#74: Other people's kitchens
On my culinary calvary through Brussels this summer, or the importance of a good kitchen for your sanity
I’m writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my weekly free-to-subscribe newsletter about life in Brussels. If you like it and you’re not already subscribed, you can sign up here! This week, we’re talking cooking and sanity.
In the Gare Maritime building at Tour & taxis there’s a shop front with aspirational messages stuck on its windows, alongside shiny box fresh kitchen appliances. The messages say things like “more space, less waste”, “smart connectivity for an easier life”, and “Cook health #LikeABosch”. The place looks like a shop but it isn’t one - the doors are locked and you’re not allowed in without first having made an appointment on their website. It’s actually an experience centre for Bosch, Siemens, and Gaggenau - each brand delineated in the window display and the shop by different surfaces and design aesthetics. Siemens, the cheapest of the three, is all white PVC doors and practical kitchen implements. Bosch is a step up, sleek chrome, wooden slats, and dark kitchen cabinets. And Gaggenau is, by all accounts, extremely stylish (I had never heard of the brand before) if the marble countertops and midcentury teak dining chairs of the display kitchen are anything to go by.
When I’m in Gare Maritime, taking the kids to the comic shop on the other side of the complex, or stopping in for a drink at the airport terminal-style corporate food court, I gravitate to the window display and ogle the well organised fridge units and the multicoloured display of enamel hand mixers. Sometimes I stand there and I feel like Eric Bana’s character in the film Munich, several scenes of which feature Eric’s off-book Mossad agent standing on a Parisian street corner looking longingly at a department store display of upmarket homewares and an aspirational vision of domestic bliss beyond his tortured reach. I’m reminded too of the couple in Maeve Brennan’s short essay “They were about forty” who the writer spies from across a New York street as they stand and stare at a chocolate brown and ombré yellow Hotpoint kitchen display.
My reach is not so tortured, and unlike poor Eric or Brennan’s stalked couple, I was finally able to cross the threshold this summer and actually see what the place was like from the inside. Because in February we launched into a nine month-long renovation of our tired, century-old Brussels rijhuis. The centrepiece of the works, the most important intervention, and the room which would absorb a sizable chunk of the budget, would be a new kitchen, built from the ground up and designed by us, for us. It was a big responsibility, one which had me most evenings hunched over my computer with 40-odd Chrome tabs opened from Good Housekeeping, House and Garden, and BBC Good -agonising over what kind of floor we’d have, would the counters be composite or inox, open shelves or closed, L-shaped or galley, island or no island. Induction or gas.
I enjoyed the research, especially when it was still in the abstract phase and multiple different versions of the kitchen could exist at the same time in my head, without having to make a decision. But as the demolition works got underway, I started having to make decisions, and the superposition of different kitchens had to be collapsed into an agreed design and populated with appliances we could actually afford. I did not like this. But what I liked even less was having to move out and into someone else’s kitchen for the duration of the works. This surprised me, because I hated our old kitchen, which was the primary impulse of the renovation in the first place.
I hated our old kitchen. I mean, I loathed it. It was dark and heavy, damp in the winter and sweltering in the summer. The roof leaked when it rained hard and the spotlights worked infrequently. The work surfaces were at weird heights, there was never enough shelf space, and the room itself was unergonomic. The oven was too small, and sometimes made odd sparking noises. Worst of all, even after nine years occupying it, the room still just didn’t feel like ours.
Maybe some of my hatred came from home intimately I knew every inch of it. In those nine years we’d stocked it, emptied it, refilled, it and rearranged it multiple times as the kids got older and our eating habits evolved. I knew where everything was and how everything fitted into where it had been put. I knew which lights worked and which didn’t, why one drawer didn’t close all the way, and why not to worry about it (a lost tupperware lid). I had my favourite hob - the big one on the bottom left of - and how to get it working if the gas stopped catching on the spark. I knew how to get the best out of that shitty little oven, and how to push it to its limits to make passable pizzas.
It wasn’t even the worst kitchen we’ve had in 15 years of living in Brussels; that prize probably goes to our first one, a narrow little galley kitchen in our garret studio in Schaarbeek, where we overcooked a meagre little duck for our first Christmas dinner in the city. And it was, I found out, a damn sight better than the kitchens I was forced to occupy on our itinerant Brussels summer living in other people’s houses.
