kitchen stories: short-shorts on a theme

I don’t believe you just said that! You must be drunk. Or on your way there. How about a nice cuppa tea? No? I thought you liked tea . . . before we got married I remember your drinking strong black tea, but only with milk, no sugar. I must be mixing you up with someone else. Maybe your sister? Your mother? I distinctly remember sitting in this kitchen at this grey formica table and talking about things, you know, in a casual conversation and whomever I so remember told me how comforting a hot cuppa tea with milk could be. And I remember agreeing. Now wait a second there! Don’t you start making fun of me, my tea drinking. I’ve shared my memories of Dad giving me a nice cuppa tea in the morning when he took me out on the fishing boat collecting specimens for his research. I remember that like his warm palm on my shoulder. Well, okay, I’ll join you for a shot of Irish, but watch out, I don’t want either of us losing our balance and falling onto the floor. Oh no, there you go. You hold your liquor like I do; that is, not at all. Look, we’re both here on the floor. And there you go again, making more fun of me. Oh well, I’ll think of that as your loving me. Like I know you do. Here on the soft linoleum kitchen floor where we lie laughing together.
    - Alan Bern


It’s raining heavily. I’ve just poured a glass of white and I’m sorting the veg for a stir-fry when the announcement comes through that the Queen is dead. We turn the TV up and listen to the past tense. There’s a helicopter shot of people gathering in front of Buckingham palace. We discuss how she’s always been there; how we know more about her than many of our neighbours. We watch as the notice is posted on the palace gates. We leave the TV on and cook dinner.
    - Alan Peat


It wasn’t a kitchen but Madame cooked there. One day she led me down a flight of stairs into an open-air space beneath the house. The four walls were limestone with rounded openings making the space feel like a light-filled cathedral cloister. In the center was a large stone table; on one corner stood a metal trivet with circular bars at the top and beside it a pile of twigs. “These,” Madame said, “are vine twigs.” And she put a few under the trivet, lit them, and as they began to smoke — a sweet/bitter scent — she added more, then took out of her bag a sharp knife, a plate, and a long piece of spicy sausage.  She sliced the sausage into thin rings and put them, a few at a time, on top of the trivet. As they sizzled, she turned them over then slid them onto the plate. “There is nothing, nothing, like sausage cooked over vine twigs. Monsieur loves them.” When the sausage was all cooked, Madame swept the still-glowing embers into a hole in the table. “When we have enough ashes we spread them around the vines,” she said. “Now, come, we get these to the lunch table while they are still hot.”
    - Antonia Matthew


During a visit to the big box store, my husband and I spotted a display of kitchen mixers, professional grade, in bright red enamel. Paul had a knack for cooking intuitively; when he shook a pan with his firm hand, the contents flew up a foot into the air and landed exactly as intended. We unpacked the red object of desire and set it up on the kitchen counter. Over the next months, he didn’t get around to reading the instructions or switching it on. I attributed his seeming lack of interest to the distractions of our busy life and was not especially concerned. Then, he showed increasing signs of difficulty in handling routine tasks, like using the coffeemaker, a sign of his fast-moving dementia. I watched him like a hawk and assisted him in basic “activities of daily living.” Learning something new — how to operate the mixer with its various parts and settings — was no longer possible. We left it in place, too overwhelmed to move it. When Paul died, I decided to return it, unused and re-boxed. After this sad errand, I sat motionless in the car, empty-handed and brokenhearted. Sometimes, when I go into the kitchen for a late night snack, I remember the red mixer that occupied the corner shadows, then disappeared, along with the life and love I cherished.
    - Barrie Levine


Anne, my older sister by 18 months, acted as though the difference in our ages was more like 18 years. She felt she was so much more mature than I was and she hated it when Mom insisted we do anything together. One night Mom wanted us both to clean up the dishes and right away Anne declared she would wash but she would not dry. That was okay with me. I was just happy to be part of the project, which seemed more like a game than a chore. I was too short to reach the sink so I pulled a chair over and climbed up, with a drying towel in my hand. Anne was determined to get the whole job done in a hurry so she could go off and do something more fun. She plunged the dirty dishes into a tub of soapy water, rinsed them quickly under a thin stream of hot water, and roughly passed each dish into my tiny hands, one after another. The plates were still greasy and they slipped away from me, crashing to the floor. Of course we should have stopped immediately, but we just kept on going like that. Mom heard the commotion and came rushing back into the kitchen, ordering us to quit our shenanigans. Anne happily ran off while I looked at the broken plates in horror. Mom knew that our “system” had been devised by my sister so she was not angry with me. She just lifted me off the chair, gave me a hug, and told me to go get the broom out of the pantry.
    - Blue Waters


