In the Kitchen: Essays on Food and Life

"What are the simplest ingredients of a kitchen? Water, fire, ice. A stove, a set of cooking vessels, knives, a kettle, a rice cooker. A small window from which you can see a tree or two. A kitchen is a place of great ambition, of patience, of comfort, and of failure."

In this collection of thirteen essays, the writers share their own personal histories and their relationship to food and cooking, showing us how food can embody our personal as well as cultural histories.

Rachel Roddy kicks off with an account of the cookers/ovens that have accompanied her through her life, from her childhood to her current kitchen in Rome. She’s currently on her twentieth cooker and this may be the first one that she does not leave behind. Each cooker from her past is a marker, a memory of a point in her life, and her vivid account of each shows how integral they were to whoever she was at that time.

For Ella Risbridger kitchens are a place to fall in love, they are a measure of love and the degrees of intimacy (think about different people in your life and imagine having them in your kitchen, sharing space, and a meal - how comfortable are you? Would you be able to help yourself to anything in their kitchen without asking and vice versa?) She ends with a plea to all of us to notice things about the people we love, the small things they like, the things that do make up a life. 

Daisy Johnson writes about the rituals surrounding food, including her family’s tradition of making pizzas on Christmas Eve, and how these traditions evolve over time and are comforting in their constancy. Laura Freeman writes about the diets of famous writers and explores the connection between food and the creative process. 

Rebecca May Johnson’s feminist take on food, using the film Mermaids, was one of the most fascinating pieces in the book. The mother in the movie, Mrs Flax (played by Cher) subverts all societal expectations from a woman (especially in the kitchen), with her fantastical finger food creations - all hors d’oevres and no main courses, no man seated at the head of the table carving a chicken. Food is one of the ways in which she exerts her autonomy.

Mayukh Sen’s poignant essay about food and grief, looks at Archana Pidathala (we have had her fabulous books for years now, and she's a friend of the bookstore); how she found her way into the kitchen after losing her grandmother, an excellent cook who had collected all of her recipes in a Telugu cook book that she self-published called Vanita Vantakalu. But what started with Five Morsels of Love, as a means to honour her grandmother’s memory and to bring her recipes to a wider audience, became eventually a life's purpose for Archana.  

The most humourous piece in the book is the one by Joel Golby who dissects the social dynamics of the buffet and the way it “inverts the eating experience.” He questions who we are when faced with a spread of food and no one is watching.

“When you go to a restaurant, you are handed a menu and asked to read and imagine what you might eat. The Buffet attacks you with visual stimuli and asks you to reach into the outer reaches of your own hunger. The Menu is calm and composed, and the pricing is there, by the side, in plan black-and-white. The Buffet asks you to pay before you even look at the food. You are not given a knife and fork; you are given tongs. You are given a small lifting device to ease out a plump square of lasagne. You are given a whole salad bar to totally ignore. You are given a glass and told you can fill it, forever, with Coke. The Buffet subverts anticipation by overwhelming you with choice…”

This was a collection of essays we savoured.