Ode to a Cooking Pot

Our tools can become our friends, and we often develop an almost human-like loyalty to them. So it is with my little steel pot.

She is a three-quart, stainless steel sauce pot with a lid; good-sized, but so not terribly large. Her handle is shapely, making her a joy to pick up and hold. Her lid fits tight, but there’s a little sing-song purr she makes when she gets hot. It’s what tells me my coffee water is ready each morning. And no matter how dirty she gets, she always cleans up pretty.

At least on the inside. I’ve had this pot for at least a decade, maybe two. My ex, Holly, bought it for me for Christmas. She’s also the one responsible for the black staining on the sides. She once burnt… something, I can’t remember what, so badly that we thought the pot was a goner. Holly was mortified, and managed to scrub the insides clean with Bartender’s Friend and some steel wool. I remember it taking days to do, with long soaks in between.

I’ve kept the remnants of those stains on the outside. They’re like our scars, markers of character, catalysts for stories of challenges met. The inside is shiny, however, and I’ve scrubbed it so many times the etched volume markers — one quart, two quarts, three to the tippy top — are all gone now.

This pot is one of the first things I touch each morning. I pour water in it, enough for two cups of coffee or one of coffee, one of tea, set the lid on and put it over my hottest burner. I turn on the radio (the Current here in the Twin Cities), and check to see if I have any messages on my phone. I look out my window at my little back yard, my little garden, and think about the day ahead.

Then she sings, that musical shimmy when she’s hot and ready. My coffee is always a pour-over, through those beige bamboo coffee filters that congratulate me for “caring.” I am partial to coffee from Chiapas or Ethiopia, light or medium roast always. Dark roasts taste burnt to me.

On many days, this is my only interaction with my pot. But when I am busy in the kitchen, she gets worked. Hard. I use her in all sorts of ways, not just to boil water. This pot is the perfect size for sauces, reheating lunch, boiling down broths, cooking rice or beans or grits. And if I am alone, she’s generous enough to boil a serving of pasta.

There are days where my little pot sees action four or even five times. I am not quite sure what I’d do without her. I did check online before writing this to see if Le Creuset still makes them, and turns out they do — but they’ve changed the design enough where it wouldn’t be the same.

I bring all this up because tools do this for us humans. We all have our favorites. Maybe it’s a teapot, maybe it’s a shotgun. Or a knife — many of us have especially strong bonds with knives. But we can fetishize these tools, the way I do with my pot, to the point where their loss hits hard enough to leave a mark.

So it happened last week with my favorite fine-meshed strainer. I wrote about this strainer, and about The Art of Straining All the Things, several years ago here. Well, my strainer’s mesh finally popped out of its housing, blown out and dead. I am legit sad about this, because like the pot, I use that strainer almost daily. Also like my pot, the strainer was at least a decade old. A good run.

Why do we humans do this?

I suspect it has to do with (at least) two things: We are creatures of habit, and we are obligate tool users. Homo sapiens isn’t terribly scary without tools. We’re reasonably strong, can run a long time, regulate heat and see colors really well, but if we’re not chucking rocks or sharpening sticks or digging with antlers, we’re just not going to get a whole lot done. And I’m not even talking about fending off lions and tigers and bears. Oh my.

Tools, and our ability to gang up on our fellow creatures, has helped us rather a lot. So it goes without saying that we venerate objects — especially objects that can help us survive and thrive. Think swords buried with vikings or pottery tucked into a woman’s tomb, all the way up to the luxe garage sale that is a pharoah’s funereal stash. We like our stuff. A lot.

Could I cook with another pot? Absolutely. But I don’t want to. I like mine. She fits me. Maybe someone will toss her into the hole with me when I die. That could be fun.