batterie de cuisine...

... a term I have learned from the wonderful 'Honey From a Weed' Patience Gray's 'rhapsodic text' of living in very rural Italy and Greece.
It means the range of tools and pans in a professional kitchen but Patience Gray was not a professional cook and she carried her 'essentials' as a nomadic cook packed in a large grape basket and carted on muleback.

Rick Stein carried this book, along with a few others, on his Mediterranean Journey and spoke so poetically and enthusiastically about the simplicity of her life and her existence. Cooking with whatever was seasonally available and learning from her neighbours, feasting and fasting as the seasons required.

BUT when it comes to mortars and pestles...there should be three in your Mediterranean kitchen. Two of a fine grained wood the former for grinding roasted seeds and berries, the second for pounding and emulsifying and the third stoneware or marble.
This for all the smelly stuff like anchovies, smoked cods roe and pate ingredients that would impregnate a wooden mortar.

For many years we had an olive wood mortar and pestle souvenired from a 70s trip to Ibiza (before it became party town).
Sadly it got binned  when all the go was the hugely heavy granite monstrosities!