Such a tool

Dec. 28, 1997

The freshman English assignment contained any number of topics: the nature of friendship; the sources of peace, inner or international; I don’t remember too particularly, but I do remember that the suggestions were distressingly heavy, alarmingly cosmic. Luckily for me, there was an out: You could pick your own topic as long as it was a source of deep personal passion.

I gave that essay passion; boy, did I! And with a scintillating thesis, if I do say so — tea serves up a transcendently sensual experience only if the beverage is slurped piping hot. The professor didn’t understand, alas — I think he dismissed my genius with the word trivial — and in another assignment, he wasn’t too fond of my rather risque description of stapler as sex symbol, either. Philistine!

My obsession with scalding tea shriveled, I admit, and I don’t have the foggiest notion now how I, at 17, could fill a page in its praise. But some kitchen ardors go deeper. Only a few years later, when I first began cooking in earnest (if fecklessly), I decided that someday, goldarnit, I would compose a paean to the most divine, most meaningful piece of cooking equipment I’ve known. I speak, of course, of the rubber spatula. Not just any rubber spatula — get real! — we’re talking sturdy, wooden-stemmed and heat-resistant here; no wimpy, bendy (cq), achy-breaky, weaselly little implement, Nosiree, but rather a tool at once macho and diplomatic, one that can put muscle and finesse behind hard-core stirring and scraping and folding and generally putting two and two together.

I’d always attributed this affection and affinity for rubber spatulas to a persevering (and sometimes perverse) distaste for waste. Give me a bowl, and I will spatulate (cq) it clean. I will also bring out my backup spatula and a butter knife to run to ground any dribs and drabs — to get the goods to the last drop.

But love is never so simple, never so noble, is it? My life has been battered and buffeted by bizarre impulses, urges that seem idealistic but, upon closer examination, prove to spring from reconsidered pleasure and ruminated pain.

I was making brownies recently, and, most uncharacteristically, I wasn’t in the mood to bow and scrape. And so, when the pan was in the oven, I faced a bowl and — wow — a spatula still coated with chocolaty glory. I didn’t use my fingers to move brownie batter from spatula to mouth, I’m afraid. No — I got down and dirty and licked that darn thing, and, in a flash of clarity, I understood everything!

I was a young girl again, back in the kitchen with Mother, and we were making cakes and cookies and icings and all the important things women produced to keep our men in our thrall. While the males were doing their silly, manly, useless things with power tools and sporting gear, we were cooped up in the kitchen, second-class citizens but superior creatures. For we who have charge of the wanton beaters and luscious spoons and spatulas have the ultimate privilege of licking and lip-smacking.

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I have a confession to make: I was unfaithful. But you’ve gotta understand — those of us in midlife are sometimes carried away by fascination with what’s younger, sleeker, newer. I tried to be good, but when I read about the spoon spatula, my sense of loyalty started to shake and quiver. I held out; I wrote the discussion of the traditional rubber spatula without having strayed. But on Christmas Eve, I dragged the spouse out to a housewares shop and plunked down good money for two of these curvaceous little honeys. And I was smitten.