Last week, when I made my Sticky Chinese Pork, I showed off my lovely new casserole dish from the Prestige Vintage Collection. It's made of enamel coated steel which has a non-porous surface so it is stain resistant. It is also dead easy to wash up, even when having used a sticky marinade that has been baked on.
It is high scratch and wear resistant and is dishwasher safe, although a quick wipe with a sponge and a bit of washing up liquid is all that it needs to be spotless. It is also freezer and oven safe up to 240 degrees which means that you can prepare a dish in advance then just pop it in the oven as needed. It is even beautiful enough to be carried straight to the dinner table to serve from. In fact, Prestige are so sure of the quality that it comes with a 12 month quality assurance guarantee.
The 21cm Casserole Dish that I reviewed has a RRP of £29.99 but it's just one of the products available in the Vintage collection. They also have saucepans, roasting sets, mixing bowls, storage containers, baking dishes, ... everything you need to kit out your kitchen retro-style.
The Prestige Vintage Collection is inspired by the brand's rich history as a part of the British kitchen for over 70 years, so they are inviting people to tell them their favourite kitchen memory for the chance to win the full Vintage collection in their choice of red or blue. They asked me if I had my own kitchen memory to share so I tried to think back to my earliest childhood memories in the kitchen. That would be back in my nan's kitchen, where she always used to be bustling about, brewing up tea in the stainless steel teapot, washing up or doing the laundry in the spin-dryer (with two sides so you had to use big tongs to drag the sopping wet washing over to the spin dryer side !). I remember her having enamel mugs, which I (for some reason only a child could understand !) was convinced came from the battlefields of World War II. They actually looked very similar to the ones in the Prestige Vintage Collection, minus the stripes.
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| photo credit : Vilseskogen on Flickr |
I also remember the fact that she didn't have a fridge - just a built-in pantry that somehow always managed to stay cool, even in summer. She'd always have tins of beans, peas and carrots bubbling away in a pan of water on the cooker - how's that for multi-tasking ?! - and every Christmas, she'd order a whole crate of bottles of Cresta Cream Soda, cherryade and limeade from the milkman. Every Saturday, someone would go to the chip shop and the whole extended family would sit around the table, while she still hovered in the kitchen warming up some beans to go with it - I remember her constantly cooking but don't actually remember her sitting down to eat any of it ! (She probably did though !) Everything was made from scratch as there was no freezer and no real convenience foods - cheese and bacon flans (no one said quiche yet !), egg and thick homemade chips, Sunday roasts, coconut macaroons or glacé cherry buns, and the Christmas pudding that was started several months beforehand, with old sixpences wrapped in foil and added to the mix ! My grandad would help out by toasting thick slabs of bread on the open fire with a toasting fork, before slathering them in butter and jam (and surreptitiously wiping off the ashes if they fell off into the grate !) or wrapping huge potatoes in foil then pushing them around the base of the bonfire on Firework Night. So much more fun than the soulless frozen ready meals and convenience foods that make up much of people's diets today !
If you have your own kitchen memories to share, head over to the Prestige Facebook page - make sure you share them here too though, as I'd love to hear them too!
Disclosure : We received the casserole dish in order to write an honest review.
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