Ask Albert Moulin to name the essential accoutrements in his kitchen and he’ll answer with a story. The gourmet cook was scheduled to demonstrate the tricky business of pompano en papillote for a TV talk show in Albuquerque. He pointedly asked if he should bring any equipment. “No,” responded the station manager. “We have a well-appointed kitchen.”
Unfortunately for Moulin, the appropriate verb tense was “had.” Someone had cleaned out everything; there wasn’t even a knife left. The Dallas chef, who teaches cooking courses at Brookhaven College and Williams-Sonoma, went on the air filleting fish and chopping vegetables with the knife on the tip of his pocket corkscrew, which he always carries. “I learned then there’s not much that’s absolutely essential,” he quips.
Maybe not, but kitchens and cooking are as much statements of personal style as clothes and cars. What’s necessity to one cook is frivolity to another. We asked five gourmet cooks what kitchen equipment they would be bereft without. Their answers all had one common element – their differences.
Parker Folse, Jr., is a championship cook. The Dallasite has won more state fair blue ribbons than any other Texan – 200 first places and 12 best of shows – and four times captured the crown at the International Hush Puppy Olympics. This cook extraordinaire says his list of requirements is long, because “you need the right tools for the particular job you’re doing.”
Nonetheless, some things in his kitchen are more equal than others. And most of those gadgets are hand-held. He favors them because they are easy to use and simple to clean. ’They don’t require any expensive energy,” he laughs.
High on his list are knives and cutting surfaces. Although he has more than 100 knives, there are two he labels absolutes. “If I had to live with only two knives, one would have to be my filet knife,” he says. Thin and flexible, it has a smooth, eight-inch blade and a wooden handle. The other is his sabatier, a 12-inch, high-carbon steel instrument.
Folse favors two chopping surfaces. For contaminants – chiefly pork, beef, and chicken – he uses a plastic rectangle half an inch thick. Vegetables start their trek to the sauté pan or stock pot on a wooden butcher block oiled to a high sheen. Folse fashioned the slab himself from a white ash tree on his farm in Minnesota.
Folse relies heavily on his Cuisinart to puree, uses an electric blender for mayonnaise and crepe batters, and employs a cast-iron skillet for “90 per cent of my sau-téing.” And he says, “I would trade in everything before I gave up my cast-iron drip-roaster. I don’t have to worry about it because it’s not valuable. But it’s invaluable to me.”
There’s one curious utensil in Folse’s kitchen which he says he will never move. It’s his 12-year-old daughter’s outgrown high chair. When she was a baby her father would sit her in it so she could watch him cook.
James Beard, the prolific cookbook author, has always been an advocate of back-to-basics cookery, but at the same time keeps an eye out for modern innovations. His list of indispensables, accordingly, is a blend of both attitudes. “I couldn’t live without my very best knives, my Cuisinart, and my KitchenAid mixer with its dough hook,” he responds, not mincing words.
Beard’s blades are high-carbon steel, usually from France or Switzerland, and never see the inside of a dishwasher. “I have the old-fashioned idea a dishwasher is not good for them. I believe they’re much better off if kept clean with a damp cloth,” he says. They are suspended on a wooden rack; it treats the steel more gently, he explains.
The syndicated columnist says no kitchen is complete without two or three different kinds of scissors. He also confesses to having a “whole drawer full of spatulas.” And he never seems to have enough measuring cups.
A huge mirror is the centerpiece of Beard’s kitchen. “I use it to get a fix on things,” he says. The author first installed the mirror when doing food photo shoots. He says it makes a perfect background.
His favorite energy saver is his tall director’s chair. “Every kitchen needs at least one high stool so you can rest and work at the same time.”
Next is a housewife whose cooking was just too good to keep a family secret. When Willie Nelson was last in Dallas, he asked Betty Ablon, now one of the city’s hottest caterers, to fix his dinner.
Mrs. Ablon says she loves her six-burner gas stove. Six burners more than double the cooking capacity, she contends.
Although the caterer cooks complicated meals, she lives on salads, which explains why she needs eight potato peelers. “People go nuts over knives. But they don’t move me, I’ll cut with anything. But a potato peeler …” Her voice trails off.
Mrs. Ablon grows as hot as her gas stove when discussing her most dispensable item – the microwave. “I can’t make peace with that thing. I like the total experience of cooking and think microwaving is culinary thievery,” she says.
In Mrs. Ablon’s kitchen all you hear is the sound of the Cuisinart whirring. “I can’t stand any noise when I cook. I’m a featherbrain in the kitchen so I really have to concentrate. So much baking powder, so much baking soda – I get lost if there are any outside noises.”
Burt Wolf, for three minutes, five days a week, enters households all over America and teaches his TV viewers about cooking, nutrition, and kitchens on a syndicated program called What’s Cookin’. Also author of The Cook’s Catalogue, Wolf travels to Dallas four times a year to supervise cookware buying for Sanger Harris.
Knives and pots are the only essential things in his New York kitchen. He says his 12-inch chefs knife, three-inch paring knife, and beveled-edged slicing knife are his most trusted friends. “Everything that needs cutting could be done with them,” he’s discovered.
Wolf’s 19-inch sauté pan is the biggest he could find. “When you’re cooking for three children, their friends, and the woman of your dreams, you need a large pan,” he says. The health-conscious cook usually steams two kinds of vegetables for each meal, so he’s got to have two saucepans. A 15-quart stock pot and a good roasting pan round out his essentials.
The one thing he’ll never give up is his industrial broiler. “I hate fat on my food, so I simply broil it away,” he continues. Wolf adds he “would be lost” without his corkscrew and “a mess” without his apron.
Whenever he works, Wolf turns on his stereo. Two speakers sit right in his kitchen. “Music keeps me company when I’m alone,” adds the expert.
Since Wolf has to stand during his daily filming, he likes to sit down when he slices at home. “My feet are the first to go when I cook. I have a stool which I drag around everywhere,” he says.
Judith Bradley is a cooking instructor at the Country Cupboard, a well-stocked gourmet shop at Prestonwood Shopping Center. Her list of musts could double as a catalogue of some of the handiest gadgets ever devised by Yankee ingenuity.
Like her wooden tasting spoon. It’s a hollow-handled device with a bowl at either end. The cook dips one end into the sauce, which flows down the handle’s trench into the other bowl. This not only cools off the sauce, but keeps the process hygenic. “Once I had one, I wondered how I ever did without it,” Mrs. Bradley says.
Ditto for her citrus zester. It magically turns the peel of a lemon or orange into a long, thin spiral, with none of the white pith underneath. “If a recipe called for two tablespoons of orange rind, I don’t see how anyone could do it without a zester,” she comments.
But if she could take only one gadget with her to a strange kitchen, it would be her nutmeg grater. “I would rather perish than eat store-bought nutmeg,” she proclaims. Her round grater has a hinged storage compartment on top for the leftovers.
Like Mrs. Ablon, Mrs. Bradley zaps her microwave. “We bought it because my husband thought he couldn’t live without it,” she says defensively. “It’s for convenience, not cooking. It’s a very expensive way to boil water.”
When it comes to kitchen decor, Mrs. Bradley likes clutter. She also demands quiet. “I talk to myself a lot,” she confides. But her prime requirement is sun, which explains her curtainless windows. And if she “had her druthers,” she would raise work surfaces in her kitchen two inches. The six-foot chef says “at the end of a dinner party I look like Quasimodo.”
Finally, we checked with a North Dallas matron, known to store tortilla chipsin her oven, on what she values mosthighly in her kitchen. “That’s easy, honey,”she laughed. “I couldn’t live withoutmy cook.”
