Two months after her husband left in 2020, Bee Wilson was startled by the clatter of a baking tin falling on to the kitchen floor. In one way this doesn’t seem particularly remarkable: Wilson is an esteemed food writer who presumably has a surplus of kitchen utensils crammed into her bulging cupboards. This tin, though, was different. For one thing it was heart-shaped. For another, Wilson had used it to bake her wedding cake 23 years earlier, taking care to leave out the cherries because her husband-to-be loathed them. (This now strikes her as ominous: “Maybe a man who was so fussy about cherries was not the man for me.”) Lurking at the back of Wilson’s mind had been the thought that she would soon be using the heart-shaped tin to bake a cake for their silver wedding anniversary. But now here it was, lying dejectedly at her feet and, she couldn’t help noticing, spotted with rust.
In this delightful book, part memoir, part anthropological investigation, food writer Wilson explores the way that kitchen objects have the power to move, soothe and even reproach us. There’s the plate you feel compelled to eat off because it makes everything taste nicer, or that bowl you keep but can’t bear to use because it reminds you too much of the person who gave it to you. In the maelstrom of her new living conditions, Wilson worries that she is overdoing the anthropomorphism: there is a big cast-iron knife that she can’t bear to pick up because it is the one her ex-husband always used and “to touch its smooth handle would have felt like holding his hand”.
It turns out that Wilson need not have worried that she was, in her words, going “mad” by ascribing personalities and human meaning to bits of wood and stainless steel. Magical thinking, the textbooks reassure her, is a universal aspect of human cultures. It also provides the propulsion for this engaging collection of 30-odd short essays organised around ordinary people’s complicated feelings for egg whisks and apple corers. Among the kitchenalia that Wilson sets before us is a much-loved pressure cooker belonging to a Tuscan diplomat’s wife which saw service after the second world war in Senegal and Mumbai (pressure cookers, incidentally, turn out to be ancient bits of kit, going all the way back to 1679). There’s also a silver toast rack that Wilson’s mother, slipping into Alzheimer’s, is convinced has been stolen by a burglar who wants it for a particularly fancy picnic.
Closer to home is a humble red, plastic washing-up bowl. It was a gift from a thoughtful neighbour who spotted that the newly single Wilson was now in charge not only of the cooking for her three hungry children but all the washing up too. The bowl had a cheerful, purposeful look to it, as if urging Wilson to look on the bright side. And it worked: “Every time I looked at it filled with hot sudsy water, I felt that washing up might actually be cool and Danish rather than tedious and mildly oppressive.”
A book concerned with rummaging in other people’s kitchen drawers might start to feel claustrophobic, but Wilson is careful to let the light in. She interviews Sasha Correa, a Venezuelan who recalls how for 60 evenings in a row in 2002, her family – five sisters plus their mother and father – went out on to their balcony in Caracas and banged pots for an hour to protest against the authoritarian policies of the country’s president, Hugo Chávez. These “casserole protests” have become a feature throughout Latin America, though recently they have been seen in Europe, too. During the “Kitchenware Revolution” of 2009-2011, Icelandic citizens clashed and clattered in protest at their government’s dire handling of the country’s financial crisis.
It is no surprise to learn that Wilson’s obsession with kitchen vernacular has a genetic element. Her grandfather, Norman Wilson, was the production director of Wedgwood during the middle decades of the 20th century. Under his auspices, thousands of dinner plates and gravy boats sailed out into the world in a variety of patterns from the classic Willow to Summer Sky, a beautiful pale pearlescent blue with a white trim. By far and away Mr Wilson’s personal favourite, though, was Kutani Crane, featuring a turquoise crane set against a multicoloured floral arrangement. Although extremely popular with customers, Norman Wilson’s descendants found Kutani Crane fussy and clotted, and competed to offload unwanted heirlooms on each other.
Consequently, Wilson admits that she has developed ambivalent feelings about the family china. Recently, she opened another little-used cupboard only to find two Kutani Crane vegetable tureens squatting, dusty, unloved and vaguely malevolent. Despite feeling “strangled” by them, filial obligation had so far stopped her from sending them to the charity shop. Looking at them now, Wilson has a revelation: “What if I had become the Kutani Crane in the marriage?” – in other words, something that her ex-husband felt a grudging duty towards, but not quite enough to keep. In the end, the tureens, unlike the marriage, get a last-minute reprieve. Bundled up into the attic, they are biding their sulky time until Wilson’s children are old enough to decide whether a clean break is in order.
• The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss and Kitchen Objects by Bee Wilson is published by 4th Estate (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
