THE TRUE EVIDENCE OF MY CONTENTMENT
When it comes to accoutrements, I am no minimalist. I have dozens of pairs of shoes, a bordering-on-overstuffed walk-in closet of clothes, a whole drawer devoted to workout wear, and enough lingerie to kit out a bordello. But if you really want to see my intimate inner workings, open my kitchen cabinets.
My everyday plates are hand-thrown Mamma Ró, from Italy, a generous gift from my former husband’s stepmother. My wine glasses are Riedel, which were an extravagance only before Target took them on and offered them at a reasonable price point. My pots and pans come from E. Dehillerin in Paris: Emile Henry, Le Creuset, first honeymoon booty. After two nuptial go-rounds, I have a surfeit of bridal shower gifts from Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel, Sur la Table, and Williams-Sonoma (affectionately referred to in our house as Willie Sóno). My utensil drawers are filled with an assortment of tools sourced from Ikea, KitchenAid, even a funky little Australian company named Dreamfarm. I have three manual can openers: my first red KitchenAid one that always misses a spot; the black KitchenAid one that works perfectly, which my wife Laura contributed when we moved in together; and a funny German one that removes can lids laterally. The flatware drawer is wide enough to accommodate two flatware caddies: One holds the elegant architectural set Laura had before we moved in, adjacent to the Crate & Barrel Dune set that I chose when I was engaged and twenty-seven in Manhattan, walking around drunk on my concupiscence, shooting stuff with the registry gun. (I just went to the website to see if it had been discontinued, as my first marriage was, but nope. I am heartened to see that it endures.)
I know. I sound like an obnoxious bourgeois twit. The Imelda Marcos of Food Prep. The Candy Spelling of Tabletop. I’m neither. I just love to cook, bake, and entertain—nothing makes me happier than a dozen friends at my table, enjoying the smorgasbord stemming from my latest cookbook crush—and when it comes to that, I don’t like to “make do,” even though I know how to, and can if I must.
Growing up in a wobbly family, I learned to seek out comfort from the familiar items in my kitchen, no matter how imperfect they were: the avocado-green rice cooker with the white switch that popped up with a ding to indicate that the rice was finished, scorched the bottom layer every time, dried out the top, and rendered the middle sticky. But when my Cuban grandmother Migdalia simmered leftover rice in hot milk and served it to me sprinkled with salt, all of the rice maker’s sins were forgiven and forgotten. The rice maker sat on the counter, unplugged when not in use, and I often plinked the button with my fingertip, as if playing a one-note piano.
On steak nights, my mother called my father into the kitchen after the meat had rested for a few minutes on the wooden cutting board. My father got out the electric carving knife, plugged it in, and showed the London broil who was boss. Why, in the 1970s, did people plug in kitchen knives and click them on like mini–chain saws? They were just slicing a piece of steak, not hacking through firewood. Yet there he stood in our small kitchen, in his white singlet undershirt and dungarees, sternly dispatching the meat into serving sizes while my mother receded, watching reverently as he did his manly-man work within her otherwise feminine sphere, a rare tableau of symbiosis in their embattled relationship.
Unlike many families, we didn’t have an electric can opener, that humming-crunching block of machinery with the footprint of a small cinder block. Overkill, thought my mother (and I agree). But we had the handheld manual one that gouged tender fingertip pads with its heedlessly painful, unnecessary circular stamp-outs. The vegetable peeler was dull, nicked, un-ergonomic—although my mother was so deft with a paring knife that she never needed to use it.
I loved the manual egg beater that whirred so clickety-zen. Even that was a bit dated in the 1970s, when handheld electric beaters were ubiquitous and buzzed with the danger of clipping the fingertips of careless children going in for a swipe of batter, Struwwelpeter-style. But the one time I used the manual beaters to make meringue, my wrists wailed from the sustained exertion, giving me a time-travel hit of how much convenience and ease were once not priorities for kitchen tool design—and how much hardier my ancestral matriarchs were. My Greek great-grandmother and her two sisters used to soak, swirl, massage, and dry pounds of their garden’s savoy spinach for the spanakopita, every few days, in large tubs outside in all kinds of weather. Their hands were their tools, and I have to say that the one time that I made her spanakopita recipe, the massaging-in-cold-water thing got unpleasant pretty fast (although it was the best spanakopita I’ve ever had).
The rice cooker and electric knife were given to my mother at her first bridal shower, along with this piece of advice from a ribald aunt: “The secret to a good marriage? Keep him well-fed and well-fucked.” She did her part, but reductive axioms only go so far. The remnants of her registry flatware set were mixed in with all sorts of exuberantly rococo mismatched forks and spoons, also from yard sales, their curlicue, floral-embossed handles at odds with the registry set’s smooth colonial simplicity. Plates were also mismatched, as were the pots, baking pans, mixing bowls, and drinking glasses. In search of a fresh start, a magic new launching pad, my parents moved many times when I was young. Things got broken, got lost, or were replaced piecemeal. My mother took us kids and left my father multiple times, and came back. I didn’t know on any given day when we would next leave or return, but eventually her leaving took.
