A Kitchen is a Kingdom

sovereign supremacy

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From Karyl’s Cook & Tell Newsletter (March 1986)

If I am never to find out who said, “a kitchen is a kingdom,” I’m going to have to claim it for myself. I had thought it might be one of the aphorisms of Brillat-Savarin, eighteenth-century politician-author-gourmet (hyphenate your name and I’ll hyphenate your credentials), but I couldn’t find it in there—too short, maybe; too cute in its lilting alliteration. My other hunch was my late mother-in-law (note hyphens), another brilliant savant of the galley and an author of some note, herself. She felt that way about kitchens.

It’s how I feel too, although it was not always thus. My own mother, caretaker of dark secrets, likes to remind me that all through my growing-up days, I was a kitchen illiterate. Like all the kids, I knew where to find the things I needed—a box of cereal, the milk, the mayonnaise—and I knew what to do with a knife and fork. But as far as I was concerned, measuring and mixing were what mothers did. Home ec classes scared me to death. The junior high laboratory kitchen was the one place at school where I felt completely unsure of myself, where no amount of skill at diagraming sentences could ever bail me out.

Mummy despaired of my ever learning even basic minimum survival cooking. On the eve of my wedding, she did manage to handcuff me to the kitchen stove long enough to administer a crash course in baked beans. And I’ll always be grateful for the extra handful of rice she threw my way, as my bridegroom and I made our getaway after the reception. But those heroic efforts on my behalf had nothing to do with turning this kitchen caterpillar into the butterfly I seem to have become. No one can take credit or blame for the changes in someone else. Pygmalion was fiction. Like salvation, you have to do the big makeovers yourself.

The change in me was as evolutionary as it was sudden, a spontaneous adjustment to radically changed circumstances. It happened almost the minute I, the bride, walked into my first kitchen and asked myself the big question: “Now what?”

The promise of omnipotence is what that first kitchen of my own offered in reply. I didn’t have to be a Betty Crocker to know important things happen in kitchens, that to be sovereign of a kitchen is to have supremacy over a major source of domestic noise, heat, and action. Things get hot in kitchens. Things freeze, they hum, pop open, drip, whir, ring, light up. Sometimes things burn, flop, overflow, explode, smell awful. Standing there in that first kitchen for the first time, it didn’t matter (nor did I realize) that the apartment-size oven wouldn’t heat above 250 degrees or that the refrigerator my new husband had picked up for $15 at the Salvation Army didn’t work. This place was the seat of power. I wanted it all.

Control of a kitchen, I learned, generated more confidence than diagraming the most complicated sentence. With the kitchen came tools, utensils, pans, appliances. I had counters, cabinets, drawers, and shelves to arrange and rearrange however I wanted, and nobody could object. I could make any amount of noise, and nobody would mind. It’s the one place in the house where I could drive a nail or screw in a cup hook without fear of ruining the place.

But a kitchen is more than power and hardware and architecture. It’s where the dinner guests and drop-in neighbors always want to be, even if it’s so small they have to stand in the doorways—because friendly, fragrant things take place there. It’s a window near the sink from which to see apple trees and deer tracks, an old mantelpiece over the stove to hold a pig collection and an oil lamp, a shelf above the doorway crammed with cookbooks…because in spite of myself and my mother, and thanks largely to the appeal of a kitchen kingdom’s comforts, I turned out to be a pretty good cook.

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sketch by my mom, Karyl Bannister

Amie’s Headnotes

Earlier this year, I mentioned the forthcoming excerpt I’d sold from the book I’m writing. I was hoping it would be published by now and I’d have a link to share with you. I don’t. I also don’t know why it’s stalled. Such is the writing life!

The excerpt, A Kitchen is a Kingdom, Volume 2, is named after an article I discovered in a 1959 issue of Gourmet magazine in my attic three summers ago. My grandmother, the mother-in-law my mother mentioned above, wrote that article. I read the article and thought, hmmm…What if I wrote a book about the three generations of food-writers in my family?

Three generations of female food-writers sharing words, recipes and the belief that a kitchen, like Disney’s Magic Kingdom, can indeed be the happiest place on earth.

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BROCCOLI QUICHE IN A RICE CRUST

Makes 6-8 servings

• 4 eggs

• 2 c. cooked rice

• 2/3 c. finely grated Swiss cheese

• Garlic powder to taste

• 1 10-oz. pkg frozen chopped broccoli (or spinach), cooked and drained

• 2 T. butter

• ½ t. salt

• 1 c. cottage cheese

• ¼ c. grated Parmesan cheese

• 6 T. half-and-half

• Dash of Tabasco sauce

• Sprinkle of garlic powder

Beat 1 egg; add rice and Swiss cheese. Mix well; add garlic powder to taste. Spread evenly in a 9’ pie dish to form a crust on the bottom and sides. Refrigerate till ready to fill and bake.

Add butter to the well-drained cooked broccoli (or spinach) and set aside. In a medium bowl, beat the 3 remaining eggs. Stir in salt, cottage cheese, Parmesan, cream, Tabasco and dash of garlic powder. Stir in broccoli and pour all into the rice crust.

Bake in preheated 350◦ F oven for about 35 minutes or until firm and a knife stuck in the middle comes out clean.

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my own personal Magic Kingdom

Amie’s Endnotes

I considered sharing a more, ah, pristine snapshot of the little kitchen where I first learned to cook with my mom and still continue to. If you know me, though, I’m as far from a pro-photographer as I am head chef of anywhere other than my own kitchen. Staging the perfect picture has never been my jam.

Your Voices of the Casual Kitchen,

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