Commonplace Vol. 5 Issue 2

Hello. This is only the second issue of Commonplace this year, which is somewhat disgraceful, but there it is. Some of this issue is about stocking a kitchen, equipment-wise, and then there’s a bit of a look at food supply issues that are continuing to rumble along in the background.

Stocking A Kitchen

I had a question in a few months ago, which went like this: “My eldest son is going to university in the autumn. He’s lucky enough to have access to a house owned by his uncle which has been occupied by various cousins over the years and rented out wholly or partially in years where the family didn’t fill it. The kitchen is old and has very few (if any) good cooking implements. What would you recommend as a “starter package” for a kitchen which I can provide him with?”

(The actual answer to this went out when I got it, mind. This is an edited-for-general-use version.)

First three things are a cast iron pan (12” or so), a solid all-purpose knife, and a cutting board. A cast-iron pan will work on any cooking surface, from solid-fuel through induction, and if you can cut things up and put them in it, you’re off to a very good start. Trying to do the same things with standard issue rental frying pans (usually non-stick without the non-stick surface), knives (blunt, weird shapes) or chopping boards (bent, imbued with gods only know what) is an exercise in pure frustration instead.

Once those are in place, the next things are three saucepans (stainless steel), of sizes from about 1.5l to 4l (give or take a bit on either end). Saucepans often come in sets of three anyway, so this shouldn’t be hard to manage. Again, stainless steel works on all cooking surfaces, and cleans easily. This enables boiled eggs, many vegetables, and both rice and pasta.

You’re also going to want a can-opener, some mixing bowls of various sizes, some measuring cups and/or a weighing scales (a Tala measure will actually cover both), a few wooden spoons, a slotted spoon, a fish slice, a whisk, and a pair of tongs. Depending on whether the student in question can cook with pastry, a rolling pin might also be useful. If you can get one of the metal-crescent-with-holes-in-and-a-handle-on-one-end (I do not know a proper name for this object, and the internet is unhelpful), they are superb for draining boiling water off just about anything, but a colander will do instead.

A stick blender is the advanced tool - I use mine pretty rarely, but I understand some less historical cooking practices make more use of it.

Depending on what’s already in the kitchen, it might be useful to also provide some plates, bowls, mugs, and cutlery - the sheer randomness of what’s in a rental house’s cupboards and drawers after a few generations of tenants can be hard to beat.

And then you can also provide a few “pantry goods”, as they seem to be called - sunflower oil, olive oil, salt, pepper, some spices and herbs according to taste, and maybe some canned tomatoes and other stuff you know will a) be eaten, and b) keep if it’s not. Flour, rice, and pasta optional - and all of that depends on what your student likes to and knows how to cook.

That should provide a solid start.

Food Supplies & Pricing

One of the notable things about the news since about 2020 has been the ongoing background of stories about food supply lines, and rising prices because of them. I keep an eye on this, firstly because of my interest in just plain food, but also because historically, the availability or not of things to eat has been a fundamental motivator in wars, revolutions, and other Big Events.

Some parts of this are connected to climate change, and unusual weather patterns. There were issues with potato crops in Ireland last year, and there were warnings in the UK this spring that record rainfall was having impacts on crops. Indeed, many farmers in Ireland had to hold off on ploughing this spring because it was too wet for tractors to move in fields. We’ve now had more recent floods in Central Europe, and obviously Hurricane Helene has hit the southern Applachians harder than anyone there was expecting.

Some of it is to do with shipping issues, which have continued on and off from the beginning of the pandemic. And some is because food production is controlled - as with many things now - by an ever-decreasing number of people. Part of the effect of this is that food prices, per unit, are rising rapidly even when there’s no good reason for it.

One of the exercises I’ve been meaning to carry out for a while is a comparison of food prices I’m paying myself. I do a lot of my shopping at Tesco, and some of that is via delivery, so I have receipts going back a while. They’re spotty - I go through phases of deliveries and doing my own shopping - but I can pull up one from October 2021 and have a look at prices then and now. It’s well into the pandemic, so a lot of the pricing changes should have settled out, right?

In October 2021, a 24-pack of Coke Zero was coming in at €15. I am a fiend for Coke Zero, and I prefer it in cans because they get recycled properly. If you go to buy a pack of cans of Coke Zero today, the list price is €17, which is up 13%. Ok, that’s a jump, but inflation, right? Except the pack of cans available now is not a 24-pack, but an 18-pack. So what was €1.87 per litre is now €2.83 per litre; an increase of 51%.

A whole cucumber in October 2021 was €0.59; it’s now €0.85, up 44%. An own-brand can of black-eyed beans was €0.69; it’s now €1.15, up 66%. A 250g pack of sliced Gouda cheese was €0.99; it’s now coming in at €2.00 - just over a 100% increase. And the humble Johnston, Mooney & O’Brien White Sliced Pan, which I’m not actually buying anymore because it’s a diabetic disaster, has gone from €1.69 to €1.99, an increase of “only” 17%.

I didn’t cherry pick those; they’re random selections from the receipt from 2021 (literally, I used dice), minus a few things that aren’t stocked anymore. The Central Statistics Office has a calculator that purports to show the inflation difference between two dates; it says that from October 2021 to September 2024, there’s a 15.22% difference. So the change in price of the sliced pan is almost legitimate; everything else is well above inflation. And this is in the context of interest rates that have made most mortgages somewhat murderous, and eye-watering energy price hikes.

It’s no wonder people are having more trouble getting enough to eat; Ireland has a food poverty rate that hovers around 10%, which is pretty horrifying.

I don’t have good solutions for this. I don’t think anyone does. Growing some of your own food has been the traditional response to shortage, and I’m fully in support of that, but a many of us no longer have the skills for that, a lot of us don’t have the time to invest, and a hell of a lot of us live in places where we just plain can’t. Shopping in other places - Lidl, Aldi, local greengrocers and butchers - can knock a few percentage points off, but not all that much, and there’s still a time cost in shopping around.

Not the most cheerful of places to leave it, I know, but autumn is pretty much here, and that’s a positive thing. Mists, mellow fruitfulness, and Hallowe’en. If you have topics in food and food history you’d like me to write about, drop me a line. Stop me grumping over the state of the world!

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