You’re not supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I didn’t need to.
I would have to be polite about it, of course, because it was a gift, but here was a horse that would go straight to pasture, and shortly afterwards, indeed as shortly afterwards as was commensurate with decency, to the knacker’s yard.
For this gift horse, ladies and gentlemen, was a kitchen gadget.
Yes yes, I feel your shudders. Kitchen gadgets. We’ve all succumbed. We’ve all been fooled.
We’ve all from time to time forgotten the truth that almost everything you need to cook with had been invented by the Iron Age: the fire, the pot, the pan, the knife, the spoon, the plate, and only the fork to come.
But what suckers we are for the idea that things can be improved, labour saved, new effects achieved by dint of a gadget.
It is the curse of capitalism that such things are spawned and plugged till you and I forget our better natures and acquire yet another chunk of dump fodder.
How many million "automatic" bread makers have been sold to people who already own a mixing bowl, a pan and an oven?
Who uses their bread maker more than twice? It makes bad bread badly and occupies half your bench space. Yet because it seems to offer a free lunch it continues to sell to the gullible.
And right this minute, in maternity wards around the world, infants are arriving who some 20, 30, 40 years from now will see a bread maker advertised and think that’s just the thing. Ah well, the only teacher is experience.
But it remains hard to believe that there was ever a man who bore my name and social security number and who was capable of buying a deep fryer.
Like everybody else he already had a deep fryer. It’s called a saucepan.
I found my old deep fryer in the back of a cupboard not so long ago and briefly wondered whether somebody else might want it, then stopped myself. Man hands on misery to man unless someone breaks the cycle. I dumped it.
And how about the slicer-dicer thing, the multi-tool that turns your cucumber to decorative ribbons, your carrots into juliennes and potatoes into wafer slices through which you could watch an eclipse of the sun?
The warning is already there in the word multi-tool. Anything for the house that claims to be a multi-tool or multi-purpose, is not a tool and has no purpose.
And anyway, you never wanted cucumber ribbons, or potato wafers. And if you did, a knife would provide.
The garlic press! Ha, use a knife.
The apple corer. Ha, use a knife.
The thing shaped like a fish that is supposed to deal to avocados. Ha, use a knife.
But you don’t need to be told these things. You know these things. Yet you have fallen as I fell and all you can do is shake your head and hope to be wiser.
So when the gift horse cantered into view, I sighed.
"Air Fryer" it said on the box. Air fryer. The name is so suited to the zeitgeist, implying the indulgence of frying but without the guilt of fat.
In other words an oxymoron, a fraudulent come-on to the greedy and the vain and the credulous.
Of course I had to show willing. It was a gift horse. I had to take a token ride on the spavined beast. I gave it some sausages raw. And never looked back. The thing’s a wonder.
The one thing wrong is that silly name. It isn’t a fryer. It’s an oven, pure and simple, a bench-top oven that heats up in seconds and is therefore quicker to use and cheaper. I use it every day.
It cooks a brace of chops, a hand of sausages, a raft of bacon, roast potatoes, buttered balsamic carrots, anything, in short, that I previously used my oven for except the larger roasts.
And it’s a doddle to wash down. I’ve entered it for the Melbourne Cup.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
