As the years pass, you remember less and less of your childhood. I have only a few memories of grade school. But there is one searing moment that haunts me. Fifth grade. Audition for the school band. The school district had a roving conductor who came to each school and interviewed each kid individually.
He sat across from me. There seemed to be some tension for him, sweat on his upper lip. “Try again,” he said. “Which is faster, this, or this?” He’d done a couple quick pats of his hand, something about beat. I couldn’t tell anything.
“Again,” he tried. And, “Again.”
He stopped sweating. Stopped saying “again.” He just left. He was supposed to call my parents about the results of his test, but they never said anything to me. Twenty-five kids in that fifth grade room and only two did not make the band. Me, of course, and the other kid. To this day I can’t believe it because I was nothing like that other kid. I don’t even know if he’s out of prison out yet.
So my music career was cut short. No piano or trumpet. Or drums! Despite the test I would have been great at the drums. And I even thought about the mandolin.
“Put it down,” Suzen said to me. I was actually holding a mandolin, not the instrument but the cooking kind. Suzen is afraid of them. I’m terrified. A mandolin is one of those slicer things where you move the food back and forth over very sharp blades. Very sharp. Fingerprint removing sharp. Now, after some regrettable accidents, mandolins ship with clampy things you press down on top of the food so it should be physically impossible to get hurt. For me, “should be” is not enough.
I’ve wanted to do slicing but I know that I am just too mandolin-challenged. I was reading Ham by Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough. In describing one recipe calling for sliced vegetables, they suggested using a Benriner, a Japanese tool for making very long thin threads of vegetables. Now, Benriner sounds like a nice Swiss name but at my local kitchen store there the box was, covered in Japanese with Benriner the only thing in English fonts.
I brought it home, unpacked, and tried to read the instructions. If I bought this device, cut myself, and had to call Suzen …Well, I might as well bleed to death. I was careful.
It turns out [there’s a pun there] that the Benriner is an amazing kitchen device. Just put the vegetable in between the bottom and top clamps, start turning and you churn out long, long threads. One hand is on the turning handle and other can be scratching your ear. Your fingerprints are never threatened. I had almost paper thin strands of raw potato that were over a food long. My next project is a cucumber accordion.
In that picture above, the potato is only for scale. And of course it needs to be peeled. I’m not as dumb as that conductor thought.
If you want to buy a big stocking stuffer, this is a marvelous toy.