i wanted a Viking funeral

This is the stove I grew up with, an all-gas titan of a thing made – fittingly for my Atlantic-crossing mother – by New World and installed in our house well before I was. The clock and timer died fairly promptly, followed over the years by various pilot lights, and finally, last autumn, the remaining viable oven.

Barring one nearly disastrous wildcat strike involving Christmas day and a 15 pound turkey, it did us proud, and though oven-less this past winter, Mum would regularly have six or more friends over for a meal. Lighting the huge broiler on the right scared the bejesus out of me even after I’d lost any nerve endings in restaurant kitchens. You had to crank the stainless steel top to its highest perch, exposing along the way the exotic sprockets in the back plate where you could insert the (only used twice) rotisserie skewers. Then you turned the gas on full, struck a kitchen match, counted to two and a half, and then waved the match as close as you dared while peering up at it from underneath and praying that it caught quickly enough so you wouldn’t lose your eyebrows in the subsequent ‘whoooompfff’. Once lit, it was hypnotic – a flickering sheet of blue flame, 16 inches square, hovering (adjustably) over a corrugated steel grill pan with two protruding black handles that regularly caught the unwary or the hasty right in the kidneys. This monster cooked the best sausages and bacon, and toasted bread, muffins and crumpets to utter perfection. We never had an electric toaster, until in a bratty fit of frustration at how ‘backwards’ we were, I bought one for a tenner at Portobello market and gave it to my poor mum as a Mother’s Day present. I think I had decided, through some tortuous teenage logic, that if it was vintage and cool, I could somehow bring her around to the idea that the sophisticated life required small household appliances. The toaster was a rickety 1960s flipper, finished in orange, with an electrical cord the thickness of a garden hose, and with her usual eternal patience, Mum effused over it, used it a few times just so that I could admit to myself that it turned innocent bread slices into blackened floppy casualties, and then wisely hid it in the back of a cupboard before it could start an electrical fire and burn the house down, which it was quite patently itching to do. After that minor heresy, our kitchen machinery reverted to its established duumvirate: this cooker and a Kenwood mixer (same generation, still going strong).

Yesterday, my mum called and said with great portent, “I’ve just roasted a chicken.” It’s taken her eight months of navigating glossy vapid brochures, standing up to the patronizingly slick sales-spivs telling her she wanted convection ovens and a remodeled kitchen (no she didn’t), the fitters who wouldn’t co-ordinate the disposal of Ol’ Faithful (she was supposed to carry it up from the basement herself, apparently), and the threat of new health and safety regulations that would require punching a vent hole through 6 inches of Victorian brick (no they don’t). And after a marathon day of busing around every showroom in west London with me, we discovered a week later that the anointed successor had electric ovens after all, despite that particular sales-spiv’s assurances to the contrary. Now that the British Gas showrooms that used to be on every high street have gone the way of the woolly mammoth, options for actually going and seeing a new all-gas cooker are surprisingly limited, but Mum persisted, determined not to condemn a loyal retainer on just the glamor of an online profile. She wanted to look the contenders in the eye. She wanted to slam doors and kick tyres. Finally we called in the big guns; the intercession of a family friend – a transplanted South African builder called Guy – got her as close a match to the original as possible in these heathen, Rangemastercentric, wok-burner-worshipping times, and last monday, the new New World (yes, really) cooker showed up. The two delivery guys took one look at the steps down into the basement area and balked, but Guy arrived with his very own Kosciuszko squadron and the 5 of them manhandled it down into the area, whereupon it wouldn’t fit through the door. Guy nonchalantly pointed out that if they took all the packaging off, it would fit just fine, and so, hey presto – happy Mum, shiny new silver cooker, and roast chicken for all. As a reward for her indomitable bloody-mindedness, this new model had better last as long as the previous incumbent. After that there will be a new crop of snotty spotty sales-spivs to be taught the perils of talking down to their customers.