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The passing mention of pesto, last time, provoked this topic. Necessity is hardly ever the mother of invention; association nearly always is.

Pesto is a stock item in my fridge – classic basil pesto. You’ve grokked my fridge now, just from that information. I put pesto in pasta, as I’m meant to. I may also spread it on bread or put some in bean salads. Since it’s a stock item, I’ve been wont to buy the basic own-brand stuff at the supermarket.

My fridge stays as cold as it can be without damaging the veg. Even so, it’s never cold enough for that ordinary pesto. By the time I’d got through 2/3 of  190g pot, the rest would be moldy.

Before Dr. __ova, the Czech Enchantress, moved in a couple of years ago, I did the waste-not-want-not thing with this this mold. I scraped it away with a spoon and consumed more of the remaining pesto. Undoubtedly I also consumed undetectable vestiges of the mold, but I have negligently consumed a variety of food molds from infancy and come to no harm yet.

Dr. __ova, however, femininely combines chaotic untidiness with exquisite and fanatical hygiene. She will not have moldy food within her hyper-senstive ken. She has assured me vehemently that food molds may be the death of me. I accept this, though I believe that most things that might be the death of me are far more likely to be. I have desisted from skimming the mold from my pesto: now I scrape it all into the wastebin at the first appearance of mould, and recycle the jar, naturally.

Not long ago – about the lifetime of 3 jars of pesto – I noticed for the first time Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference deluxe pesto just as I was reaching for a new jar of the bog-standard sort. I’m fairly well disposed to Tasting the Difference, at least once, so I re-directed my grasp to the costlier pot.

I can vouch that Taste the Difference pesto does indeed taste dramatically better than Sainsbury’s pesto ordinaire. But it has another conspicuous merit: it doesn’t go moldy before I’ve finished it. The deterrent to Tasting the Difference, as ever, is the price. Pesto ordinaire, today, costs 63p per 100g. TtD pesto is more than twice that: £1.31 per 100g. But when I reckon with 1/3  of the cheap pesto going to waste, its effective cost to me is 90p per 100g.  That makes the delicious and non-molding TtD alternative look like the better value.

Since I’ve made this discovery, TtD pesto has been my stock choice. And alert as I now am to the principles at work, I soon noticed them again, in the case of houmous. The whole preceding anecdote goes through, with obvious variations, for ordinary own-brand houmous v. houmous deluxe, where houmous deluxe is represented by Yarden Houmous Extra rather than any supermarket premier label.  Have you noticed how cheap houmous, even before it goes moldy, begins to ferment? Dr. __ova’s anathema kicks in at that point, and I was binning a good half of my cheap houmous once I relinquished the practice of eating it slightly fermented.  The good stuff does not ferment, either.

I’ve speculated on the basis of this welcome long-life property of high-end pesto and houmous. The Yarden houmous lists its ingedients microscopically, so for all I know it might benefit from superior chemical preservatives. But the TtD pesto contains nothing you would not be pleased to find in a rustic Piedmontese kitchen. (I was impressed by that). One thing that the expensive products have in common is that they are much oilier than their cheap counterparts. Extra olive oil is tastier, but also more preservative. That could be the answer.

Right, let’s get straight to the beating heart. Where can I get a good egg slicer?

Sliced eggs, I know, are representative of the kind of “salad” you used to get in the 60s. And having the eggs sliced with an egg slicer, rather than a simple knife, was square even then. But a hard-boiled egg is tasty and an unbeatably efficient vehicle of nutrional goodness – especially since we now know that its  terrible cholesterol rap sheet was all baloney.

A fairly common main element of my evening meal is pitta bread with a filling of pesto or tapenade, maybe tatziki, black pepper and sliced hard-boiled eggs. See? – it might be sauvage, but it’s cool. It would be a hard-boiled egg kebab, but I keep the salad on the side, on account of its volume.  So I have a regular need to slice hard-boiled eggs, and an egg slicer is, in principle, an unbeatably efficient egg-slicing solution.

An egg slicer trounces a simple knife particularly when the hard-boiled eggs are an unpremeditated choice based upon a pre-prandial fridge survey, as my meals typically are, and therefore have to be peeled and sliced straight from the saucepan. Time is of the essense in my cooking activities. No doubt yours too, and very hot hard-boiled eggs are unfriendly for knife-slicing – even if you’re content with wedges rather than slices.

I resolved to add an egg slicer to my batterie de cuisine around a year ago when one absurdly prolonged fiasco of knife-slicing two hard-boiled duck eggs made me miss the indispensable first 1/2 minute of CSI, the 1/2 minute before the opening credits where we see what the crime is that’s going to be solved.

So I picked one up at Tesco with the next weekly shop. It was the only model in stock, an entry-level plastic and wire item at about £1.50. This one sliced my eggs fine for me until July, when one of the wires broke. Well, I reckoned I’d got what I’d paid for. I had back-slid from the prime ordinance of competent cooking: Get good utensils.

Next weekly shop, at Sainsbury’s, I sought out my next egg-slicer, this time with build-quality. There, I got a sturdy looking stainless steel “Farringdon” model that reassuringly cost around a £1 more. Stainless steel always plays well with a man. And one of the wires broke yesterday.

I don’t mind when cheap rubbish packs up. But I feel like a sucker whenever an article that comes on all pricey and workmanlike packs up quicker than the cheap rubbish.

Now, £2.50 is 2/3 as much again as £1.50, but it’s nowhere near the luxury end of the egg-slicer price range. I’ve been googling and have discovered that I could keep chasing what I’d call merchantable durability up beyond £15.00. At that price point, you’re getting German engineering in your egg-slicer. And it will slice your Mozzarella too.

German engineering plays tremendously with a man. But will one of the wires still break within a year? Is the wiring a fundamental weakness of the egg-slicer design? Is there an egg slicer that lasts?