Why the kitchen is heart of the home
When you think of your dream home – or perhaps even your more flawed, but tangible actual home – what do you consider to be the heart of it? When you were growing up, did your family congregate in the living room, or in the crumby, over-lit mess of the kitchen? And do you do the same? None of these questions are Hinge prompts, although they ought to be. There are, perhaps, two kinds of people in this world: living room people and kitchen people. Finding out who is who is, I believe, the crux to getting to know someone well, and quickly. How can you truly judge your compatibility with someone if you don’t know whether they see a kitchen as the heart of their home? I was recently relieved and delighted to find out my boyfriend is also a kitchen person.
In my fondest recollections of growing up, it was always the kitchen – my granny’s kitchen, in fact – that we congregated in, that hummed with life and energy and love. My earliest memories are sitting there, eating thick toast slathered in Kerrygold and trying to get involved, while around me the people I knew best in the world gossiped, laughed, played card games and smoked incessantly (It was the 90s!). If we ever decamped to the living room, this meant something very bad and wrong was happening. Possibly a funeral. It’s little wonder that as an adult I’ve attempted to recreate this, eating breakfast perching on shared counter space, constantly running the radio in the background while trying to entice stray cats through the back door.
That the shared kitchen has become a necessity is, if not a silver lining of the housing crisis exactly, then at least a serendipitous, pleasant quirk of private renting. Having left our family homes, we find ourselves moving into increasingly anonymous spaces, dividing our living spaces into smaller and smaller boxes (landlords would call these ‘rooms’, although sometimes I am not sure that they can be legally named as such). Sequestered into bedrooms, with living room politics too sensitive to breach – how to divide a Netflix account between six people, and ensure that they all avoid spoilers in unison? – we’ve found ourselves in the kitchen again. The only truly shared space for a generation resigned to eternal communal living, it’s in kitchens that we pre-drink and cook together, gossip over toast in the morning, squabble over who’s used whose KeepCup before rushing out to work – everything that I remember from my childhood except chain-smoking (it is no longer the 90s).
It’s an understatement to say millennials’ endless shared living is not perfect. There are times when it feels like a life sentence. There are other times when it feels like the platonic ideal of a commune, a WhatsApp group with your friends briefly brought to life. Our kitchens are hubs of family – chosen or blood – and community. It is why it’s so easy to put your hands on so many quotes about the space, from the literary to the saccharine. From your mum’s painfully unchic “in this kitchen we dance, sing, laugh…” corkboard, hanging next to a fridge overladen with kitsch magnets and family photos, to Alfred Hitchcock’s often-attributed kitchenalia quote: “Happiness is a small house, with a big kitchen.” Anthony Bourdain went so far as to designate the space its own language: “kitchenese”. I, for one, am fluent.
This article is taken from Port issue 36. To continue reading, buy the issue or subscribe head here
