My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

Kitchen Confidential

I have certain expectations for a kitchen item that costs more than $300. I expect it to have a motor and a plug and a lengthy instruction booklet that I will fail to read, causing an incident wherein an improperly secured part dislodges itself, allowing food matter to be sprayed evenly and efficiently across vertical kitchen surfaces including the cook and a guest and the guest’s cashmere sweater set.

So when my husband, Ed, announced he wanted to buy a pot—a pot—that costs $345, he encountered some resistance. Perhaps he had been anticipating this, for he did not refer to the pot as a “pot,” but rather as a “seven-quart pasta pentola.” He may also have pronounced “quart” as “carat,” hoping to appeal to some perceived female gem lust.

A pentola, apparently, is a pot with a matching colander that fits inside it. It is the cashmere sweater set of cookery. I pointed out that we already have a very nice colander.

“But this way, you just lift out the colander,” said Ed. “You don’t have to pour the pasta water into the sink.” Ed drew out the word pour, so it sounded like an elaborate or somehow heroic undertaking.

“But at some point,” I said gently, “you will need to pour the pasta water into the sink, correct? Unless you plan to throw the pot away after using it once. If you’re the kind of person who spends $345 on a pot for boiling water, I suppose it’s a short trip to being the sort of person who throws a pot away after each use.”

Ed hesitated. I could tell he was cooking up a story, and no doubt there is a special $350 pot for this too. He tried to convince me that pouring boiling water down the drain could “melt the caulk.” I knew this to be a bluff. Otherwise, the drain cleaner people would not instruct you to pour boiling water down the sink before you pour in the drain cleaner. And if you can’t trust the drain cleaner people, whom in this world can you trust?

Ed shifted tactics. He began explaining the various high-tech virtues of this brand of pot, which was called All-Clad Stainless. The name refers to a process whereby steel outer layers are bonded to an inner core of aluminum. This way, you have the benefits of stainless steel, which is pretty and durable, as well as the benefits of aluminum, which is neither but redeems itself by heating up quickly and evenly. “So you get uniform heating,” said Ed learnedly.

This made sense, except that we were talking about boiling water. “So, the idea is to make sure the boiling water in one half of the pot isn’t hotter than the boiling water on the other side?”

Ed was humming to himself. “I can’t hear you.”

Later, I read on the Web that the All-Clad “molecular bonding” process was developed by NASA.

The man who answered the NASA telephone had not heard of All-Clad. His name was Bill. I asked him how the astronauts make pasta. Bill said they put the pasta pouch into a warmer. “Then they take scissors and cut it open and eat out of the package.” These were my kind of people.

To make Ed feel excessive and wasteful, I told him the sum total of the cookware on board the space station is a warmer and a pair of scissors. Then I felt bad. Because what it came down to was that Ed simply wanted a decent pasta pot with a lid that fits. The one we have came without a lid. It was an All-Clad that Ed had got half price, thinking he could order a lid to fit it. And the reason he bought this half-price, lidless pot in the first place was to avoid arguing with his harpy of a wife, who is reliably, pointlessly, tediously cheap. When Ed called to order the lid, he was told they did not make a lid for this pot. “It was an experimental pot,” the woman said enigmatically.

In the end, we compromised. We bought a nice, new pot with a lid that fits, and made do without the cashmere colander insert.