Lois Davey

I’m getting to be what some might call a bit of a cranky old crock who’s going to pot so guess what I want to rant about … that’s right:crockpots. Crockpot recipe cookbooks to be precise.

I’ve just spotted yet another new crockpot recipe book collated (no doubt in some haste) by an author keen to leap on the bandwagon of this hyped-up fad.

My faithful old crockpot has been with me for thirty-odd years and often comes in handy for those times when I’m not able to be darting back and forth to the kitchen to monitor pots on the stove or in the oven. Or, for when I have a piece of meat I suspect might be a tad on the tough side.

That is the reason they were invented.

Crockpot cooking is not fun – it’s aim is convenience. If you haven’t the time to spend lovingly tending a stove-top meal (tasting, adding, fiddling, modifying etc) you chuck everything in the crockpot, flick the switch and go about your other more boring business.

But about a year or so ago someone, somewhere in a marketing division of a crockpot manufacturer’s head office was charged with the task of boosting ailing crockpot sales.

It was a crafty and stealthy operation and, looking back, it’s hard to decipher where they actually began it.

Did the promotion of the crockpots come first, or the appearance on supermarket shelves of packets of slow-cooker recipe mixes. Or did they persuade a food writer to come up with a book first in order to trigger demand. It’s all a bit of a chicken and egg conundrum, albeit a money-spinning one.

A while ago I was sent a few packets of slow-cooker recipe bases. I viewed these up, down and sideways and for the life of me could not see why they should be so specifically labelled for crockpot use. The “beef and red wine casserole”

and “beef with onion gravy” sachets were nought but variants on Maggi’s range of “Cook in the Pots” (any pot will suffice). The minestrone recipe base merely contained a flavour sachet and a handful of dried kidney and borlotti beans.

I guess it is the words “slow-cooker” on these packets that persuade people to rush out and buy one of these gadgets because they are under the impression that a minestrone cannot be successfully created in anything other than a plug-in pot left to its own devices for several hours.

But I rant in vain. The damage has been done, pockets have been lined. Thousands (of the culinary gullible) have raided stores for a “slow-cooker” and, with one of those many specific cookbooks at their side and a pantry full of “slow-cooker recipe bases”, now fervently believe. Seven days a week probably, until someone, somewhere in the marketing division of the head office of a pressure-cooker manufacturer…..

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