At one point, things in my childhood home matched. And then, they did not. Along with the lost consistency of forks and knives and plates, chaos rushed in from every corner, the linen closets, kitchen cabinets, silverware drawers filling to the brim with mishmashes of goods as my childhood flooded with unpredictability and upheaval.
I like wandering through big, focus group–tweaked upscale chain emporia, but my favorite places are the offbeat. Kitchen goods outlet stores, with their unpredictable mix of discount-priced stuff from all over the world. Seconds and overstock. The passé stuff in Germany or Spain or Italy is my novelty-gilded stash, providing me with, say, hard-to-get glass storage containers years before the U.S. market responded to people’s desire to move away from plastic, or to have ramekins that are larger than usual and, coincidentally, perfect for my annual Easter breakfast mainstay: baked eggs with polenta, ringed by a stout collar of applewood-smoked bacon, topped with gruyère and chives.
Kitchen supply stores in Chinatown have endowed me with steamers, stove burner diffusers, and small, heartbreakingly beautiful porcelain bowls painted with bounding rabbits and maudlin monkeys. An industrial baking supply store in Manhattan dazzled me with dozens of different shapes of baking pans, not to mention sprinkles and sculpted sugar flowers.
At yard sales and secondhand stores, I’ve scored a crepe maker, nesting colored Pyrex bowls, a cocktail shaker emblazoned with recipes for vintage stiff drinks, squared-off tin canister sets with black plastic lids, and a little wooden treasure chest that housed a smoked glass decanter and two shot glasses—in case I ever wanted to tipple with a dashing pirate.
Although my family life was chaotic, we were culturally strict. I grew up in a blue-collar Long Island family with restrictive beliefs around religion, sexual orientation, vocation, and race.
If I hadn’t looked so much like my parents, I would have thought I was switched at birth by a careless nurse. My second semester of freshman year at college, I threw over Campus Crusade for Christ for libertine pantheism. I’ve been in love with men, and with women. I married a man, had two children, and, years after that ended, married Laura, the love of my life, legally, in my home state of New York. We live in New Mexico and dig that white people are in the minority here. And my children, along with absorbing that culturally diverse vibe in their daily life, have three moms, if you count my ex-husband’s partner.
Through the changes in my domestic life, I avoided the kitchen mishmash I remembered from childhood. I left my registry plates (Pottery Barn’s Emma ware) and flatware with my ex at first, because their symbolism broke my heart in ways I couldn’t face at every mealtime. But my kids and I needed to eat off something. So I went shopping in a secondhand store in Albuquerque and bought both a vintage yellow metal hutch and a set of plates to put in it: 1960s milky turquoise, with an insouciant daisy motif, edged with a silver line.
As my two young children and I tentatively moved forward, navigating jagged-edged feelings, the wrenchings of change, and the exhilaration of the new, I found myself feeding us the thrifty comfort food of my childhood: roast chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy; my grandma Marie’s chicken fricassee; homemade pizza; turkey soup with rice.
We also played with new gadgets that had no bittersweet associations. On weekend mornings, I pulled out the Ebelskiver pan to make round griddled doughnuts filled with jam or melted chocolate; and I bought a plug-in waffle iron that my daughter came to commandeer, setting the foundation for her own confidence in the kitchen. We even made salt ceramic dough, rolled it out, used cookie cutters to punch out gnome and animal shapes, and then painted them with watercolors. Those doggies and gnomes still pop up occasionally in different places around the house, reminding me of the fragile tenacity of that time.
When Laura was courting me, she bought me a matching pale turquoise KitchenAid mixer. Today, Laura’s parents’ registry plates (Franciscan Atomic Starburst), from their wedding in the 1950s, mingle with that stab at resilience and recovery in the hutch. It’s the kind of mismatch that doesn’t irk me in the slightest; my post-divorce dishes and her parents’ registry set each have their own shelf, and their midcentury designs work well together.
And every Thanksgiving, Laura and I host a houseful of people: her parents, my mother and husband number four, our dearest friends and colleagues. We pull down the Mamma Ró, the Emma ware, the turquoise daisy plates, and the Atomic Starburst. From the cornucopia of our authentic, consciously created domestic bliss, the results of days of cooking and baking spill out and nourish our beloved crowd.
At last year’s celebration, I caught my mom telling my coworker’s boyfriend, who was expertly disassembling our heritage bird with Laura’s family heirloom carving set: “I think a man should carve the turkey. Call me old-fashioned. . . .” Although this heresy was being said in the heart of our same-sex domicile, I let it go, reasoning that at least she wasn’t pressing an electric carving knife into his hand.
After Thanksgiving, I sometimes page through the Williams-Sonoma catalog and consider getting a set of dedicated, tasteful turkey-motif toile dishes, on sale. I mean, if I had to choose something. But here’s the true evidence of my contentment: I don’t think my kitchen needs one more thing.