In the early morning hours, my nana’s kitchen at the Cape house smelled of perking coffee and bacon bubbling on the griddle, while cornbread turned golden brown in the oven. My nostrils can recall the smells even now as I write this. A small, eastern-facing window offered glimpses of the Atlantic in all its glory. Rust-colored knotty pine paneling covered the walls, and the linoleum flooring featured rust and ochre bricks laid at angles. A working water pump sat on the counter to the left of the great farmhouse sink. High above, red-and-white gingham valences softened the light streaming in from the two twelve-paned windows overlooking the shell drive. There was a working fireplace. In the middle of the room, a round pine tilt-top table easily seated six of us at mealtimes. Nana was a stickler about eating well. She had us put our milk glasses out of reach on the lazy Susan in the table’s center. Her theory? If we drank the milk first, we would not clean our plates. As youngsters we earned shimmery stars when we did eat well. My sister hated green beans and would hide the long stringy vegetables under the braided seat mat. How did no one ever notice? Her actions emboldened me. Once, I threw my zucchini down the garbage disposal but got caught in the act. Guess who had cold zucchini for breakfast the next morning?!
    - Deborah Burke Henderson


Recently something terrible happened to me, related to the kitchen. On Tuesdays I regularly go to tennis, but that day my partner had a problem, so I went with my son. Before that, I set out to cook something for the family, something that wouldn't take me too much time — namely chicken livers with mixed vegetables that I had on hand: carrots, zucchini, corn, garlic. It would have been okay to prepare some rice as well, but I had no time and no one to help me, so I gave up. After the livers were ready, I started with the vegetables. Finally, I put everything in the pan to combine the flavors and added the garlic, cooking at low heat. After that, I went to play tennis for about two hours. At one point, my wife asked me if I turned off the stove. I was perplexed and said I don't know. Arriving home, we found the house shrouded in smoke and the food turned to ashes. The good thing was I had left the window wide open, otherwise who knows what would have happened. Maybe the chickens cursed me for my cruelty? Anyway, this madness has left a bad taste in my mouth, and of course I remember that “haste is the devil's work.”
    - Florin C. Ciobica


Gram’s kitchen: she, gray haired, an apron tied tightly around her waist; me, age 7, standing atop a step-stool to reach the counter. My earliest culinary lessons: the importance of soaking beans overnight, ways to keep molasses cookies soft, and the key ingredient for a flavorful raisin sauce (a splash of brandy). Cooking with Gram always included a bit of family history and a full helping of her kitchen wisdom. “I’ve had plenty of time to think about life while waiting for the water to boil,” she’d chuckle. Standing at her side, she told me stories of love and resilience: the tragic loss of her mother to the 1918 pandemic; the excitement of her first job at a seaside inn hundreds of miles from home; the hotel guest she met that summer who, unknown to either of them until that moment, lived in the same faraway hometown; her delight in marrying this summer visitor three months later. She ended these tales with advice for living optimistically: “No matter what goes wrong in life, never give up,” she’d say. “Sometimes the pie dough simply won’t come together. Don’t be afraid to toss it out and start again. Besides, who will know?”
    - Jim Mazza


I am not allowed in the kitchen when he is cooking. If I so much as place a toe over the threshold, he will wave me off in agitation. Cooking is a reverent experience for him, a meditation of chopping onions and carrots, a blessing of oils poured over linguine or fettuccine. I wait impatiently in the living room, catching the occasional whiff of garlic or hearing the sizzle of butter in a saucepan. I think of his signature dishes — pasta primavera, pepper-lime chicken, homemade fettuccine alfredo, caprese salad with basil picked fresh from a little plant on the counter — and marvel at how far he has come in fifteen years. When my son was two, we stopped on a whim at a garage sale and bought him a play kitchen. It has paid dividends ever since.
    - Julie Bloss Kelsey


we renovated the kitchen along with the rest of the condo took out all the cupboards and doors added skylights opened things up some might think we were not practical but we had other ideas the shelves built to the ceiling held books and big empty nut jars we are still filling these 22 years as our museum of broken things adding pieces every day and since then three small beautiful silver blue urns of my mother's ashes not all the family can bear them and the thin flat cardboard box for a favorite artwork by a friend labeled residue of a star exploded oh yes and one small pantry but most is open shelved and the walls covered with the artwork of a beloved departed friend our kitchen is full of life and painted three shades of yellow with pink champagne granite counters we took out walls and put in skylights and on the top shelf a big special cookie tin keeps hope where we can always find it
    - Kath Abela Wilson


