had a cold and stayed indoors, he amused himself by burning out a hollow in the stick, and 10l the first wooden spoon. The jug is not so ancient.. It may be only about 300 years old. The unknown benefactor who first thought of its distinctive lip lived not very long ago, and his fine thought has not yet spread to all races. The Greeks and Romans had no lips to their pitchers, and there are few around the Mediterranean to this day. The picturesque women who draw water from the wells and fountains in southern lands and carry it home on their heads have crooks and pitchers without any dent in their round tops. The brass water pots of the Indian woman are completely round. . . It is a surprise wlien one first goes abroad to find that our kettle is so peculiarly British. To be sure, the kettle’s cheif use is for the making of tea, and in few countries outside our own is the making of tea a daily rite. In Russia, the other tea-drinking country, there is the traditional samovar, a much more complicated apparatus. One can, or course, make tea with water from a saucepan, and this practice no doubt accounts for much that we find odd in the tea drunk abroad. The kettle, then, is a modern utensil, probably invented in this country a couple of centuries ago, but by whom? Another unknown benefactor. The saucepan is more ancient. In museums there are skillets of brass and copper with long handles and, lips, which are four or five, hundred years old. Always the lips are on the left, unless there are two, one on each side. It is odd that this should be so, ana still is, in spite of the demand .from women cooks that the lip should he on the right. In making sauces the cook (unless she is left-handed) always stirs with the right hand and pours with the left, and the lip should therefore be on the right. But no. The first saucepan or skillet was made with the lip on the left, and it looks as if the last saucepan would keep up the tradition. • The casserole is far more ancient than the saucepan. In the rubbish heap of Et Bronze Age settlement there were found rude crocks blackened underneath, the cooking pots or casserole* of 3,000 years ago. No one knows who invented them, or in what part of tho world they were first used.