My Kitchen

Amazingly my saucepans are nearly thirty years old

with some items even older – so many stories to be told...

Sandwich tins from between the wars, pre non-stick with scrapers for assistance -

these slide under the sponge which leaves the tin cleanly, without resistance;

and a nutmeg grater belonging to Gran – a little box of memories,

still housing a nutmeg and the scent of exotic islands across the seas.

Cakes and biscuits are always stored in 1960's Tupperware,

recalling girlie parties, Beatles songs and bouffant style hair.

An old tin spoon with embossed crest and advertising healthy Ovaltine beverages,

and a sixpenny cookery book by Mrs Beeton, written long before women had privileges...

A set of white china basins used in the past for Christmas puds,

and pretty aluminium jelly moulds with fan-like scalloped edges,

cooling racks for airing and wooden spoons for stirring -

both from a previous decade and probably before I was made -

So, even 'tho I'm in my cuisine, cooking in northern France,

I often think of times gone by and give a backwards glance...

towards the many hands that used and worked these well worn tools so well,

delighted they are still in use and in a twenty first century kitchen happily dwell.

We've moved house over 14 times in 38 years of marriage so I've had to adjust and work in a range of different kitchens.  'Range' being an important word as it takes me right back to the 1950's where it all started with Mummy's two kitchens on the Farm.  We had the Scullery with Rayburn for cooking and sink for washing up, and where all the dirty domestic jobs were done, and then a short walk under a covered way and up a couple of steps to the 'posh' kitchen where we ate sitting around the old scrubbed table in front of the range.  This could be used both as a hob and oven and was very useful for keeping dishes warm, and of course, blackened regularly by Mummy.  Not dissimilar in idea to our neighbours of the last few years in France who also had two kitchens – 'one for show and one for go'.  Actually many of the houses we knew in France had just one big room downstairs which trebled up as kitchen, dining room and salon, all heated with a wood burner residing in a huge alcove.  The French by reputation focus on their cuisine and the marvellous cooking and dishes that result, so the emphasis on a kitchen where family can sit, talk and enjoy meals together is both an essential and a practical one.

I still possess a few items from that early farmhouse kitchen, and some are still used very regularly.  For instance, in the photo of the little cherry cakes you can see them airing on a wire rack which must date from the 1940's, and for a backdrop I've placed a couple of my own cookery books from the 1970's and 80's.  The other picture displays a collection of kitchen ware which accompanied us across the Channel and back again, and the poem tells you all about it.

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