Seasoned and sharpened

A good friend told me this story, knowing I would find it funny. 

Some time ago, his family had guests staying with them for the weekend.  On the Saturday evening, my friend prepared a meal with a variety of dishes, mostly drawn from the Chinese cookery tradition.  They all ate and drank well, and they talked until the early hours of Sunday morning before going to bed.  When my friend woke up the next day and headed down to the kitchen to make coffee, he discovered one of the guests busy at work cleaning up the kitchen.  All the plates, the cutlery, and the glasses had been washed and dried, and were stacked neatly on the table.   On the draining board were clean pans and lids.  The guest was standing at the sink, working away with a wire scouring brush, on my friend’s oldest and most prized wok. 

“Nearly finished,” said the guest with a smile, “it takes a lot of work to get these really clean.”  He lifted the steel wok out of the water to reveal that the near spotless metal was as smooth and bright as when it had first been bought.  My friend forced a smile, nodded, and then retreated upstairs to his bed, speechless.  Ten years of cooking – ten years of sizzling hot oil, infused with ginger, garlic, chilli, black beans, spices, sauces, and marinades – ten years of working at the stove, carefully building up the patina on the surface of the wok, ten years of culinary labour, all obliterated by ten minutes of over-zealous uneducated cleaning.  Disaster!  

The guest was trying to be helpful, in that way that guests sometimes do, taking it upon themselves to carry out domestic tasks without consulting, seeking consent, or advice about the way in which these tasks should be done.   I doubt that many people, when visiting friends for the weekend, would try to re-tune the television, or re-arrange the books on a shelf, or re-hang pictures on different walls.  However, presumably because cleaning in the kitchen is regarded as straightforward work, some guests seem to think that it is a helpful thing to do, and one that does not require prior permission, or guidance.  Nonetheless, my advice to all guests is to avoid messing with the host’s kitchen equipment and utensils without clear instruction and licence to do so.  This is especially true if you do not know about woks.

When a wok is new and is first used to make stir-fry, it provides no additional flavours.  It is neutral in its function.  By contrast, an old wok that has been seasoned for many years, whose surface retains the residues of numerous previous meals, is much better for stir-frying because it enhances the flavours of the heated oil, adding depth and subtlety to the aromas and tastes.  Cooks who are serious about preparing Chinese food – and my friend is certainly one of these – take great care to preserve the aged and seasoned surface of their woks, while also keeping them clean.  The trick here is not to confuse the patina with dirt.  Scraping the surface back completely, so the wok looks as it did when it was first bought, is neither required by principles of good hygiene, nor does it improve the wok’s performance on the stove.  On the contrary, over cleaning diminishes it.

What is true for woks is not true for all other kitchen tools.  I have three Japanese cooking knives, which I use for food preparation.  They are different shapes and sizes, and I used them according to the task at hand, but they all share one feature in common: they are sharp.  From time to time, I re-discover this feature and my fingers have several nicks and scars, although nothing too serious.  My sense is that blunt knives are more dangerous because they require greater force to be applied when cutting or chopping, whereas sharp knives can be used precisely because less pressure is needed.  However, sharp knives blunt quickly when they are used regularly, so I make use of a stone block to keep them in good shape.  From time to time, however, they need to go back to the shop where I bought them to be properly sharpened by an expert. 

Woks improve with age, as the seasoning of recurrent usage adds new, desirable qualities to their surface.  Knives deteriorate, as regular usage wears down the edge of the blade, making them less effective.  Woks are like good wine, which improves as it grows older, but knives are like eggs, the fresher the better.  What might kitchen utensils teach us about life?  I think of the wok as a symbol of character and the knife as a symbol of intelligence. 

