Cheesecutter

Yesterday evening, that is to say Thursday evening, we talked about hats and worked our way around to the cheesecutter, the flat cap worn by the older building tradesmen of my youth, now more an accessory for provincial horsey people. We wondered how it came to be called that.

I recalled a kitchen gadget of my youth, which was used for cutting up cheese, the first stage in working cheese into a dough, perhaps a dough for cheese scones.

I failed to turn such a thing up on my telephone.

But waking this morning, I realised that it wasn't used for cutting up cheese, rather cutting up the butter or margarine which went into a cake mix. I wondered whether I was going to have to draw such a thing and feed the drawing to Google Images in order to get its name - at which point, hopefully, BH would recognise what I was talking about. A drawing which would test my limited powers.

Then getting up, I fed the clue 'five or six bladed kitchen gadget used one handed to startng working something like butter into a cake mix' into Bing. He sailed over the typo and straightaway produced the result included above, with the very thing featured in the top row, although he seems to go a bit off-message in the second row.

Armed with the improved clue 'five blade dough blender', I visit Amazon. And he, not minding the 'blade' for 'bladed' turns up, at the bottom of the snap above, pretty much the thing I remember from childhood. Except that that handle I remember was painted in a hard gloss rather than varnished, perhaps red and white or blue and white.

So nothing much to do with cheese, although it is true that the shape does suggest that of the hat, albeit with the blades at the back and the handle at the front.

Clearly the heat of the afternoon had taken chunks of the brain offline.

At this point I remember that I wanted a Flexi Map of Calcutta to help me along with my reading of the Calcutta section of reference 1, previously noticed. A brand I have found convenient and helpful in the past, perhaps now owning half a dozen of them. Amazon fails miserably with 'fleximap calcutta'.

I work my way through to reference 2 and eventually decide that the map does not exist, perhaps accounting for Amazon's failure. But I am able to buy something called 'Calcutta Insight Guide (Insight City Guides)' from eBay for a fiver or so. A bit puzzled as to why the front cover sports what appears to be a double decker London bus, but at that price, worth a punt.

Also puzzled as to why no Flexi Map. Calcutta is a big place and one might think that there was demand - but clearly not. Perhaps there is some local version which I have yet to turn up.

PS 1: not quite the same, for someone of my generation.

PS 2: reference 4 tells me of yet another bunch of people wanting to get out from under the home country. Its not just the Ukrainians at all... Or the Irish, or the Scots, or the Shans. And then there were the Biafrans and the Katangans. Except that this latest bunch appear to be well short of a majority, at least for the moment. And, hopefully, the matter will be handled in a decent, decorous and dignified way. The three D's.

References

Reference 1: The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian - Nirad C. Chaudhuri.- 1951.

Reference 2: https://www.insightguides.com/shop.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolkata.

Reference 4: Alberta to hold vote on referendum to separate from Canada: Province’s move bypasses legal block preventing independence poll and poses challenge to Prime Minister Mark Carney - Ilya Gridneff, Financial Times - 2026.