In The End of the Land, David Grossman writes:

At 7:30 in the evening she stands cooking in the kitchen, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and, for lyric effect, the floral apron of a real, hardworking, eager housewife: a chef. Piping hot pots and pans dance on the stove top, steam curls up to the ceiling and thickens into aromatic clouds, and Ora suddenly knows that everything will work out.

She plunges into battle with her winning combination: Ariela’s Chinese chicken strips with vegetables….Persian rice with raisins and pine nuts….she moves between the oven and the stove top with unexpected gaiety, and for the first time since Ilan left… she feels a sense of affection and belonging to a kitchen, even this old-fashioned, grubby kitchen, which now approaches her tentatively and rubs up against her with its damp snouts of serving spoons and ladles…Piled on the table behind her are covered bowls of eggplant salad, cabbage salad, and a large colourful chopped vegetable salad, into which she has snuck slices of apples and mango… and tabbouleh. She has arrived at the moment when all the dishes have been sent on their way: cooking on the stove top, baking in the oven, bubbling in the pans. They don’t need her any longer. But she still needs to cook.

There is a problem that requires a solution, but she does not understand what it is, and she hurries back to the pots’ thick breath. She does not taste the food…She watches her hand move wildly over a pot, showering its contents with paprika. There are particular movements that always make the phone ring. She noticed this odd conjunction a long time ago: when she seasons food, or when she wipes a pot or pan dry after washing it….Something in these circular motions seem to bring it to life.

Grossman brings the kitchen to life, merging what is going on in Ora’s head with her body and why she cooks – as an expression of love, for therapy and creative satisfaction. An immersion in the colour, aromas and expectation of eating, all without too much thinking. It shows how integrated the process of cooking is with our consciousness and moods, all the way from well-being to worry. There is no mention of efficiency or ergonomics, but there is a sense that she loves being in the kitchen. Her body moves around effortlessly, without too much self-direction. It is a safe place for her to be in relation to the world and it accommodates her cooking and serving up of food to the point where it feels like a place for occupation and contemplation.

There are many motivations for being a kitchen. A key one is nurturing. Domestic duties can turn from obligations to offerings if we can relax and converse with others. Visitors become roommates through easy eye contact or and allowing freeform thoughts to circulate through our consciousness creates a kind of personal meditation. The 1950s image of the suburban housewife and her lonely obligations to service the family is long gone. The kitchen described in Grossman’s passage is a real living space.

Sadly, not every family has the space, resources or mentality for this kind of kitchen. One feels Ora’s kitchen is not an expensive to make, but it needs ingenuity, maybe a little inclination to DIY, and most definitely owners with the right sensibilities. In my opinion, most high end modern kitchens are not an enlightened spaces, but at least  design trends in magazines now show kitchens as being sociable places, not back room dungeons or cheerless box-rooms with utilitarian units around the wall.  Cookery programmes, for all their dubious glamour, have given the kitchen an enjoyment-come-living -status that was not historically seen in its 19th and mid-to-late 20th century predecessors.

David Grossman writes eloquently about something more crucial – its emotional value. His stream of consciousness writing reminds one of what really goes on in our emotional lives, with the constant need to keep our spirits up. A kitchen should be planned not just with style and function in mind but also as a place that one occupies for emotional recharging.

Editor’s note: You can read Johnny’s previous post on The End of the Land here.

Photograph of communal kitchen at Goats with Wind farmhouse in Galilee, by Katherine Grey.

Throughout 2011, I will be quoting passages from contemporary fiction, as I come across them, on kitchens and interior spaces, selected for how they encourage emotional engagement with kitchens and interiors and engender a sense of belonging. They will show how houses and interiors can be more than just shelter, clever design or good investments.

In The End of the Land (2010), author David Grossman describes Avram’s house, near Jerusalem, into which the protagonist has recently moved:

The house itself was finely attuned to Ora’s moods. It carefully, hesitantly shed its age-old gloominess, stretched its limbs, and cracked its stiff joints, and when it realized that Ora was permitting it to retain the occasional pocket of charming abandon and even some healthy neglect, it grew into a comfortable unkemptness, until at times, when a certain light hit, it almost looked happy’. A place on the edge of becoming a real home.  Ora felt that Ilan (her husband and mutual friend of Avram) was  ‘content in the house, with the collegiate mess she created in it, and that her taste – meaning her assortment of tastes – was to his liking. Even when things suddenly went bad between them, and their togetherness emptied out with alarming speed, she believed his affection for the home she had made for them still pulsed inside him’…. Her voice pauses for a moment, and she quickly turns on the radio, like someone opening a window…. she needs talk, a human voice.

