Spoon (Domestic Ponge)

 

Dangled heavily from a free-standing hook by a fashioned tube arc of shining grey steel, the handsome implement stays ready for use at any time. Hung might be more correct than dangled, placed even more accurate as it never turns idly in position with a visiting breeze but rather remains fixed freely firm in the air due to weight and gravity like the escutcheon above a palace gate. Its elevation with others of its kind, the sombre ladles and grey-day spatulas in a position at arm’s length from the action, is a reminder of its critical role at the given moment when pots boil or saucepans simmer. Then it moves in to play its part in the culinary operation that forever tantalises with the belief in a flavour perfection, a more pleasurable taste outcome. It is a wonder and necessity, an ancient invention that has gone through varying permutations only modernist design, then computer templates, could render with such a level of visual as well as practical originality. Twelve centimetres of stainless steel grip, a cylindrical handhold shining dully above the kitchen fray, then extends another twelve centimetres of tapering handle easy to balance, that then dips and spreads into a gorgeous oval spoon, broad and shallow, decoratively smelted with a crosshatch of 66 small circular slots. Their grid, held to the light, makes diamond shapes that could be a magnified eye of a fly or set of equidistant raindrops on a pond. Their spacing apart allows for liquid to flow through and the scooped contents of the cauldron to remain aloft, the steaming cubes of potato or hot bright pearls of Lebanese couscous that must be separated from the soupy base. Slots, contrarily, being a cause for discussion, as what is a slot. A long narrow hole, that’s true, an elongated depression, an extended aperture, none of which accounts for roundness, or roundness in great numbers. Manufacturers are at odds as to what to call a slotted spoon, some opting for sale purposes for their own synonym: perforated serving spoon, premium wide skimmer, culinary plating spoon, metal mesh sieve ladle, colander scooper, steel spider strainer. The strain shows and there isn’t anyway time as the contents of the bubbling preparation need attending to now. Nipping and scraping of the goodness collecting at the edges, stirring and turning of the Earth’s produce cooking through nicely thank you very much to the optimum, loading and lifting of the same above the plumbline for ocular and olfactory examination, this is the moment of the thingummyjig plucked from its hoity toity highness on the kitchen rack, rummaging delicately with the end product of a recipe known or found, borrowed, enhanced, turned round about, spiced up, or down, in the thick of the place sometimes referred to as too hot to handle.