To Kitchen: Making Cookery American

Introduction

If museums are palaces of memory my mother’s kitchen is a museum.

As very young children my brothers and I would play there, hauling out pots and pans from the built-in wood base cabinets on which to make noise. Behind every cabinet door were new treasures to be found, each a cabinet of curiosity, full of strange and colorful and variously-shaped boxes, bottles, canisters, and tins, from which my mother would spoon or pour into a bowl or pot and create, as if by magic, something wonderful to eat.

By the time my brothers and I entered primary school, we knew how to pull out the wood drawers — the bottom storing bags and boxes, the middle protecting breads, and the top sorting cutlery — to make a staircase to climb to the high hanging cabinets. We wore grooves into the drawers’ top edges to retrieve boxes of cereal and bowls for our Saturday breakfast in the living room. We watched hours of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck while eating way too much sugar for own good. As a Girl Scout, I earned my “Cooking” badge by making — all by myself — a meal of American-style spaghetti and meatballs, with much of the tomato sauce erupting like lava from the volcanic pot-crater and landing on the stovetop and wall tiles.[1]