This article is taken from the April 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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By now, I expect, the copper has oxidised. In a dim, neglected cupboard, verdigris probably coats my wife’s formerly gleaming batterie de cuisine, like a crust of mould. I daren’t look, in case a smell lurks within or some cuprous exhalation seeps out. I can’t abide the hand-staining, nostril-wrinkling nonsense of smearing and dabbing with copper-polish.

Yet I recall our expensive and intrusive charlady, when we first moved to America, covetously fingering the burnished pots. She suggested, by analogy with other clients — richer, perhaps, or more ostenatious than ourselves — that the pans should dangle above the kitchen range, like the clusters of fake grapes and plastic lobsters that used to decorate the ceilings of professedly Italian restaurants in England.

You can whisk or mash anything with a fork and slice anything with a decent knife

I’m not above a bit of vain exhibitionism: paintings at home have little mandolins, potato mashers and frying pans in so many dimensions that even Goldilocks or Edwin A. Abbott would give up. You can whisk or mash anything with a fork and slice anything with a decent knife.

In home cookery I can’t think of a dish I’d recommend that requires more than one frying pan at a time. Most of us have too few hands to wield more than two spoons while cooking.

Sillier fripperies are available to the reckless. A mezzaluna — a broad blade, curved like a scimitar between upright handles so that you can rock it back and forth over a chopping board — looks spectacular as it flashes and shimmies in the hands of a professional; the swaying motion may cast a spell over spend-thrifts or insomniacs.

But the tool does nothing that a knife can’t do and costs ten times as much. Kettles are luxuries: water will boil in any fireproof vessel. A pair of forks makes tongs redundant. Lemon squeezers are idiotic: you can squash half a lemon around a fork. So are garlic crushers: the wise apply a short, sharp shock with the flat of a blade.

Oven-glove vendors apparently assume that cooks are cack-handed: a cloth is enough to protect hands against heat, while leaving digits at liberty. Except for tyros too timid to judge quantities by eye I see no point in kitchen scales or calibrated vessels. A plate does service as a chopping board.

Lemon squeezers are idiotic: you can squash half a lemon around a fork

For cookery is like war, as Napoleon evoked it: “In everything that is beautiful and simple, the simplest moves are the best.” A batterie of a dozen items of high quality is more useful than all the gimcrack “starter packs” in the warehouse. One large casserole, good for oven or stovetop, makes saucepans strictly unnecessary, though one should have a relatively small, light specimen for double or rapid boiling.

A single frying pan is enough, if the bottom is thick, for frying at different rates. I’m willing to admit two roasting trays to my kitchen, as it’s often helpful, as the parson said to the midwife, to have more than one in the oven. A grater, strainer, skewer and spatula are welcome.

Madcap consumption is the bane of the planet and the enemy of equality. Everyone should eschew it. It’s a more rewarding form of self-indulgence to consume food than to acquire knick- knacks. Show-offs get deeper kudos from a spoonful of caviar on the table than from cupboardfuls of obsolescent technology or greening copper bottoms.

In my kitchen, if a shortage of bric-à-brac impedes meals, the cook will, at least, have corkscrews for consolation. The money saved on rubbish can be spent on something enticing and intoxicating to use them on.