The kitchen of the one-bedroom apartment we’d moved into for the duration of the works was more like someone’s idea of what a kitchen might look like, rather than any kind of practical design. It was made of inox, open and airy but the drawers were too long and too deep, the oven - while powerful - leaked more heat than it retained and made an awful whirring racket whenever it was on. And the gas hobs, the gas hobs were just ridiculously overpowered. But after a month or two we did manage to wrestle it into some sort of shape, finding room for the magimix, the blue plastic chopping boards, and the yellow receptacle for hair ties, keys, and loose panini football stickers. We’d established a tenuous equilibrium.
But over the course of the summer that equilibrium was sundered as, seeking an escape from five months of cabin fever, we upped sticks again and went house sitting for various friends who’d escaped Brussels on their holidays. Now, in case any of them are reading this, I just want to say that their kitchens were perfectly serviceable. I’m sure they worked for their owners, but they just didn’t work for me. I could never find anything because things weren’t where I expected them or where they were supposed to be. I didn’t have my preferred hob constellation (obviously) and I found their induction set-ups made unexpected and unexplained beeping noises I couldn’t shut up. Worst of all, I couldn’t do the things I wanted to do with food because I wasn’t surrounded by the tools I was used to having within easy reach.
The situation reached its peak - or its nadir - when we moved back into the unfinished house in late-September. While waiting for the kitchen to be installed downstairs, we set up camp in what was 9and will be again) our bedroom, with a two-ring electric hob, a toaster, a tabletop oven, and a camping cool box for a fridge. All these and the chopping boards were put on one IKEA table, and food was eaten at the other. There are worse kitchen set-ups, I know, but still the circumstances of our cooking arrangements, coupled with the stress of trying to get the building finished, conspired to cause me to fall out of love with the kitchen, and to basically disengage with the joy of cooking altogether. Meals became a logistical puzzle to solve, with the key motivations being what was easiest, involved the least amount of prep, and created as few dirty dishes as possible (we were doing the washing-up in the bathroom).
I was honestly surprised how much this affected me; it didn’t just knock my love of cooking out of me, and drive me from the kitchen, but it drained so much pleasure out of everyday life. We were, I know, extremely fortunate that it was a temporary interregnum. It’s a little pathetic how quickly and deeply it affected me to be out of a familiar environment, cooking in perfectly serviceable kitchens that I was lucky to have access to. But there you go; I’d gotten used to having all my kitchen appendages within arms reach, and knowing where they all were if I needed them. And it reminded me how much I loved the kitchen, and how much time I spent in there trying to stay sane.
The kitchen is, I was learning, my favourite room in the house, even the most necessary for my sanity. And not just because it’s the one with all the food in it. What I missed in those other kitchens, aside from equipment, was the warmth and the energy, the productivity, the feeling useful, and of actually being useful. In our old kitchen, on shitty migraine days I when I couldn’t really do anything, but I could still go into the kitchen and make dinner for everyone and do the dishes afterwards. I could be productive. When our little dishwasher broke and we never fixed it or replaced it, I didn’t mind; I like doing the dishes. Doing the washing up meant I could go into the kitchen, close the door, and clear my head for a while. Meditation, brought to you by mild green Fairy Liquid.
My most vivid childhood memories are watching my mother mix the little white tubs of candied peel into the cake bowl, and the house later filling up with the smell of boiling plum pudding, or of accidentally leaving unset jelly mixture out on a counter in my Dad’s kitchen in Ballyheigue only to come back in the morning and find it solid and springy. I love being in there and being around food. It’s why you’ll always find me in the kitchen at parties, and why I really can’t be trusted to work from home. There are just too many temptations.
But I lost all of that over the summer, and I felt it right in my gut. I couldn’t find that joy and that peace when our kitchen was also our dining room, our bedroom, our office, our playroom, and our classroom.
My culinary calvary is nearly at an end. We’ve already been gradually repopulating the kitchen with utensils and plates and boxes of dried goods. Will it turn out to be our dream kitchen? Of course not, we couldn’t afford our dream kitchen. It will be a compromise - between what we could afford, what our architect recommended, and the path of least resistance decided on by the builders. But at least it’s ours, from top to bottom. I can already feel myself coming back to life, my brain rattling through ideas for what we can do with the new space and the conversations with the kids about what the first thing we’re going to bake. It’s going to be great.
The kitchen fitters were in the house yesterday installing the final puzzle pieces of the new kitchen - the inox worktop, the sink and the new induction hobs that have been sitting in a box in a corner since the summer and our visit to the Bosch experience in Gare Maritime. As I understand it, from what the eager salesperson showed us, induction is basically magic. I look forward to casting some spells with it.
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