Moby Dish

The water pounds out from the faucethead with a sound more insistent than a bubbling fountain, more personable than the breaking and ebbing of the surf. It’s the sound of rain dropping like bricks, but with the downpour circumscribed within a half-inch-wide cylindrical beam. Water strikes and strikes and strikes the metal basin of the sink, sending up curly little suggestions of steam. The heat pleasantly infiltrates my silicon gloves, and it’s like I’m standing, warming myself near a hearth. The crackling of the liquid fire and its warmth.

The sponge, which was sitting dingily by the sink, is revivified in a moment. What a mean little husk it is when dry!—but, at a hint from the water, it becomes a plump fruit of a thing, radiant with health. I squeeze, and it yields its aromatic and foaming juices.

To my left, the dirty plates and pans and flatware; stained, made into abstract paintings which use color to symbolize breakfast and lunch and dinner. All of that it is my task to erase and put right, so that the white porcelain plates and keen steel knives can become pure again, ready to receive the painterly impressions of new meals tomorrow.

Porcelain is a happy substance for the dish washer. (I take up the first plate.) It doesn’t kick, it doesn’t cling. It is like a sage, who, proceeding through the world, bears the things of the world, yet remains in spite of this crisp, untainted, whole. The remnants of food tumble off the plate’s white surface like marbles from a table. Yes, porcelain is a doll.

Glass is slightly less felicitous. Unless it’s quite thick, it threatens to break under the slightest mistreatment and splash its own water-clear spray into the sink; a spill which usually requires blood at least, if not sweat and tears, to mop up. Though glass shares porcelain’s inuredness to things of this world, all the sauces and crumbs, when it comes to more rarified temptations, when it comes to water, it is easily stained. Like some wiry old philosopher who imbibes nothing but coffee and cigarettes, lives in a sparse little hole, needs no company or companionship or entertainment—who, in short, has no interest in traditional hedonic allurements—but who will be a complete glutton when the pleasure in question is the chance to hold forth on Hegel. Still, like an eccentric friend, if you can account for its peculiarities, glass is first-rate.

But plastic is an old toad. A great bloated creature of excessive desire, it slurps up whatever it touches. One dalliance with turmeric will yellow it forever. One liaison with kombucha means a perpetual aroma of vinegar. One roll in the hay with salmon initiates a sempiternal oiliness. Plastic waddles into the sink after its debauchery like an old lecher settling into a church pew, winking at the pulpit. The homilist can scrub and scrub and scrub at that tainted soul and produce no effect; the yellow, the vinegar, the oil remains. The plastic smiles up complacently from the bottom of the sink, unworried by its own wretchedness. May we all be saved from scrubbing plastic!

Steel seems to be in a state of perpetual confusion and alarm. It is naturally afraid of water, knowing that, in spite of the great technical expertise that has gone into its rustproofing, water will destroy it. Yet it clings to water nearly as much as does glass, as if too afraid to let this enemy out of its sight. As for food and oil and things, it is mercurial. Sometimes, what appears to be a deadly, inerasable, burnt-on stain will melt at the first touch of soap. Other times, what seems like an easily washable mark will prove invincible to all scrubbing. I work myself into having tennis elbow, it endures. Steel wool can help with these sorts of stains; steel is better equipped to persuade fellow steel.

Iron or untreated steel will certainly rust. The dish washer should refer to the seventy million hours of online cast-iron care video content for guidance with substances such as these.

Raw earthenware can handle water, but soap will spoil it. Clean it using a consecrated scrubbing implement, which never touches any cleaning agent besides water. (Even soap can be a corrupting force when wrongly applied.)

Wood—cutting boards and salad tongs and things—is with water like a toddler is with insecticide. Turn away for one moment and it will try to drink it all up. Wood, when allowed to drink, will swell and warp and break—so you must police it. Wet wood sparingly. Dry it thoroughly and completely; there’s no place for delay.

Besides what has already been mentioned, there are a few key tools the dish washer should have.

Chief among these is high water pressure. This makes all the difference in the world. If you have high water pressure, be grateful. If you do not, consider immigrating to a building where you will have it. Next to indoor plumbing itself, no other luxury feels so much like an essential as high water pressure.  

A garbage disposal is also of great help. Always check it for mislaid measuring spoons and never run it with the water turned off. In turn, it will protect you from having a backed-up kitchen sink.

A common amateur mistake is to confuse soap with sanitizer. Sometimes the two are blended into a single formula, but, generally, there is a distinction. Sanitizer is a deadly poison, aimed at depopulating the microscopic world of bacteria. Soap, meanwhile, is a substance that reacts with water to make water wetter. Ordinary water is not wet enough to slip into every cranny. The infinitesimal gaps between oil and oiled surfaces especially pose a problem. But, with the help of soap, water gets wet enough to infiltrate even these spaces. You can feel the difference as you work. The dishes where oil isn’t in play can usually be cleaned with just scrubbing and water. But soap works miracles when oil is involved.   

As for sanitizing—for obvious reasons, applying poison to your own dishware is unwise. The dish washer has therefore traditionally relied on heat for sanitization. This is why your kitchen faucet goes hot enough to put off steam. The heat will kill those antisocial microbes, but poses no danger of killing you, since it can’t accumulate gradually like a poison. This is why it is important that you wear your gloves and run the faucet with the heat at full tilt.

