Saturday, February 20, 2016

Cooking with Baby

Today

Today, my Honduran cousin posted a picture of the cooker she used when she was first married. Pretty basic, as you can see,

In My Day

Many, if not most, of us started out our adults lives with a selection of hand-me downs and second hand purchases.

When we were married in 1971 and moved into our first flat at Belmont in Brighton I used a cooker with the deceptively cute title of a "Wee Baby Belling".

Cute it was not. It was a tiny electric stove, probably designed for bedsits (come to think of it, I had a version of one of these in my Bedsit in Christchurch Road in Worthing, on which I used to make onion omelettes and just about nothing else).The one I owned was certainly second-hand and actually boasted two hotplates and a little grill and tiny oven. 

It sat in our tiny kitchen and I used it daily. The hotplates took about ten minutes to get lukewarm and the grill was so slow you could take a bath while making toast.

I got used to it, as you do, and I certainly cooked our first Christmas dinner on it  - turkey, sprouts, roasties, red cabbage et al. I don't know how I managed to keep things hot while something else cooked and there was a fair bit of pan-sharing. But I did it and everything was done to a turn. I baked Lizzie's first birthday cake in the toy-sized oven and generally managed to provide culinary miracles with it.

I used it until our neighbour, Leslie Clay, became homeless and moved in with us together with her gas cooker, which was certainly larger than the Belling, if as ancient and clapped-out.

How uncomplaining we used to be about having to cope in this way; I think it may be because we were young and confident that life could only get better. Which it did.


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