Bringing food back to life is a great kitchen skill. No, you can’t just microwave it
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here is nothing lovelier than seeing a cook do their thing. By “doing their thing”, I do not mean just going about kitchen work – that is often excruciating to watch (why are they cutting onions like that?) I mean doing their thing: their culinary equivalent of a Mastermind subject, that one dish or process that they do so well, and with such evident pride, that the most crotchety backseat cook is forced to shut up.
Take my partner’s method for making fish-finger sandwiches, which involves frying the fish fingers in butter, then creating an in-pan sweatbox to melt artisanal cheese on to them and custom blending condiments. It creates, on average, as much washing up as a full cooked dinner. Others have a special pancake hack or carrot cake recipe, and people tend not to let these things go unnoticed – it’s always my salad dressing, possessive, but we forgive their hubris, because each of us has “A Thing” of our own.
My thing, if you can call it that, is reheating stuff. This is not the high-impact flex that a cook hopes for; after the theatrics of cooking, reheating seems like drudge work – the job you give to the person in your household who you wouldn’t even trust with the washing-up. Just get the leftovers to a germ-proof 74C. But is this really where we’ve set the bar? With a bad reheater at the reins, carbs get waterlogged when they should be crisp, or crunchy where they should be tender, while stew is blasted in the microwave until borderline radioactive. We’d never settle for this in any other cooking sub-niche – that it’s enough that the food doesn’t kill you.
