Wooden Spoon

Not knives or pans. The genius of a kitchen is the wooden spoon, that archaic thing – a dugout unchanged since the Neolithic or before. Impervious to heat, stained by its meetings with food – soups, pulses, gravies, pastas – its colour deepens slowly from beech or cherry to the almost-black midwinters of the mulled wines it has drunk. Changed like us by what it works in it wears its tip flat, nudging against the angle of pans, poling mudbanks of lentils or the sulky tidal liquor of a stew. So harmless a gingham ruff and some marks in felt pen can turn it into a doll, it speaks still of a world before metals: reaching for it this moment your hand senses the magic, and recognises its kin.