The Spirit Of Innovation Still Thrives In The Good Old Kitchen Hack
This year marks 300 years since the publication of Daniel Defoe's blockbuster novel Robinson Crusoe. And while its hero is rightly hailed as fiction's most famous castaway, he can just as equally stake his claim to another — more culinary — title.
Robinson Crusoe: patron saint of the kitchen hack.
This is the man who grew, ground and baked his own organic, artisanal bread from scratch — with nary a Kitchenaid mixer in sight.
In an age when we are drowning in kitchen gizmos — whether it's a waterwheel-shaped device to cube a watermelon or a pint-sized mill to mince your herbs or a steel pot with buttons that promises Michelin magic — it's inspiring to recall the Herculean story of Crusoe's bread making and celebrate the kind of ingenuity it embodies.
Shipwrecked on a deserted island, Crusoe has no plow, no scythe, no threshing floor, no mill, no sieve, no oven. No problem. Driven by desperation, he comes up with tools and methods to turn his precious store of corn into freshly baked loaves: a bough of a tree is his harrow and a cutlass his scythe; he uses his bare hands to
