Three Kitchens: Part 4

My Bespoke Kitchen

I’m not being pretentious calling my current kitchen bespoke. Architect Misho Vasilevich and interior designer Olga Gruzdeff spent time watching how Marilyn and I, and our guests, used our kitchen, had meals with us, and Olga went so far as measure the volume of storage space we had for food, crockery, cutlery, kitchen equipment, and finally even asked us to measure our largest saucepan, longest platter, widest fry pan, tallest storage jar. It fits us like a bespoke shoe fits a foot.

This kitchen isn’t, on the other hand, anything special in terms of the way it functions like so many other kitchens of relatives and friends of mine now as a return in some ways to the social functions of the conversational circle of the hearths of Paiga combined with a sort of enhancement of the mystery of transformation through cooking by its public performance  that is very much now a part of both domestic cooking and of course the plethora of cooking media programs and events.

Thought it wasn’t meant this way, the Jona Lewie song ‘You’ll always find me in the kitchen at parties’ ought to be the theme song for the modern domestic cook. Invite some people around for dinner and there is an expectation that at least the first part of the evening will be spent with you and your guests drinking and chatting in your kitchen while you get the meal together. You will be making your ‘ethnic specialities’ or trying something clever you’ve just downloaded to make from the seasonal celeriac you scored at that nice little famers’ market on Saturday, and at least half the guests will be as interested in talking about what you are making and how as they will about gossiping or dissing or breaking news about boyfs/girlfs/bubs/pets etc. Some of them will undoubtedly want to know what they can do to help prep. No-one will feel the least bit uncomfortable about the cooking smells, the cramped space, the spills. Cooking at home for guests is again now part of the conversational circle. The cook is again no longer excluded from half or more of the evening; indeed, the cook often becomes the hub around which the first half of the conversational circle revolves.

My kitchen certainly functions like this. A bit of background and description is called for. I live in an Australian Federation style house, so named as it was built in the period just after the various independent States on the landmass of Australia federated into the nation of Australia, this house being built in 1910. We don’t have much information on the original layout of the house but the kitchen was certainly a room on its own at the back of the house, later converted into a bathroom, with a new kitchen being added on next to it. That was the kitchen in which I began my domestic life in the house.

When originally built, one of the rooms toward the front of the house would have been the dining room. My house is particular in that it has a second large detached building in the yard whose function is forgotten but which looks like it would have been a small ballroom. That room had been used as the formal dining room for guests the time I moved in. So it remained for some time, and I spent the first several years talking food from the kitchen outside and into this other building in all weather. Unsurprisingly I got a tad tired of being cold, wet, and blown away bringing food to my guests. So Marilyn and I decided to knock down what was an afterthought of a kitchen and build a new covered structure to incorporate a kitchen and an everyday dining room.

It was this that Misho and Olga designed for us, but in the way of these things, the function of the spaces created changed, particularly in ways that embedded the social relationships Marilyn and I have with relatives and friends who come to dinner.

What we’ve ended up with is a single space that is now both kitchen and guest dining room (Marilyn and I tend to eat our domestic meals in the dance hall that is now mostly our tv or reading room though it still has a large dining table at which we sometimes have social dinners or seat overflow children or other guests). What it allows for is the expansion of the conversation circle to encompass both these spaces in a way that allows the cook and the kitchen circle to interact freely and flow to and from another circle created around the dining space. In this way it is a return to the inclusive hearth of the Paiga round hut.

At the same time, the placement of the kitchen creates a stage for the mystery play of cooking. The kitchen end of the combined space is created by a wall of cupboards facing the dining space, with a galley in front of it for the cook, and an island bench that creates a second ‘wall’ for the kitchen, but one that allows movement and conversation and visibility easily across and around it, and also allows the transformative processes to be seen and engaged in. It is a space for the preparation of basse cusine as well as the space for the creation of ‘culinary dreams, maximising the element of surprise and mystery’. The canny cook in a space like this can play with the possibilities of their role and manufacture mystery and surprise while all the time apparently being transparent, indeed, welcoming scrutiny. It’s the key to magic; expose yourself by encouraging participation and scepticism and then floor them with more than just a rabbit out of a hat.

Part 5

Conclusion

I don’t think Jones is a host/cook. I found much to reflect on in his kitchen typologies but they don’t seem to me to be developed by someone who cooks for others as a social activity.  I think there are some pretty fundamental practical reasons why you might like to separate a kitchen from a dining/conversation space that he overlooks or just doesn’t get. I bless the day someone invented chimneys, and more than that, invented the over-stove-kitchen-extractor-fan. I think he also underestimates the potential for mystery of transforming material into a meal in front of your guests and so majorly upping your status. The women of Paiga are as skilled at showing a guest how well they can use their hearth to create something personal and surprising as any chef in a three hat restaurant in Sydney.