How many sieves do you have and what is a sieve anyway?
"They went to sea in a sieve they did,
In a sieve they went to sea."
So says Edward Lear in his poem The Jumblies. Every now and then the words pop into my head as they did today, for no apparent reason. It's so catchy.
In my early days as an infant teacher I remember we did a whole lot of activities around this poem and sieves - it was quite a successful little project. So today I thought I would think about sieves.
As I and my small pupils discovered, when you start to think about sieves, you are soon thinking well beyond what is normally thought of as a sieve, as shown here. I have three of these of varying sizes. Mine are all metal but of course you can get plastic ones too.
Mostly they get used for sifting flour but you can strain liquids through them too of course. The holes are fairly fine. Now would the Jumblies have been better off with a sieve with large or small holes I wonder?
The original illustrations have the Jumblies in a different kind of sieve - more like the ones you find at use in the garden - a wooden rim and a wire mesh at the bottom, so I suppose it might just possibly float. I suspect the more modern version at the top of the page is not so floatable.
But I wasn't going to talk about the Jumblies, I was going to talk about the huge variety of sieves in a kitchen. So what is a sieve? Well according to the Cambridge Dictionary it is:
"a tool consisting of wood, plastic, or metal frame with a wire or plastic net attached to it. You use it either to separate solids from a liquid, or you rub larger solids through it to make them smaller"
So yes that covers the normal sieves, colanders and strainers of various shapes and sizes but does it cover muslin, slotted spoons, steamer baskets, and those Chinese soup spoon shaped things that have holes or mesh or something - the things you use to get stuff out of hot fat and similar?
Does a whisk count as a sieve? It sort of is isn't it? What about a mouli? or a meat grinder attachment, a pasta extruder thing? It's never-ending is it not? I must have dozens of things in my kitchen that could loosely be described as sieves. And why do we strain pasta through one of those conical sieves rather than a colander or an ordinary sieve. Or is it just me that thinks this particular kind of strainer is Italian? What does the cone shape do for you?
Nigella separates her eggs by straining them through her fingers. Are fingers sieves? It works by the way.
I am absolutely sure there are hundreds of other examples of things that could loosely be called a sieve.
Really the definition is a thing with holes/slots in it isn't it? What you use it for is marginally irrelevant. I imagine if you were a good lateral thinker you could probably think of lots of things to use the bamboo steamer for, for example.
Tonight I am making Robert Carrier's kebabs. They will sit on a rack under the grill, so that the surplus marinade can run off into the pan below, making a delicious sauce to serve with the kebabs. Now is that rack a sieve or not? How far can you take a definition - just like how far can you take a classic dish. At what point does it become something else?
And when did sieves first get used? Well I think nobody really knows, but certainly the ancient Egyptians were using sieves like this one - probably mostly for separating out grain - a technique still used the world over. Even industrialised methods use the same basic method of shaking grain through holes.
So many questions and so few answers. Well my brain is a sort of sieve too and lots falls through it.
And every one of those implements deserves a post to itself.
