Kitchen confidential
If you drop by in my off-hours, you’ll find me in my kitchen.
“At your favorite spot?” you’ll say, and I’ll nod with a sheepish grin at the simple truth of it.
“Can I help?” you’ll say.
“Nah,” I’ll say. “‘I’ll chop, you talk.”
Right now I’m working a growing mound of chopped onions and I’ve still got a couple more to chop as I make one of my favorite meals. It’s a favorite not because it envelops our home in the warm scent of cumin and coriander, and not because it’s also one of my family’s favorite meals, but mostly because it’s the meal my dad makes for special occasions. The perfectly imperfect recipe he recited one afternoon, as I took copious notes, calls for “a lot of onions.”
I am happy in the kitchen, chopping as many onions or apples as required, finding great comfort in the humble act of making food for the people I love. In my happy place, I focus on the task and try desperately to get out of my own head. My drab kitchen becomes a great hall of transformation — flour turns into bread, apples turn into pies, and I turn into someone with clarity and purpose, hypnotized by the rhythm of knife-against-board, the neat apple slices falling to the right of the blade like obedient little soldiers.
One day I’ll have a grand kitchen and a beautiful six-burner gas range with those fancy knobs. For now, I make do with a vile cooktop and severely limited storage space for my nine types of flour. For now, I take culinary joy in a good spatula that fits perfectly in my hand, the set of bright mixing bowls, my grandmother’s cast iron pot, my grandfather’s paring knife. I treasure these things, and working with them, I become one with generations of cooks before me, and the stories they’ve told me a hundred times become mine.
Stay awhile and tell me your story, will you? While the onions murmur in the hot skillet, I’ll laugh at your shenanigans and sympathize with your woes. And, for a time, you’ll displace the mixed tape that’s playing on loop in my head: things I said earlier, things my daughter said to me, what I should have replied instead of the thing I actually said, things I shouldn’t have said to my husband, things I should say to my daughter next time, ways to say it, other ways to say it, opportune moments to bring up the thing I desperately need her to hear, and repeat.
Things are simple in the kitchen. Straightforward. Reliable and reproducible. Cut butter into flour, get scones. Braise meats with carrots, get stew. Make a mistake? Just try it again. A bit less salt, a bit more carrots — voila.
Outside of the kitchen there’s a chasm of uncertainty. There are no step-by-step instructions for when to employ the carrot and when to wield a stick, and results refuse to converge to the mean, despite stable variables. In our household with two young girls and stressed parents, everyone’s walking on eggshells, unsure what might set each other off. A tired teen plus dad joke may yield uncontrollable giggles or ferocious rage or wretched tears, all of which are not necessarily attributed to the teen.
Thinking back on my pre-mom years, from rushed meals to drawn-out family feasts, I wonder what I missed between the lines, what I was too green to interpret and too naive to understand. The truth is that I don’t remember much, so consumed in my self-made drama, and there’s no way to know what my dad thought as he recited his recipe to me, what my mom left unsaid as she served us dinner after long days of teaching and grading.
If I stay in my kitchen long enough, simmer enough onions, bake enough scones, one of my daughters might come out of her fortress. “Smells good,” she’ll say, and I’ll ask “How’s the salt?” She’ll stand next to me awhile, and just maybe rest her head on my shoulder. And in this moment I won’t chide nor praise, I won’t try to be funny nor profound. I’ll stand very still and force myself to not say anything at all.