There are different schools of thought when it comes to electric dishwashers. One school uses them to replace human dish washers. This school can be subdivided into those who think the electric dishwasher should entirely displace its human counterpart, and those who say it should partially displace him. In the first camp are those mad fools and geniuses who put into their dishwasher such things as never should enter therein. I knew a person once who habitually washed the thinnest of wine glasses in his dishwasher without breaking them. Even so, this strategy will subject knives to undo wear and tear and will mean death for wooden spoons and cutting boards.

There is more to be said for the partial displacement camp. This camp advises dishwashing everything that can be safely dishwashed, and hand-treating the rest. It is a sensible, moderate ideology and attracts sensible, moderate adherents. Claim such conveniences as you can; fulfil such duties as you must. We all know people like this.

The other major school on electric dishwashers uses them to augment the human laborer. The school of augmentation can likewise be divided in twain. First, you have those who would have the dishes washed twice, once by hand and again by the dishwasher. The children of the children of the Depression. Not trusting the dishwasher enough to refrain from handwashing and not trusting themselves enough to forgo the dishwasher, they double the work before distributing it among the two untrusted agents. They waste time and water, but they manage to satisfy their scrupulosity that everything be spotless, spotless, spotless.

In the other wing of the augmentation school are those who use the dishwasher as a glorified drying rack. For, though they wouldn’t trust it to do their dishes—or perhaps they simply enjoy doing the dishes themselves—they recognize the usefulness of a two-story undercounter set of waterproof dish racks. And, anyway, it isn’t so convenient to have the dishwasher removed. You’d violate your lease. So you should really use it for something, they reason.

There is an art to using an electric dishwasher. Not everyone can do it. Based on my experience, hardly anyone can do it. So it’s worth recording some of the basic principles here, for the betterment of humanity.

As regards flatware, each fork or knife or spoon should be loaded into the basket, not at random, but in such a way that the heads of spoons and forks do not touch each other and especially don’t cup, one over another. Table knives without sharp edges may be placed blade up, but sharp knives should be placed blade down (if they belong in the dishwasher at all, which is doubtful).

As regards dishware, plates and bowls should be placed as nearly to vertical as the racks allow. Good racks will prop them up and space them out from one another.  This is important both for managing space and for ensuring things get hit with enough soap and water. Small frying pans can be treated like plates.

As regards glassware, cups should be placed with the open end down. This should go without saying, but I have seen this principle violated often enough to know it doesn’t go without saying, so let me explain why this is important. If there is any open-end-up receptacle in the dishwasher—be it a mug, cup, or bowl—the dishwater will accumulate in the declivity. Far from being clean, this milky white slurry contains bits of all the gunk on all the dishes in the whole machine. Having your supposedly clean dishes filled with this will defeat the purpose of your dishwasher cycle.

For every item, all large particulate matter should be brushed or rinsed off before running the dishwasher. Elsewise, it can clog up the filter and cause trouble with the machine.

The dishwasher should be loaded with detergent—I find the pods to be very suspicious and ineffectual—and rinse aid. This latter chemical helps the water rinse off more easily, reducing or eliminating water stains. It is probably bad for our health and the planet—iridescent blue artificial formulations tend to be—but it is an extremely helpful substance whatever you’re washing and an indispensable one if you’re washing glass.

But perhaps we should heed the people who teaches us to treat the electric dishwasher as a drying rack.

Consider: when you’re washing the dishes in the sink, there is a pleasant interactivity between human and dish. The vessel starts out dirty, you wash and scrub, it becomes clean. You can watch the unworking of entropy in real time. But the dishwasher is a black box. You line up the plates, press the start button, and—presto!—magically clean dishes. Or maybe they don’t come out clean. Then you can’t say for sure why; everything happened while your back was turned. You can only handwash them or rejigger things and entrust your fate to the opaque logic of the dishwasher again.

Ironically, as we have progressed our understanding of the cosmos and made it less of a black box, we have more and more built our own black boxes. From our economic systems to our algorithms, complex human creations have replaced the gods as the capricious arbiters of our destinies. Like Freder, we look upon our own creations and see only Moloch.

We may be powerless in the face of social change or technological development, but we can at least assert authority over our own dishes.

Sometimes, when I’m washing the dishes—when the water is speaking with its musical voice, and the steam is rising up from the sink, and the soap is foamily obliterating some tough bit of caked-on beans—sometimes I feel a sweet, gentle electricity running down to my fingertips. I am unfathomably there—there with the suds and the steam and the dinner plates. I pause and gaze at the plate in my hand. The hot liquid in my eyelashes corresponds with the hot liquid in the sink. I feel happy.

I don’t know why I sometimes feel this way when I do the dishes. Possibly I am so disconnected from the real world that dishwashing is my only firm point of contact with it. Maybe the ecstasy bubbles up from a latent psychosexual attachment to running water that I don’t know I have. But it might be that there truly is something remarkable, something unutterably precious, even in this ordinary chore. And I’m a romantic, so that’s what I believe.