No amount of kitchen equipment stuffed into designer cupboards will make you a better cook. Because, in the kitchen, it’s what you do with it that counts.No amount of kitchen equipment stuffed into designer cupboards will make you a better cook. Because, in the kitchen, it’s what you do with it that counts.
The saddest kitchen I’ve ever seen was in Fresnaye, a patch of Cape Town’s Atlantic Seaboard where mansions have ocean views to marine infinity, decks bigger than the ones on board Queen Mary, and landscaped gardens tended by topiarists and punctuated by sculptures of dolphins and poodles. (Actually, one of the poodles may have been a topiary salt bush.) Its owner was a household-name mogul and the kitchen was so big you could have parked a small plane in it. But it was eerily stark.
There was nothing in the cupboards, no crumbs in the designer toaster, no food-stained cookbook from last night’s supper. I waited for others to leave the room and guiltily pulled open a drawer, and opened a cupboard or two. It could not have been clearer: the kitchen had never been used.
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Recently, I too had a large kitchen, if not as big as that one. It is in our house in Cradock (which hasn’t sold yet) and is big enough to hold an eight-seater dining room table – a lovely old Victorian one full of the marks of others who have used it over its generations of owners – and it is a beloved table around which many stories have been told. A table on which elbows have rested and over which glasses have been clinked; more than a collection of pieces of wood.
It holds stories and memories, and that is the point of the kind of table that deserves to be in the middle of a family kitchen. I have wanted a big kitchen table all my life and it was Cradock that gave it to us. But we still have the table.
It came to Cape Town with us, and is in my garage-study-den-studio-thing. I haven’t quite worked out what I should call this strange room where I am writing this. It is a garage, but with my stuff in it, it has become something it was not designed to be.
The table is at the garage door end, and on a hot day, I open the door upwards for the air to flow in and the light to fall on the table, where at the beginning or end of a day I photograph plates of food in natural light. That end of the space is earmarked to become a studio; it needs softbox lighting, backdrops. It is a venture that will take a bit of time.
And on hand, when the weather is right, will be that natural light. I love natural light for photography – it’s my first port of call. My old desk, which was once a reporter’s desk at Grocott’s Mail in what was then Grahamstown, now Makhanda, stands against a wall, lined with my Olive Schreiner books and a framed portrait of the Victorian writer who captivates me.
My old Yamaha FG-580 guitar, bought in 1976, leans against the desk as a reminder of the young muso version of me, next to my watercolour of a Boer War cannon at Mafeking during the siege of October 1899-May 1900. Cookbooks line the old ball-and-claw radiogram we call Van Riebeeck, against another wall. The table is in here because there is no room for it in the kitchen.
This kitchen would fit into our old kitchen twice. And I had been worried. I’d feared that it would be too confined for me.
But in only six weeks it has ceased to be any kind of a problem for me. Even though I cook every day. And it’s made me realise that the food that comes out of a kitchen bears no relation to its size.
Most Britons know this, given the scale of the average British kitchen. With notable exceptions, the ordinary household kitchen in Blighty is a miserably small affair, yet they all seem to cope. We did, for our four years in Chichester, where the kitchen even had a built-in dishwasher – the narrowest I’ve ever seen, half the width of a standard one.
Imagine your dishwasher cut in half right down the middle. Yet it did all the work we needed of it – size really doesn’t count for much.
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