Crockery

Ah the electric potato peeler, the sandwich grill, the fondue set—the wedding gifts which mark the bounty of your first married garage sale. Maybe you use them once before you write the note—“Thank you so much for the lovely crystal bowl. I’ll think of you every time I dust it. And it goes so nicely with the matching seven others we received.”

The clay cooker I actually used. Maybe it was because I was a new bride and unafraid to try anything. In the kitchen.

First you soak both halves of the clay cooker in water, to allow the clay pores to absorb the moisture. Then as you heat the cooker, you essentially steam cook the food inside, very healthy for you and it seals in the juices and the flavors. It’s especially marvelous with sea bass…. Sorry, I got lost there in the reverie.

So why did I stop using my clay cooker, you may well ask. As you use the clay cooker, it turns colors: black and orange and deeper orange. The terra cotta becomes splotchy, which it’s supposed to do, but that scares me.

As a good little archaeologist, I learned that all ceramics fail eventually. Even CorningWare. However, I’ve never personally known CorningWare to fail, so I figure in a single lifetime, the CorningWare I received at my wedding will outlast me. The clay cooker, on the other hand….

Let’s put it this way: as an archaeologist, I never found a whole pot. I found pot sherds of Sand Tempered Plain and the occasional exciting St. Johns Checked Stamped, but never a piece larger than my hand. THEY ALWAYS BROKE. I don’t know how to emphasize to you that the original peoples of Florida ate sea catfish as much as their clay pots always broke. Perhaps if I didn’t know this fact first hand I’d feel safer putting my cooker into the oven.

Futhermore, you don’t preheat the oven. You place the clay cooker on the cold oven rack, THEN turn the oven on. Everybody knows you can’t shock clay or heat it unevenly; otherwise, the stuff will fly apart like a raw egg in a microwave. Firing kilns are brought up to temperature gradually on a steady increase. However, you put a clay cooker in an electric oven and guess what? That hard, hot element kicks on and shuts off, kicks on and shuts off, jeopardizing the fragile ceramic nature of a clay cooker. This may work more gradually with a gas oven, but I don’t have a gas oven. Thus I live in living fear of opening my oven door…and ruining yet another meal. With my clay cooker, I cannot rest a-sherd.