An Italian that's not so hot

Having an old stove on its last legs is a great excuse for putting off the awful job of cleaning

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Martin van Beynen

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A new stove should be a happy event in any household.

We would be no exception, I thought optimistically, as I abdicated the responsibility of choosing the appliance to my wife, who would have had the final say anyway.

"Who does most of the cooking?" I could hear her saying, if I so much as looked at venturing an opinion.

I had only one condition - more a suggestion, really. "Just make sure it fits in the gap in the bench," I said.

In fact, I was more than relieved that something was finally being done about our cooking appliance. We had received fine service from our Atlas Caravelle for most of the 20 years we have been in our house and the previous occupants probably had a good 20 years, too.

When it broke down we had it fixed, but lately its many flaws, mainly due to old age, signed its death warrant. It had four elements, three of which worked only on full speed. This was peachy as long as you wanted to boil everything on the menu, but anything requiring a little more finesse was problematical.

The oven still worked, but you could see it sucking up all that the Benmore power station could produce just to get our lasagne to the right temperature. The grill had long ago given up the ghost and everything was cooked blind because the light fitting was broken and the window was past the dirty stage.

Having an old stove on its last legs is a great excuse for putting off the awful job of cleaning.

We have been telling ourselves for about four years that we will be replacing the old Caravelle in a few months, so why bother with all that mess and fuss cleaning it. While we had no doubt the Caravelle was the Rolls Royce of stoves, it was a Rolls Royce that had been thrashed and neglected for most of its life and finally had to go.

So my wife did her circuit of the stove yards and eventually arrived at her decision. It was a nifty little Italian stainless-steel number called a De Longhi. She liked the design of the knobs, she said. I thought: "Italian. Fiat. Stylish. Temperamental. Unreliable." I also thought De Lorean, but that was only afterwards.

"I want my cooker to be more than just a looker," I said.

Or maybe I just thought that too.

After we had paid and were awaiting delivery I reminded my wife about the one stipulation I had made. "Of course," she said and then went off quickly to get her tape measure.

From my chair in front of the fire I could hear a mild expletive from the kitchen. "She is winding me up," I thought, making sure I didn't react. She wasn't.

The new stove was about 5 millimetres too big for the gap between the fixed benches below the extractor. "Brilliant," I said or words to that effect.

In due course, the stove was delivered by the technician who was going to wire it up for us. He couldn't get it going and had to take it back. Next day he was back with a new one.

While it sat in the middle of the kitchen awaiting the remodelling so it could be shifted into its rightful place, my wife was discovering its secrets. And her love for her Italian stove-muffin was quickly turning into disillusionment.

The first quirk was an automatic element switch-off (excuse the non- technical language) to stop the ceramic top from getting too hot. So what do you do if you want to fry something at very high heat? Search me.

The next disappointment was the fact the drawer under the oven was, unlike the magnificent Caravelle, unheated. What is the point of a #*!&! unheated oven drawer? Where are you supposed to warm up your plates? How do you keep food warm while you wait for something to finish cooking? It's a bit like our fridge, which has no butter conditioner.

Then we discovered we needed a new set of pots and pans because the ceramic top does not like undulations in the bottom of its cookware. Admittedly, some of our pans should have been thrown out long ago, but it meant yet another adjustment for the Italian.

After some bush carpentry from me, it is now in its proper place. We are getting used to each other, but we are left with the abiding impression that advances in technology, as is so often the case, are wonderful for everyone except the user.

Next week: The $30 shoes I bought for my son at No 1 Shoe Warehouse. We expected a month of use. We got a week before they started to fall apart. Whole towns in China are devoted to churning out rubbish like this. Why are we stupid enough to buy it? This is not sustainable.

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