I like to keep my kitchen clean. Most people do, but I like mine really clean. It’s not just mine, of course; it belongs to my husband, and arguably our cat, just as much as it does to me. But it feels like a place wholly mine. I know where everything is. I spend several minutes wiping its surfaces to a gleam after washing up. I like the way the little bulbs over the sink and stove cast a twilight glow across the fake-marble veneer.
My kitchen, I think, is a portal. They all are. Kitchens hold us in the here and now in the most essential terms: by taking care of our most basic sustenance needs. But they’re also these unique, liminal spaces, full of potential for learning, connection, retreat. I’ve learnt a lot in my kitchen. After moving to Sweden and finding more time for myself, I started baking: cinnamon buns, banana bread, cookies. I learnt new words for ingredients and methods, familiarised myself with deciliters (some knowledge never sticks though; I’ll always have to bring up the grams-to-deciliter conversion table on my phone).
When I took on the project of painting the kitchen doors and drawers in the summer of 2020, the room somehow came to feel even more mine. I bonded with it, you could say. But kitchens aren’t always places with which we (especially primary caregivers and those who traditionally take on household labour) have harmonious relationships. After the move, I was without a paid job for the first time since my teens. Washing up, cooking, ordering our weekly shop, all felt like ways for me to prove my worth and bring value to our household. My internalised capitalist values and discomfort at being financially dependent on someone else were compounded by the ickiness of kitchen work’s gendered connotations. It’s something I’m still working through and a topic for another time.
Moving abroad can strip the most confident person of any semblance of identity, independence and belonging. After over two years, I am just beginning to feel a firm grip on this place as ‘home’, as somewhere I have just as much a right as anyone else to live. The kitchen has played its part in helping me to give myself that permission, and in typical writer fashion, I have tried to pin it down in words. In A Recipe For Starting Again, I processed the stress of the early-pandemic relocation, and how baking felt like grabbing hold of the only solid thing during a time of emotional and bureaucratic unmooring.
Earlier this year, I again found myself in the kitchen, this time trying to connect with another place altogether: the Caribbean island of Trinidad, where my father is from and which forms an important part of my heritage. It wasn’t until I uprooted myself from the familiarity of London that I started to really interrogate my identity as a person of mixed racial heritage, and what that means and has meant for me as a ‘white-passing’ woman. There is so much I am still mulling over and so many historical, colonial legacies that impact how much I’ll ever know about myself, but more than anything, in the kitchen, I wanted to know if I could recreate a vegan version of a dish from my childhood and one of the most delicious meals I’ve ever known, Trinidadian stewed chicken. So I tried. And I wrote about that too, in a piece with an amusingly similar title, A Recipe For Nourishing Roots (page 17).
In writing these pieces, I feel like I’ve nurtured a new way of processing life. Is it possible to filter all experiences–shit health, difficult decisions, our attempts to understand ourselves and others–through the heart of the home? Can kitchens–how we feel in them, what we create with the tools and structures they give us–tell us something new and surprising about life and its highs and lows? Next time something happens, something that takes you out of the monotony of your day for better or worse, might you go and stand at the sink or open the fridge and see if you feel changed?
My short story collection, Tools For Surviving A Storm, is available now.