from the fridge to the frying pan: Everything AND the Kitchen Sink, In Praise of Kitchen Maximalism
When it comes to the kitchen, I’m a maximalist. Not in the décor, not in the sense of making the kitchen a jungle of pothos, tapestries, and framed art, but in the sense that I can’t say no to an ingredient. It takes some real thought to dissuade myself from purchasing tools. When I think of “necessity,” of “essential” in the kitchen, I think of everything. Sure, I can live without a lot of things, but I wouldn’t be happy. No matter what happened in my childhood financially, the constant was that our kitchen had things to make. Even when we were scrounging as my parents worked full-time and my mom also attended college at night, our pantry and cupboards were stocked.
I’ve taken that ideology with me to my adulthood. My friends come over and make fun of how half my kitchen island has become storage for clusters of random ingredients: Korean rice syrup, naengmyeon, four different kinds of flour, a butane kitchen torch, a bowl of various alliums, a chunk of ginger, cans of coconut milk. Between my sink and my stove is a row of vinegars and oils, a bottle of fish sauce, my salt hog, knives, my instant pot, a drying pad for dishes. In a slim cabinet, I keep my extra sheet pans and cooling racks, the plastic cutting board I use when my wooden one is dirty, extra dish towels. Up above are cabinets with more spices and herbs than the average American, I’m sure (I almost always make my curries from scratch). I’ve got a small tinned fish collection, some boxes of various masalas, leavening agents, extra salt, yeast. My pantry is practically a warehouse of ingredients at this point: canned tomatoes and beans, shelf stable boxes of tofu, all kinds of noodles and lentils, flours, dry milk, an extra kewpie mayo, condensed milk, Chinese sausage, various seaweeds, nuts, sugar, and more I can hardly think of without going home to check. I’ve stashed roasted vacuum-sealed chestnuts in the freezer, sliced galangal, candlenuts, kaffir lime leaves, fried tofu puffs, a veritable avalanche of dumplings. The fridge has too many pickled or fermented items to count. The door is crammed full of sauces and condiments from around the world. There’s hardly a sauce I didn’t like. The whole place is packed.
The thing is, even the little things I hardly use (like candlenuts — just once for Singaporean Laksa), feel essential to me. Maybe I’m a bit of a hoarder, but I think it’s more accurate to say I embrace everything. Knowing I have so many spices isn’t a burden — it’s the freedom of flexibility. I can make whatever I want. I can do almost everything in my kitchen if I so desired. I know I’m a little different that way; most people don’t experiment the same way I do at home. But that’s how I grew up.
Like so many people, my food origin is my mother. One of our favorite family stories to tell is how my mom started cooking so long ago. My grandmother was a career politician who cooked because she felt compelled to, not because she wanted to. My mom was different. By the age of five, she was already going downstairs, turning on the stove and making a full breakfast in bed for my grandmother. That was the kind of dedication to food I grew up with. It wasn’t like either of us were some kind of MasterChef Junior prodigies, but we still were lightyears ahead of our peers. In high school, I was making birthday cakes for people that resembled ones from a professional bakery. One was three tiers, covered in white fondant. Around the same time, a woman opened up the first Asian grocery store in our town, and I instantly became a regular.
My mom encouraged all of this. She was just adventurous as I was, but I had something she didn’t: the internet. While my mom had to bike to the library to read copies of Bon Appetit or Gourmet Magazine, I went to Google. Anything I saw on The Food Network (especially Chopped) became a new internet search. I trawled Wikipedia for hours, reading everything on culinary and botanical distinctions of fruits. I asked for Larousse Gastronomique for Christmas and read it like it was the latest YA novel. When I went off to college, we packed a huge rolling toolbox from Home Depot with kitchen equipment. I called the dorms to make sure it was ok to bring my knife set (it was).
All of this came with her blessing. She was right there with me as we experienced fish sauce for the first time when I learned how to make Thai green curry. By the time I was in high school, I was making a lot of our family dinners, with almost no rules. My Instagram has become nothing but food and the occasional selfie. My friends know that if they text me questions about cooking I will most likely have the answer. If they want to eat some obscure dish, I can always make it for them. If they don’t know how to cook at all, I can teach them (and have). My attitude that everything is up for grabs was fed by my mom’s willingness to say YES in the kitchen. To me, it’s easy to justify ingredients or equipment (not the deservedly scorned kitchen unitasker, though) because of my desire to experience everything the culinary world has to offer. Of course I need a torch! Or a vacuum-sealer! Or some unfamiliar spice ordered online! If I didn’t have it, I couldn’t make whatever it is that caught my attention, and to me, that’s the real tragedy. The unfulfilled desire of food is one I abhor.
I realize this idea of maximalism in the kitchen flies in the face of “necessity,” but, to me, cooking is irreducible to a few select ingredients. I understand pantry staples — I’d feel weird without cooking fats, flour, and rice — but pantry staples hardly define a person. What someone considers essential beyond the basics is perhaps the most interesting metric of a culinary person. My answer, though, is still everything.
I get asked all the time, “What’s your favorite food?” or “What’s your favorite thing to cook?” or “What kind of food do you make?” I hate those questions. I might have a favorite soup or a favorite cake, but how am I supposed to compare soup to cake? It’s a fools errand to narrow down my loves to one. I love to cook everything. I make any cuisine which catches my fancy. My answers are all-encompassing precisely because I can’t say no to anything in the kitchen. I’ll fully admit that I’m a happy little glutton. I know that I can say yes to all of these things because I was taught how to cook, because I have the necessary skills and knowledge to understand a recipe at first glance. I know how food works together because I’ve read so many things, made so many others, learned the science that underlies it all. There’s a certain amount of privilege that goes along with that, and I’m not going to ignore it. But in the end, it’s still liberating.
What is essential in the kitchen? Saying yes.