This passage shows how home owners embed their emotional experiences in their surroundings and make a subliminal investment in the fabric of their rooms, which is so hard to achieve via straight design. To some extent it is inevitable that with time and thought, but transference of this kind can be encouraged by avoiding too much built-in furniture, non-ageing surfaces, single style aesthetics and making visible items that tell of the owner’s life story. Above, this personal story is told through Ora’s personal assortment of tastes, a comfortable unkemptness, compatibility with different moods, the penetration of daylight. She also needs opportunity for eye contact that will allow for sociability and conversation.

By creating furniture with character, avoiding uniform design, encouraging cooking counters that face into the room, adding playful details and the qualities of handmade finishes, accepting the quirkiness of old buildings and not trying to correct every defect, there is room for these mental activities to occur. All of these design features assist in showering the fabric of the house with sparks of connectivity, constant mini-electrical shocks that massage your feet, or soft hooks that attach your brain cells to the circuit that says “I belong.”  At JGS we hope our kitchen and living spaces encourage these subliminal processes but have yet to record them, particularly in the extraordinary moving way that David Grossman has done in this book.

This week we’re posting excerpts from Elizabeth David’s Christmas. You can find her recipe on Pumpkin & Tomato Chutney here. Here’s Elizabeth’s take on how to keep it simple at Christmas*:

If I had my way – and I shan’t – my Christmas Day eating and cooking would consist of an omelet and cold ham and a nice bottle of wine at lunchtime, and a smoked salmon sandwich with a glass of champagne on a tray in bed in the evening. This lovely, selfish, anti-gorging, un-Christmas dream of hospitality, either given or taken, must be shared by thousands of women who know it’s all Lombard Street to a China orange that they’ll spend both Christmas Eve and Christmas morning peeling, chopping, mixing, boiling, roasting, steaming. That they will eat and drink too much, that someone will say the turkey isn’t as good as last year, or discover that the rum for the pudding has been forgotten, that by the time lunch has been washed up and put away it’ll be teatime, not to say drink or dinner time, and tomorrow it’s the weekend, at it’s going to start all over again.

Well, I know that any woman who has to provide for a lot of children or a big family has no alternative. This grisly orgy of spending and cooking and anxiety has to be faced. We are so many fathoms deep in custom and tradition and sentiment over Christmas; we have gotten so far, with our obsessive present-buying and frenzied cooking, from the spirit of a simple Christian festival, that only the most determined of Scrooges can actually turn their faces to the wall and ignore the whole thing when the time comes. At the same time, there must be quite a few small families, couples without children, and people living along, who like to celebrate Christmas in a reasonably modest and civilized way: inviting over a friend or two who might otherwise be alone (well, maybe, like you and me, they’d rather be alone, but this is an eccentricity not accepted at Christmas time) – and for much small-scale Christmas meals, at least, the shopping and cooking marathons can be avoided, the host and hostess can be allowed to enjoy themselves, and the guests needn’t have guilt about the washing up.

For such a meal, I’d make the main dish something fairly straightforward and conventional, the color and festive look being supplied by something bright and beautiful as a garnish. Not inedible decorations, but something simple and unexpected such as a big bowl of crimson sweet-sour cherry sauce with a roast duck; a handsome dish of tomatoes stuffed with savory rice with a capon; a Madeira and truffle-scented sauce with a piece of plain roast beef; slice oranges with a pork roast or a ham.

The first course I’d make as painless as possible for the cook: if money were no object, lots of smoked salmon or Parma ham to precede the duck; before the beef, a French duck pate with truffles and pistachio nuts, avocado pears, or simply a lovely dish of egg or prawn mayonnaise. Or, if you’d cooked a ham or piece of gammon or pickled pork to last over the Christmas holiday, then a few finely carved slices of that, with a bowl of cubed honeydew melon or some pickled peaches – there’s no reason why English cooked ham should not make just as good a first course as the raw Parma or Bayonne ham.

As for pudding, unless you feel you absolutely have to have at least the traditional mince pies (those who only each the Christmas pudding because of the brandy or rum butter will find it equally delicious with mince pies), most people will be grateful if you skip straight to the Christmas dessert fruits. Usually one is too full to appreciate the charms of Malaga raisins, Smyrna figs, almonds, glacé apricots and sugar-plums, or you could perhaps finish up with a big bowl of mixed fresh pineapple and sliced oranges.

*From Elizabeth David’s Christmas, David R. Godine: Boston, 2008. US Edition, p 6-8.