Corks on your Paderno-Chaudier pot lids

Here is an email that I just sent to the Paderno company who are based in Prince Edward Island and makers of fine kitchen ware. The email contains a helpful tip that could save you from burning your fingers.

Dear Friends at Paderno,

A kind and generous person gave me a pot last year. I believe it's one of your Chaudier sauce pans. It has quickly become my favourite pot. I boil dumplings in it a couple of times a week and have made some really nice date square filling with it.

The only thing that sometimes bothered me about the pot was that I needed to use a potholder or something to remove the lid if it was really hot. (Only if it was really hot, because often the handle was cool enough to hold even when water was boiling in the pot. Still, who wants to take a chance.)

Then at Christmas time, I noticed that my brother Steve who has several top-notch chef friends [like Mary and Paul] also had some of your saucepans, but he had placed corks under the metal handles . "Ah, ha," I thought, "that's not for showing off his high-priced wine corks, that's for letting you lift the lid when it's hot."

I just did some poking around on the web and discovered that lots of other people know about this trick. For instance a woman named Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan on the Apartment Therapies: Kitchen website has a nice posting about it. [also found here]

I am wondering if you have considered suggesting this technique to purchasers of your pots, or even of providing a couple of corks with each sauce pan. I'm sure you must make many, many pots each day, but I bet you could score a lot of free corks at PEI's 2006 Wine Festival (scheduled for June 2nd & 3rd, 2006, at the Charlottetown Civic Centre).

Love your pot,

David Scrimshaw

A few notes:

• The email I sent didn't contain any links or photos because I thought they might trigger a spam filters are more likely to screen you out if you have websites in your message.
• Both Steve and Sara Kate use a 2-cork method. This is probably better for protecting your fingers, but I think my 1-cork technique is more aesthetically pleasing.
• If you have a cleaning team, it's a good idea to have spare corks somewhere or to wash and put away the lid yourself because they might think a cork doesn't belong on a pot lid, take it out and put it somewhere that you can't find it. Like maybe the garbage, but I don't want to look there. Just saying.