The Art of Washing Up

The rule in my house is that the person who does the cooking doesn't have to do the washing up. This is one of the reasons I like cooking. Unfortunately, I don't enjoy cooking so much that I can be bothered to do it every day. There is also the problem that I’m very good at ignoring the consequences of my actions until those consequences are poking me in the face. This means blithely letting my wife cook dinner without thinking once about the fact that I will later be standing in front of a pile of greasy dishes.

It's possible that I'm biased, but it seems to me that Polish cooking creates a lot more washing up than English cooking. In England, we usually just buy fish and chips and make a cup of tea, which results in almost no washing up at all. Polish meals involve a lot of pots and pans and, worst of all, the extensive use of graters and meat tenderisers.

Graters and meat tenderisers are the greatest torture for haters of washing up. Whoever invented the grater had obviously never done any washing up in his life. I like to imagine it was a 19th century aristocrat with lots of washing up servants, probably a guy with an evil moustache and a tendency to laugh at the misfortunes and suffering of others, especially those who have to do washing up.

The meat tenderiser creates all kinds of kitchen sink challenges. In essence, a meat tenderiser is a surface consisting of multiple tiny crevices and is used in such a way as to ensure that small fragments of pork become forced into these crevices until they are slightly harder to extract than thorns from the paws of lions. All this trouble just to have thinner pieces of meat hardly seems worth it.

My wife and I have very different approaches to producing and dealing with washing up. I consciously use the minimum of equipment and wash whatever I can as I'm cooking. My wife uses every single item in the kitchen regardless if whether she's boiling an egg or cooking dinner for 14 people. The result is that my wife, who doesn't mind washing up, is left with almost none to do, while I'm left with a mountain of crockery so massive it has snow on top.

I restrict my cleaning activities strictly to the sink. If there is something near the sink that needs cleaning when I have finished washing up, I tend to regard it as a challenge for another day. My wife treats washing up as an excuse to start cleaning in general. From the sink, she moves on to the kitchen surfaces, then the oven, then the floor near the oven. There is no logical limit to the process – engaging in washing up can result in her being found two hours later putting the neighbours curtains in the laundry.

My research into Polish washing up techniques is not complete. Is use of the brush or the sponge the norm? Is leaving the water running or filling the sink the preferred method here? Is it acceptable to leave your dishes on the balcony in the hope that there will be a heavy rain storm? Please contribute information below, in between the suggestions that I will burn in hell for questioning the sanctity of the meat tenderiser.

* Jamie Stokes*