Excerpt from chapter 1 “In or Out” from my forthcoming book, Kitchen Complex.
We stood side-by-side at the stove, each with one of the crêpe pans and my whimsical first attempt at dough. Since we had only buckwheat flour, I had avoided traipsing into his territory of etherial –and laborious– white crêpes.
This is a food that has always been a wondrous mystery to me. It has my favorite elements of texture: chewy with a little tease of crunchiness, delivering comfort carbs with airy delicacy.
I don’t think I ever knew if they were difficult to make, or tried to find out. They were too magical to make. They could only be procured under special circumstances, at the Japanese place near LAX, or in the attic after midnight at the festival in Toulouse, or when my French boyfriend offers to conjure them for me. On those delirious occasions I perch amidst the marmalades, sirops, and sugars at the kitchen island, a good two meters away from my chef, plying the interminable wait with Crémant (that’s any French méthode champenoise wine made outside of the Champagne region).
Watching him didn’t demystify anything. There seemed to be a great deal of sieving and bemoaning the taste of the water, the texture of the flour, the size of the eggs, the layout of the stove, and, most assiduously, the surface of the pan. These spells assuredly transformed the pasty liquid into edible lace.
The French call buckwheat “black” flour and its crêpes are used only for savory preparations. The insinuation that black crêpes are crude and unfit for the ethereal realm of dessert suggested that they might beget from my meagre mechanical efforts. I was further encouraged when I learned that the recipe called for beer. Our local brasserie, La Binette, makes a transubstantiating “Citra-Mosaïc”, which would surely serve as incantation.
So there we were, crêpe-wands in hand, me with butter and he with canola. I watched him adroitly flip the well-browned first side, load and fold the lentils and black olives. I arranged slices of Cantal (that’s French for cheddar), gingerly folded and then nervously prodded to assess the melting of the cheese, while peeking at the underside for excess brown.
I had already pulled two of our largest, flattest plates and there I delivered my first crêpe.
“What’s your plan?” He asked.
I tore off a corner of the crêpe and ate it, moaning.
“Where do we eat?”
I tore off another deliriously perfect morsel and chewed it, looking at him in with extravagant pleasure. Then I took a sip of beer. I could not possibly have been happier.
He was frustrated. “Tell me your plan.”
I had to say something, but I felt embarrassed. “I don’t have a plan.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want to eat the crêpes … while they’re hot.” The last word timid and delicate. I had never had the impudence to ask why we ate the crêpes cold. By the time he cooked all the batter, they would be cold. Delicious, but cold.
“Where?”
“Here?”
He reached for one of the thick and beautifully double-folded crêpes on his plate and ate it in silence.
I concentrated on not prematurely flipping.
He took a bite of his second one.
I flailed. “For me, food is very sensuous. It can be spontaneous. I don’t always have a plan. Like I don’t have a plan when I touch you.”
“That’s different.”
“For me, it’s not.”
I took another sip of fragrant meadow. “Do you remember the high metal kitchen table in my storage unit?”
“Yes.”
“Well that should be – here.” I drew it in the air just behind us, 80cm from the edge of the stove. “So we can cook and eat at the same time.
“Uh-huh,” said the Frenchman, who always has three plates at lunch. One just for the eggs. Fork, knife, and spoon.
“Sometimes… I like to eat in the kitchen.”
“Mm-hmm,” he said, chewing, as he moved behind me, headed –I presumed– for the fridge.
He returned with one of the barstools and parked it dispassionately at the stove. Sat down and picked up the rest of the crêpe.
I couldn’t tell if he was making himself comfortable in the midst of insanity or experimenting with my world. This is a category of question that I deposit in a box labelled “When Our Language Skills Improve”.
Cuisine
The crêpe episode is a paragon of the kitchen complex. A couple makes dinner and we are confronted by right and wrong, control and convention, anger and pleasure, sensuality and furniture.
I was not surprised. Somehow between 2019 and 2022 I lived in 13 houses in 7 countries. Somewhere between 10 and 11 I exclaimed to a friend “I really need to stop hanging out in other people’s kitchens and get back to work.”
Wendy is prone to glorious dry insights. “Maybe hanging out in other people’s kitchens is the work.”
Indeed “hanging out” gives rather the wrong impression. This was no world tour of teacups and biscuits, dreamy chatter over art magazines. In fact, more than half of the experiences were dramatic.
I discovered that the kitchen is a place where people lose their tempers in an instant. Somehow, in this room we forget entirely about diversity and subjectivity. We become brittle and vulnerable over exceedingly mundane things. We are suddenly inept at negotiating difference. And uncharacteristically controlling.
In French, the word for prepared food, ‘cuisine’, is the same as the word for the room where that is done. Which goes to the heart of the matter. We tend to presume that the kitchen is a rationalized, functional, and straightforward place.
In contrast, we know the bedroom is complicated. We realize the bathroom is very personal. The dining room is the venue for intercultural dialogue. We don’t really know what the living room is for, so we have ceded it to the television. But the kitchen serves just one clear and present danger. There we mobilize our best technology and loyal diligence to efficiently subdue the lurking menace of hunger.
Except… The kitchen is also… a place of both solitude and sociality, labor and pleasure, fragility and intimacy. It’s the place where mother’s ghost lingers in imperatives and gestures and recipes. It’s a place where we continue to experiment and learn long after most of our life practices have hardened. It’s a place of grounding rituals of care and of contemplation over busy hands. It’s full of ecstasy, guilt, machines, lists, planning, rubberbands, and dirty sponges. Everything is rotting at different paces, and we try not to break the last of grandmother’s plates.
This book is about designing and redesigning our kitchens with attention to all of this. As a sociologist, I learned to observe before I theorize. As an entrepreneur, I seek agency in every aspect of every situation. As an artist, I know the greatest pleasure and satisfaction exude from manifesting my insights.
Everyday design is a space of creativity available to everyone. Good design is about learning to optimize the interactions between space, action, objects, and delight. My own observations described in this book serve as models for learning to observe what you may for now take for granted. Design also requires analyzing crashes, arguments, and experiments. This is a psychic as well as physical remodeling project. It proposes that we consider the kitchen as both crucible and pleasure-boat.
