PEPPER MILLS (10 january 2004)
Food tastes better when it is fresh, doesn't it? And pepper tastes best when it is freshly ground - or doesn't it?
About twenty-five years ago I bought a peppermill at the ancient herb-shop of Jacob Hooy in Amsterdam. It was a simple device, which could not contain a lot of pepper corns and was not too fast. But for the rest, it was reasonably good at its job.
But from time to time, I saw very big and fast mills, which could hold a lot more corns and grind pepper much faster than my old mill.
It must have been about a year ago that I saw a set of pepper and salt mills made of transparent plastic at the supermarket Lidl. Like everything that Lidl sells, they were not expensive. Besides, each was bigger and looked much more fashionable than my old mill.
If I had seen them in the street market, I probably wouldn't have bought them. But I thought they don't sell third-rate goods at Lidl's. And you must admit: they look nice, don't they?
At home, I filled the salt mill with dry sea salt and tried to grind a little over a dish I was preparing. The mill produced a few pathetic little grains of salt and then it stopped. Since then it has never produced any more ground salt.
"OK", I thought: "The two mills hadn't cost me a lot". I still had the pepper mill, which - even at the price of the whole set - was not very expensive. In the following months the pepper mill produced smaller and smaller quantities. And within a few months the mill produced next to nothing, however hard I tried.
"Maybe the grinding mechanism is clogged with pepper," I thought. So I took it apart and cleaned it thoroughly. But alas - hardly any improvement.
So now I have returned to using my old mill, which performs better than his plastic colleague ever did.
Can we learn anything from this story? To say that Lidl only sells second-rate stuff is an exaggeration. But we may safely say that not all that is sold there is of good quality.
And maybe, it does confirm that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
