I'll Tell You This For Free: Never Soak A Pan For Any Longer Than Twenty Minutes

Previously in this domestic hints series: Always buy a can of condensed milk when you get a can of evaporated milk, and vice versa, so even if you mix up which one a recipe calls for, you’ve got what you need and Canned potatoes are pretty good when you want roast potatoes but don’t feel like peeling or parboiling anything.

It’s been a brisk couple of weeks in the Lavery-Woodruff-Lavery household, let me tell you. Right around the same time as the baby sprouted his third tooth (cutest instance of Tricycle Mouth I’ve ever seen), the dogs came down with their first-ever case of fleas, due to the powerful Michigan insect lobby.

You can’t see his third tooth in this picture, but it looks very much like one of the bottom teeth flipped upside down, if you’d like some help imagining it

As you might imagine, I’ve spent a great deal of time in the laundry room as a result lately. The dogs, who cannot understand why they have been banned from all the furniture, turn the most baleful and abject eyes of silent reproach on me every chance they get. Under the very best of conditions, their ability to endure a bath with courage is limited, and we are far from the best of conditions now. They are scoured on a near-daily basis, and every time I pick them up for a trip to the tub, they assume the limp air and persecuted dignity of a Christian saint being dragged into the Coliseum to face lions. I feel as harried as that one friend of Poe’s who had a heartbeat in his floors, or thought he did.

The case was a mild one, and the treatment seems to have been effective, but you can’t imagine how many things look like fleas when seen out of the corner of one’s eye: loose threads, strands of hair, pieces of lint, discarded scraps of felt from a child’s toy, an eyelash. Most things look like fleas, now that I think about it. Certainly more things look like fleas than like anything else.

But that’s neither here nor there. Today’s household tip has nothing to do with laundry nor dogs nor fleas nor children, but with the dishes. It holds true whether you happen to have a dishwasher or not — or if, like me, you exist in that fallen, apathetic condition of someone who once had a dishwasher, and has recently moved someplace without one, and must resign yourself to doing the dishes by hand again after years of easy living.

I do think it’s easier to wash up after every meal, no matter how small, than to save it for later in the day, which has a tendency to turn into a series of broken promises and structurally unsound stacks of plates and cups, but I won’t offer that as a universal rule here. I merely remind you that as it is written in the book of Ephesians, you ought neither let the sun go down on your anger, nor on your dishes; your sink should be empty at the end of each night.¹

Most important, however, is that you do not enter into the habit of lying to yourself when it comes to “letting something soak in the sink for a while.”

It’s perfectly true that when you bake a lasagna, or accidentally burn a pot of rice (or intentionally burn your rice, like with tahdig or concón), or cook something sticky, it helps to soak the pot afterwards in some warm soapy water before you try to scrub it — but you must not walk away from a soapy pot for longer than fifteen minutes, twenty at the absolute outside, and you should certainly not sit down on the couch and start doing something relaxing.² If you do so, you are certainly lost, for whoever stopped themselves halfway through a good movie or a game of Civilization 6 to say, “I really ought to get back to those dishes now?” No one. If you walk away, your brain will consign that dish as “someone else’s problem.” Your job was to soak it, now it’s being soaked, later on something else will probably happen, but that’s not your concern. Once you go down that path, there’s no end to it, for you can always convince yourself that another day or two of soaking is going to do the trick: “If it’s soaked for six hours, another twelve hours can only improve it, surely,” and you know perfectly well where this leads.

No, if you are going to soak a dish, you must know exactly when you are going to return to it, and that right soon. Whatever the soap is going to do to it, it’s not going to get any soapier an hour from now. Fifteen minutes is plenty long enough. Set a timer and clean something else in the kitchen so your body knows it has not yet exited Chore Mode, and then when the timer goes off, go and scrub that soaked dish. It will still be warm, if you soaked it with warm water to begin with, and that’s the easiest way to get through it, for there are few things more discouraging than a sink full of cold, wet dishes. Soaking is a fifteen-minute process, no more; let this become a byword for you, and you will find doing the dishes a significantly pleasanter prospect in the future. I take no pleasure in sharing this news with you, for I wish desperately that soaking a dish were sufficient to clean it, just like you, but I must report the truth as I have found it.

[First image via]

1. You cannot sleep the sleep of the just with a dirty kitchen awaiting you in the morning, is my firm belief. Your dreams will be uneasy and you will awake feeling like you owe a good friend money.

2. For whatever it’s worth, the American Cleaning Institute agrees with me, although I have no idea by whose imprimatur they make such statements.