Over time, our characters can become seasoned, that is, they can become richer, more flavoured, more subtle, through reflection, and learning from our successes and failures.  This process is not automatic and should not be confused with the simple accumulation of experiences.  I have met people who seem to have gone through their lives repeating the same mistakes over again, learning little and changing nothing.  Their characters appear simple and stable.  Either they do not observe much about the world around them, or they do not learn any lessons from what they see; life passes them by without leaving its mark upon them.  Others, draw on their own experiences and those of others, and use what they learn to change and improve the way they live.  They develop desirable qualities – such as kindness, or courage, or sympathy, or determination – by working on themselves, regularly and repetitively, just as someone might improve their musical or sporting ability through repeated practice. The seasoned character of good person, someone who has absorbed the good flavours of ethical life, is something to be admired.

Our intelligence also needs to be exercised, not through the mere accumulation of layers of knowledge, but by being sharpened, to keep the edge as fine as possible.  There are people who lose their curiosity and their appetite for new ideas at an early age.  They do not want to think about difficult problems, or to learn new intellectual skills, or to stretch their imagination and their memory, instead, they find comfort in the familiar, the superficial, the easy, and the obvious.  They inhabit a comfortable zone and see no reason to stray from it.  By contrast, there are those always searching for answers to hard questions, who want to know and to understand more about the world, who enjoy being puzzled, who take pleasure in conversation – and debate – with those who disagree.  It is not just a case of keeping their minds active, but of keeping their minds sharp.  Just as a knife needs to be sharpened against a hard surface that offers a form resistance to shape the edge of the blade, so too the mind needs to work against something, to wrestle with problems and challenges, to avoid becoming blunt.  It is always a pleasure to talk with those who have kept their intellectual edge, who combine the curiosity of the child with the wisdom of the sage.   Best of all is to spend time with friends whose characters are well-seasoned and whose minds are kept sharp. 

I recently came across a poem about the cleaning of kitchen utensils by A E Stallings, a poet and translator, who lives in Athens.  I have read a couple of collections of her work, and I admire the way her writing connects the seemingly quotidian details of ordinary life to its larger themes and values.  She finds analogies that are provocative and enlightening, linking what is simple and what is complex, drawing attention to the relationships between the objects that surround us and the ideals we strive for in life.   In this example of her work, she takes the cleaning of a cast-iron pan as her theme, noting the resonances between the oil seal of the skillet and the armour of a warrior, and the ways in which we associate certain metals with aspects of character, – brazen youth and iron will.

I have several cast-iron pans, which I use for searing meat, fish, and vegetables.  They are especially good for cooking asparagus, which is now in season in England, because they intensify the distinct flavours.  Place the pan on a stove with high heat and when it is very hot, drop the washed asparagus spears onto it and cook for ten minutes to soften them, turning from time to time to ensure they burn on all sides, before carefully removing from the pan onto a plate, where they should be dressed with good olive oil, fresh black pepper, grains of sea salt, and shavings of aged parmesan.  Delicious. 

A few years back, I had my own experience of a well-intentioned guest causing harm in the kitchen.  She washed-up after I had cooked, without asking, and scoured one of my cast-iron pans with a wire brush, which is exactly how the pan should be cleaned.  However, she left the wet pan on the counter to dry and when I found it, an hour later, there were already signs of rust.   As Stallings writes: There can be no reasoning / With sarcastic oxygen, / Only a re-seasoning / Can give the vessel’s life new lease.  The next day, I spent half of an hour repairing the damage.  A cast-iron pan needs to be kept clean, but it must be thoroughly dried immediately after it has been in water and then re-sealed with oil, preferably over a moderately warm heat.  The coat of oil protects the iron pan from the interaction of air and water; and as we know, rust never sleeps.   

Having previously been the victim of unintended harm caused by a well-intentioned guest, I did think my friend’s story was funny, although I was sorry that his precious wok had been spoiled.  Of course, the more often he cooks for me the quicker his wok will regain is character.   Meantime, I have promised that one day soon I will buy him a sharp Japanese knife to give some additional edge to his delicious cooking.