In my first rented apartment, my flatmates and I debated the merits of buying a TV. We only had a six-month lease, was it worth it? Should we split the cost three ways? Where would we plug it in? But when I mentioned the obvious absence of a microwave, their feedback was clear: we didn’t need one.
Microwaves get a bad rap for the most part. In popular consciousness they’re portrayed as an inferior way to make food, good only for instant popcorn, or eating leftovers that are cold in the middle and scalding on the top.
What I didn’t say back then, and do so with feeling today, is that for me, the microwave is the hub of the kitchen. Having a microwave in the house is like owning a comfort blanket. Just knowing that it’s there puts me at ease.
The first microwave my family owned was a black box as big as a bank vault. It came, as most things did in those lean years, from a garage sale. The “v” sound does not exist in the Arabic language; and so thanks to my Arabic-speaking grandma, the appliance was soon known as the “microway”.
In our household, the microway was a go-to for quick food preparation. “Should I put it in the microway?” we asked at the table, for dishes that could do with a blast of heat.
We used it to make what we called “coffee” – hot milk with spoonfuls of instant coffee and sugar stirred in. It was how we cooked endless bowls of Indomie noodles, which I came to prefer with extra water and a long squeeze of the spice packet, resulting in a hot, salty soup.
I can taste those starchy, un-al dente noodles now.
Leftover bolognese became dry and unbecoming after a go-round, as did hot chips. But it did an excellent job heating up tagines and melting ingredients, saving the need for a meddlesome double boiler.
I remember staying home from school with a cold one day. I was literal-minded even as a child, and the doctor’s exhortations to rest and drink warm fluids impressed me. At breakfast, my grandma offered me the usual glass of orange juice. “I can only drink hot things,” I said.
“Let’s heat it up, then,” she said, matching my absence of humour or irony. Into the microway it went, and I drank what may be the first (and only) hot glass of Australian Squeeze in recorded history.
Over time, the microways we bought became sleeker, with better functions and more melodious beeps. I held them all in great esteem. A new one would arrive every few years and sit in the kitchen, squat and proud. As a family who avowedly hated waste, every machine was worked to the end of its natural life, and some held on beyond that. The microway’s burnt-out light bulb signalled a mere mid-life crisis, it could fight on.
I don’t know how common it is to reminisce about appliances, but my memories of microwave ownership connect me with a nostalgia as strong as if they had been about the family harira recipe.
I’m more into roasting and baking these days. But there are times when warming up on the stove feels positively antediluvian. What I need then is a hot, microwaved mug of something, anything. Then, like the appliance itself, I can come around again.
This is an edited extract from New Voices on Food Two, edited by Lee Tran Lam, available now from Somekind Press
