★★★☆☆
In the Kitchen, collected and published by Daunt Books, is a collection of thirteen essays from thirteen authors that embolden the shared hub of culture and community across borders and disparities: the kitchen. Yet it ultimately fails at providing a unique perspective on the kitchen’s role outside of its function.
The book is divided into three sections: Coming to the Kitchen, Reading and Writing in the Kitchen, and Beyond the Kitchen. While each section logically follows and makes sense theoretically, it doesn’t seem entirely necessary. Perhaps it is only because the essays are vague enough with their themes that each could be cataloged under any of the sections and worked just as well. It did not seem to be a tool of purpose in terms of the essays themselves but rather serving more of its purpose for the book itself, to act as a tool of organization that does not achieve that goal.
The essays under the first category of “Coming to the Kitchen” touch on the how different kitchens and recipe books and food-related items mark different eras of our lives.They serve as a constellation which we follow in order to track our growth and maturity alongside the specific stove or cookbook we were using at that time. The essays introduce the kitchen as a mark of intimacy, the kitchen as a place where you can truly know an acquaintance, a friend, a lover. The kitchen, thus, is established in this first section as a symbol of life and of kinship, of growth in oneself as one learns to cook and outgrows their kitchen but also the growth of their relationships, both to other people and food.
These essays have an intrinsic sense of preachiness to them that I think colors the otherwise perhaps profound words of each one. There is a call to action that is unnecessary, almost an instruction to savor one’s kitchen, and one of the essays eerily resembles an ad for a meal delivery service. The points of the authors are diminished with the floundering embellishments of sermon-like notations.
The essays under the second category of “Reading and Writing in the Kitchen” (though is that not what the whole book is doing in the first place?) more broadly define the kitchen and food in terms of relationships to daily human functions. Food as fuel for the brain, food as a means of eschewing societal norms, food as cultural disparities, food as mourning deaths, food as an emblem of family, etc.
The writing in this middle section of essays outdoes the former, as it does not try as hard as the previous to fit under a category that narrows its possibilities, as this category is one that is broad and all-encompassing. The authors in this section seem to go beyond the standard baseline acknowledgement that most people likely have, that food is more than just food, that it denotes a plethora of marks of humanity and humanness that no other necessary daily function does. The essays in this section draw from outside food writing and build upon it, highlighting the ways in which food and popular culture come together to represent food and the kitchen as all it is: a haven, central to the intimacies of groups from the small scale of families up to nations and societies.
The third section is bittersweet. The first essay in this collection, “The Long and Short of the Love Affair that Imploded because of Eccles Cakes, Three-Quarters of a Quiche and Don’t-Cut-My-Leg Chicken” by Yemisí Aríbisálà, a Nigerian author, shines the brightest among the whole book.n the prose itself, somehow both delicate and bursting with zeal, and its depiction of the gaps lie between couples in interracial relationships, in two cultures where food plays such a huge role in the demarcation of who one is and what they represent. This essay does not simply state the ways in which food and the kitchen are part of a cultural identity that symbolizes heritage, we experience it in its enthralling and emotion-filled writing.
The rest of the essays follow in the brilliance of the first, though none in the extent to which Aríbisálà was able to. Almost every essay in this section does what it sought to do without explicit admission of what that is exactly; we come to understand, as we read, that each essay defines food and the kitchen on their own terms, contextualized and profoundly molded by their heritage, their family, their community, and the individual overarching daily experience of life.
The last essay, however, is akin to a sermon on the ways food brings about community and how one should volunteer at their local soup kitchen, even further propagated with the names of the author’s organizations and almost an ad for the website she started. The whole essay felt weak in both prose and subject matter, more of a life story that would be seen in the “About” section of the author’s organization’s website than an essay to be included in a book. The essay leaves a sour taste in the mouth of the reader as the final essay, serving as a hindrance to the memory of the book and how one will refer to it in the future.
In the Kitchen, while delightful and exciting in concept, disappoints in execution. A young reader may find it enlightening to read this book and learn of the ways in which food means a lot to a lot of different people in different ways, however for those of us who have made it past adolescence, it is underwhelming and obvious.
Yes, food nourishes the soul. Yes, food and the kitchen bring people together. Yes, cultural differences are highlighted in food and can be mended in some sort of ‘fusion’. Yes, food becomes a heritage, an intergenerational language. All of these notions could have been expressed in far less moralizing and parabolic ways; rather than saying these things one, as they read this book, wishes the authors would take them on the journey that the author went through to come to this conclusion. The point of essays of this sort, especially when grouped together in a book, is to join disparate stories and leave the reader to discover the connections and motifs, not to explain them in an instructive and uninspiring way.