 Kitchen and linoleum. The words go together comfortably from many years of use. “New kitchen linoleum,” is a step further, off of the worn and curled linoleum in the little square kitchen of the little square house my family lived in. The little square house, itself, had been living elsewhere until Dad sawed it in half, put it on a flatbed trailer, and repositioned it on the wooded piece of land he’d bought from his dad for a dollar. Four rooms, neat and square. But our growing family was being squeezed in the little square house, so Dad built a new room — a big kitchen — along the side, making it the size of two of the square rooms! It had a window over the sink that looked out on Dean Heil’s cornfield. It had another window that looked down the long driveway at Grandpap and Gramma Caldwell's tall and narrow house. And it had new linoleum! Big squares of gray and red that made for a perfect game of indoor hopscotch. So on rainy days, my little brother Michael and I would hop from square to square. He was only three, though, and not great at hopping yet, so I would pull him along as I hopped. And he never complained about me yanking on his little arm. And our mother, peeling potatoes or washing dishes, never complained, either, as we jolted around the kitchen, laughing.
    - Kathleen Kramer


Oatmeal. Every morning in the blue pot. Because I only use the blue pot for oatmeal. So I don’t have to think. No decision to make. The only question is which spoon will I use to stir the oatmeal? Maybe the little turquoise silicone spoon. Or maybe the little purple silicone spoon. Those are my choices. But once I hear the oatmeal is overflowing then I no longer have a choice. I reach for whichever spoon is closest to me and that’s that. Done.
    - Laura Joy


Sometime in the years before kindergarten, I remember horsing a chair over to where my mother stood at the kitchen sink, which looked out on the road beyond. “How does it feel to be this tall all the time?” I asked. She couldn’t answer. She had had years to get used to it. She did try to teach me other things about how to stay alive once I was on my own, but she always had to drag me out of a book. So these are not skills I learned very well. I have probably never not scorched grilled-cheese sandwiches. Also, I get distracted, and pots boil over. Even now, I am writing this when I should be rescuing the kitchen from a son’s well-meaning definition of keeping up with dishes. My son is taller than I am, and even when I was done growing, my mother, too, was taller than me. But people shrink. Now she’s 93 and I have several inches on her. Sadly, she also developed dementia. Yet if she hadn’t, there is no question she could still put me to shame in the kitchen, these days while I keep one eye on a different road beyond.
    - Laurinda Lind


Kitchens. A single word that conjures a torrent of memories. Kitchens full of life — of sounds, tastes, scents and hours of work. Different kitchens, different cooks, different places all rush through my mind. There is cheese-biscuit dough wrapped in waxed paper. Seven-layer caramel cake in the freezer. A butler’s pantry. The screened porches. The tin of bacon grease on the back of the stove. The schlup-schlop of the butter churn, the wood stove still in the corner, canning jars and rolling pins. Grease popping as chicken fries in the ever-present cast-iron skillet. Real buttermilk and sweet milk straight from the cow. Mama’s radio playing “old-people’s” music. Serrated grapefruit spoons — and the list goes on. But in every real kitchen until my current one the push-pull, slip-slap, flip-flop of kneading dough. Sticky at first, sprinkle more flour, working by feel and sound. Thoughts wandering far from the automatic activity of your hands until suddenly you knew it was right. That your hands, without conscious thought, could form this ball that would, in a few hours, fill the kitchen with the smell of baking bread. I can taste it now.
    Margaret Walker

 
In South Carolina winters, our small den was the only heated room in the house except at meal time. My father had been raised on a farm and believed a big country breakfast was essential before we set out for our day. He rose well before dawn, cooked grits from scratch, fried eggs to runny perfection, baked toast in the oven, and topped it all off with a slice from the sugar-cured ham that hung in the barn part of our garage, protected by a layer of lard. A small pot-bellied stove fueled by coal and kindling was fired up while he cooked. Mother and I, dressed for school (she was a teacher), with blankets slung around our shoulders, rushed down the cold hall to eat our feast. Lunch was at school and only a tiny meal was laid out for supper so the pot-belly did most of the heating then. A haze of steam coated the windows during those special times. I felt like I was in a cocoon, safe and loved. It never occurred to me then that those days would end.
    - Pris Campbell


When spices exceed spice rack capacity, apparently they advance to a random space in a kitchen cupboard next to soup bowls. This is what I learned when it was time for me to clean out my parents’ house in northern Illinois. Sorting through their spices was a definite priority. How many unopened celery salts do two not-so-spicy seniors need? Ditto rosemary. One shelf up — vintage diced pimento. Some of the 14 cans were bulging with age, ready to pop. Four years expired and then some. All things considered, the spices were much newer. Most were only a couple of years out of date. Someone had taken considerable effort to assemble like spices together with rubber bands. My parents seemed to have thought of everything they might wish to shake on their food, but not a dash of pepper was to be found.
    - Roberta Beach Jacobson


