As I mentioned in my last post, I have been taking workshops with Barbara Krasner. Yesterday, one of the writing prompts was to write about one’s mother’s or grandmother’s kitchen. It was a lot of fun and brought back memories I hadn’t thought of for years. Other writers’ responses brought back additional memories. For example, Barbara wrote of the pull-down lamp in their kitchen which reminded me that we had one too. It never worked very well, pulling down easily, but it usually wouldn’t retract.
What do you recall about the kitchen(s) you spent time in as a child?
My Mother’s Kitchen
My mother’s kitchen at the sleepy western edge of San Francisco was efficient and cozy. It was almost a square room. One door led from the hallway. Walking in on the left was a gas stove and tiled countertop. Above the sink was a window facing the outside staircase that let in natural light.
Along the next wall were counters with storage above and below. Most useful of all was a slide out butcher-block cutting board. Then space for a small kitchen table where my mother, father and I ate most meals.
Along the third wall, a second door led to a small formal dining room. On one side of the doorway was a shallow closet that had a fold-out ironing board – a handy contraption that made ironing less daunting. As new wrinkle-free fabrics became more popular, many people in similar houses took out the board and created a spice cabinet.
Along the final wall was the refrigerator and more counterspace and cabinets.
There was no dishwasher. In the 1960s, my mother who worked full time was eager to find labor and time saving solutions to cooking and cleaning. She bought a “portable” dishwasher which was neither very portable nor efficient. It looked like a giant hair dryer with a long hose that attached to the kitchen sink faucet. It took up so much counterspace that it was a short-lived addition to our household.
My mother tried several new-fangled appliances in the late 1960s/early 1970s. One was a rotisserie that was supposed to easily and efficiently roast delicious chicken and meat – at least in our household, it promised a lot more than it delivered. It took up a lot of valuable space so it quickly went the way of the dishwasher.
The one kitchen tool my mother had which I miss to this day was an old-fashioned grinder. The contraption clamped to our cutting-board. It had attachments for grating and grinding things as coarsely or finely as desired. Apparently many people used such a device to make chopped liver, not something my mother did. It was operated by means of a hand crank – no electricity needed. One attachment ground almonds to the perfect fineness for my mother’s and grandmother’s Viennese crescent cookies. I have never been able to recreate that consistency with any of the tools I have in my kitchen.
Every Thanksgiving my mother would use the grinder to make fresh cranberry relish. For some people, it is only Thanksgiving with a can of Ocean Spray cranberry sauce making the satisfying splat into a serving dish. For me, it is my mother’s relish – refreshing, sweet, and tangy. Just cranberries, oranges, and sugar.
My mother soon learned to use a different place to grind the cranberries when she clamped the grinder onto its usual location, the pull-out cutting board. As she ground the berries on the board, the kitchen became awash in cranberry sauce – a sea of red all over the board and floor.
When my cousin Tim sent me a bag of unmilled wheat berries in 2021 after reading letters about my grandmother’s nephew sending the family wheat when he was a soldier in World War I and flour was scarce, I regretted not having my mother’s grinder – that would have been the perfect tool to make the berries into flour!
One kitchen tool I still have from my mother is a jar opener – a simple thing made of metal and wrapped in vinyl. I have never found a better device to open difficult containers and thank my mother each time I use it. [In preparing this post, I discovered that such an opener still exists — it’s called a jar wrench and is used for canning.]
I grew up with Revere Ware pots and pans, made of stainless steel with copper bottoms. They were equal to any task and seemingly indestructible. When I moved out into an apartment of my own, I proudly bought my own set. When my husband and I joined households, we had 2 sets of Revere Ware pots and pans. After both of our mothers, we had 4! I couldn’t bear to get rid of any of them, both for sentimental reasons and because they were all still perfectly useful.
When we remodeled our kitchen several years ago, we installed an induction stovetop because we cannot have a gas stove where we live now. Induction is closer to cooking with gas than a traditional electric stove. Induction uses electromagnetic cooking and the cookware must work like a magnet. Unfortunately, none of our Revere Ware worked! Finally, we no choice but to let those copper-bottomed pieces go to homes that could appreciate them.
In my mother’s kitchen in 1998