My Most Important Kitchen Tools

Ask any inveterate professional or serious amateur cook about their favorite (tool(s) in the kitchen and you will get myriad and disparate answers. Actual tools rank high of course. Almost all of mine are ancient, handed down to me from my mother and grandparents. Nothing quite like my black steel knives with a still murderous edge thats over 100 years old, or a cheese grater even older, the ceramic salt cellar, cracked and glued, hanging over the stove, the sound of the lid of which when dropping in place is a immediately recognizable and a precious memory.

I experience all of the above, but for me the most memorable, and important, tools are the memories implacably in place of my time in the kitchen with my mother and before her my grandmother. My first remembrances as a child are as a small boy are helping my old and infirm but still cooking maternal grandmother helping as much as a 5 year old can.

To this day, I can’t place a plate over a pan and flip a frittata without thinking of my septuagenarian grandmother grasping the pan and plate and with trembling hands and flipping the unfolded omelet to reveal a picture perfect breakfast.

Or my mother cutting fresh corn from a newly picked cob to be used in her great corn fritters, glass crisp on the outside and creamy within.

Or the sight of either of them cracking a few eggs into a pile of flour and producing the dough to be hand cut into heavenly pasta.

These memories guide my motions whenever I am in the kitchen, as valuable to me as a cook as the rolling pin or sauté pan.

The connection goes deeper as when I reach for one of my cast iron pans, the fact that it is the same pan that mother and grandmother reached for makes that connection almost electric.

Call it necromancy or an umbilical to the spirit world, these are the tools that most inform any foray into the kitchen for me much more than anything Williams-Sonoma has to offer.