Health & Safety

An important day on the cooking front. Not only is it seeing the baking of the 397th batch of bread, it also saw the reheating of two portions of left over beef mince.

Being left to my own devices, I thought the mince would be improved by the addition of some red lentils (pre-boiled in just enough water for 10 minutes), but this and the flour which had been added to one of the portions of mince, meant that there was a pronounced tendency to stick.

At which point, I remembered about the double cooker, very like that of my childhood, but actually made in Merton  - or at least that is what the inscription under the handle suggests. Fetched down from the far recesses of the cupboard above the cooker, more or less dusted down - it did not look like it had been used for years - and off I went.

It might not have been intended for use on an electric cooker, but the red lights shone through and did their business - and avoided having to add lots of water, which would have spoiled both taste & texture. Served with boiled white rice and boiled crinkly cabbage, it went down very well indeed.

The only catch was that half way through the reheating, I went on to remember that aluminium saucepans had been banned, on the grounds that they resulted in excess aluminium in our bodies, presumably leading to all kinds of unpleasantness. Google and the EU knew all about it, with the illustration taken from the top of the relevant page in EUR-Lex, providing access to the relevant directive, that is to say 'Council Directive 89/109/EEC of 21 December 1988 on the approximation of the laws of the Member States relating to materials and articles intended to come into contact with foodstuffs'. A quick glance at which suggested that member states were required to ban anything which might be a hazard to culinary health, a ban which certainly included aluminium saucepans.

But looking further into google, it is not altogether clear that this particular threat was still alive & well, although the directive clearly was. The evidence available now looks to be fairly mixed, at least as regards ingestion of aluminium from saucepans. So we shall hang onto our double cooker for the time being, awaiting further advice from the May/Corbyn/Juncker collective on this matter.

PS: I think the double cooker was used in my childhood home for the making of lemon curd, something which I was rather fond of at the time, making as it did a change from our more usual jam. Also home made, I hasten to add.