I remember how my maternal grandmother got up early each morning when we'd visit her home in west Texas. She no longer lived on the farm, but after she moved to town she still kept the habit of rising before the sun came up. I recall being gently awakened around 6:30 a.m. by the aroma of brewing coffee. I heard her quietly and efficiently preparing a big country breakfast that would load down the table once everyone was up, washed, and gathered in the dining room: pitchers of fresh-squeezed orange juice, a stack of flapjacks, biscuits, piles of golden toast, pots of jam, preserves, and real butter — and, of course, an urn of steaming coffee. When we were comfortably seated, she took orders for whatever style of bacon and eggs we wanted. She was a tiny woman — under five-foot-two by then — but she could stand at the stove for what seemed like hours. Later, for dinner, she’d bring out her signature crispy southern fried chicken, creamed corn, and mashed potatoes, which we topped off with fruit pies made with peaches, blueberries, and rhubarb that my aunt had canned on her nearby farm. Certainly there was lots of love in every bite!
    - Theresa A. Cancro


The kitchen in the farm house where I grew up was my mother’s domain. Grandma Wright, her mother-in-law, had insisted on a new big picture window over the sink when there was finally enough money after World War II. She earned money as a school teacher in a one-room schoolhouse and may have leveraged that when Grandpa wanted to expand the chicken coop. It was surely a dark kitchen until that beautiful window brightened things up. To the west, my mom, Carol, looked out across the fields and woods while she washed dishes, bathed babies in the sink, and chopped vegetables on the counter there. Oh, the sunsets! When she and my stepfather sold the farm and moved nearby, Mom looked out that window wistfully — it was what she would miss most.
    - Tina Wright


Each day begins in the kitchen . . . . boiling water for my two cups of green tea and getting my bowl for shredded wheat with banana and blueberries ready for breakfast. The entire day involves repeat visits to the kitchen for grazing, snacks, lunch, and dinner. On our kitchen counter we have a line of jars that contain items for browsing opportunities for any time of day, and such items seem just right! There are jars with walnuts, almonds, pistachios, peanuts, Triscuits, Saltines, Berta's homemade chocolate chip cookies, graham crackers, ginger snaps,  sunflower and pumpkin seeds. There is a plastic container with a selection of dark chocolate where at least a small square a day is available and, on a shelf above, are Greenstar Organic Chocolate Paradise Chunks of Energy for those moments when a perk to jump-start a shift in mood is needed. On another section of the counter are a couple bowls with apples, oranges, peaches or whatever is in season to help balance the options. Lunch is often a sandwich, soup, and a few kalamata olives. Dinner varies from a major production by Berta to just eating leftovers or something simple. I am the in-house dishwasher and enjoy listening to music on my phone while doing clean-up. It is at our kitchen window that I keep watch on our bird feeders and all the wonderful wildlife that visits and migrates through our back yard & backlot, which is a part of their expansive kitchen. The sightings include deer, squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, woodchucks and, less often, skunks, raccoons, and coyotes. The nourishment from the kitchen is sustaining in so many ways and I feel the call to visit off and on, all day, every day!
    - Tom Clausen


Last year I had a kitchen ghost. First I thought it was my imagination but after a while I knew for sure that something funny was going on. At night, before going to bed, I’d lay out all my vitamins and meds for the next day, carefully sorting them into three small dishes for morning, afternoon, and evening consumption. But when I woke up and went into the kitchen those little dishes were moved around on the counter, not even near where I had placed them. And things were missing. Sometimes a tiny golden vitamin D capsule would be gone; other times it would be one of the large white vitamin C tablets. I thought I was losing my mind. Then I decided I was not losing my mind and I just accepted the fact that I was living with a kitchen ghost. But then I decided that if I believed I was living with a kitchen ghost then maybe I really was losing my mind. This whole thing, back and forth with the re-arranged dishes and the missing pills and the wondering/worrying about my mind lasted for quite a few days, maybe a week, maybe more. One morning I noticed little nibbles breaking through the skin of an apple and a chunk was missing from an avocado. “Okay Zee” (when I talk to myself, out loud, I often say my name, so I know that I’m being serious) “you’ve got to do something about this.” I live in a building that employs the most excellent super. He came right up to the apartment with a small cage. Bye-bye kitchen ghost.
    - Zee Zahava