Cooking Chopsticks

I sometimes wonder how you cook in USA without a pair of chopsticks. In Japan, we use a certain type of chopsticks for cooking. They are called saibashi, and much longer than usual chopsticks. Usually, they are made of bamboo, and have small hole on their ends to bind a pair with a string. This way, you can hang them when not in use.
Saibashi is essential for my cooking. You can use them for mixing powder, beating eggs, stirring pots and so on. When you deeply fry something, like you make tempra in deep heated oil, you cannot put a battered shrimp in the frying pan without them. I know a Chinese cook will use skimming ladle for the purpose, but it is much easier and cleaner to use saibashi. It may be alright for a professional cook who must cook many servings. But if you want to fry only several pieces, the skimming ladle is too much. And we drop a small portion of batter into heated oil to check out the temperature. This trick is done with chopsticks. Every mother will teach how to do it to their daughters.
It is amazing to see how those two simple sticks of bamboo can do when you watch a Japanese cook. But we don't notice it because chopsticks are so common in Japan. But once when I broke my saibashi in my kitchen and couldn't find a replacement for a while, I realized how I needed them. I cannot make a simple omelet without them. How can I use a beater for a egg or two? Most of the eggs will stick to the beater, and only a portion will go into frying pan. And how can I boil dried spaghetti without them? If I will not stir them with saibashi, they will stick to each others and stay hard. And when you want to try the tenderness of them, saibashi can easily pick up one string of noodle. I cannot imagine other tools can do it. May be tongs? I don't know.

You can find saibashi in some historical pictures. In ancient days, Japanese aristocrats never want anyone to touch their foods with hands. They ordered their cooks never to touch foods. So, they had to use chopsticks to cook. Some pictures, I think from 17th century, illustrate this procedure. They hold fish and vegetables on the cutting board with them and making sashimi and other dishes. Saibashi has a long tradition indeed.
In these days, we are too busy to cook traditionally, and use many pouch-packed foods. Some bags have small holes on their shoulders. It is a design to make people easier to pick a bag from a pan of hot water. We stick a saibashi into the hole and pick it up. If there are no saibashi around the kitchen, we cannot eat even those ready-to-serve foods.