HOME ESSAY
A well-loved Le Creuset pan spells home for Michele Hewitson
The le creuset frying pan was once, a long time ago, bright fire-engine red. The red of the colour I once, a long time ago, used to paint my long fingernails, in the days when I had long fingernails. I can’t be certain, but I’m pretty sure I would have painted my fingernails bright fire-engine red for my 21st birthday – the occasion on which I was presented with my frying pan.
My party was a raucous event, despite the fact that we were all, to greater or lesser degrees, pretending to be intellectuals. Not a single person at that party went on to become a proper intellectual although a few were, and remain, proper poseurs.
I can’t remember what book any particular poseur spent the evening pretending to read; Camus, perhaps or Ulysses. I do remember what I wore. I was interested – in an intellectual way, of course – in frocks and make-up and nail polish. My friend Debbie was a whiz at sewing and had run me up a simple black shift dress of faux shantung with a chrysanthemum motif running through the fabric. I wore very pointy-toed, sling-back kitten heels from the 50s, spray-painted black. I thought I looked like Audrey Hepburn, although the 21-year-old mind can play those sorts of tricks.
The pan is now as black as that frock. Sometimes I think: I should clean that pan. Then I think, lazily: I’ll just call it patina.
Jock gave me the pan for my 21st birthday. They have always been expensive, and we were all skint, so god knows how he afforded it. I still remember what he wrote in the card: “Here’s looking for some good cooking!” We broke up not long after but it wasn’t the doggerel that did it. We made a rotten partnership, but we made and still make great friends. All these years on, we’ve never failed to phone or, now, send a text to say: happy birthday.
The pan still makes me happy. It has moved as many times as I have; through countless awful flats and two lovely Auckland houses. I write this, sitting at my desk in our new house – and I fervently hope it’s my last house – on 12 acres in Masterton, overlooking the three acres of garden and the chook house, with the sheep paddocks beyond. The pan is on the hob. I am slowly (40 minutes; keep stirring!) caramelising onions in olive oil and sage.
It is used most days, hence the, ahem, patina. It has cooked eggs: fried, poached and as frittata. It puffs up naan breads and crisps up poppadoms, spiked with chilli and fennel seeds. I use it to make deep dish apple or peach pies, the fruit slightly caramelised in sugar; or cherry or plum clafoutis.
At my 50th birthday party, I pulled the pan out of the cupboard and said to Jock: “Ta da! Remember this?” My young friend Joanna was in the kitchen. We told her the story of the Le Creuset pan and she said: “The amazing thing about that story is that it says that you were exactly the same person at 21 as you are at 50!”
I have considered having the pan cremated with me but I reckon it would survive a good burning; it has thus far. And why waste a good pan? Perhaps I’ll leave it to Jock’s daughter if she grows up to do some good cooking.
“It has moved as many times as I have; through countless awful flats and two lovely Auckland houses”