The Yummy Mummy’s Family Handbook. Liz Fraser
The Heart of the Home…
…and here we are in the kitchen—ah, the kitchen!
I’m going to get all traditional and Olde Worlde on you in this room, because I shall assume (deep breath, Liz, and prepare for considerable Female Wrath and Loathing) that the kitchen is a room where the Lady in your house spends more time, and has greater influence and control, than the Gentleman. I know, I know, it’s going against everything that women burned their shapeless bras and cut their long tresses off for all those years ago (and a great many more serious sacrifices, I do realise) but, despite all the great advances in sexual equality, bra design and hair products, in every household I can think of, it’s the adult with the female genitals who is at home more, cooks more and considers the kitchen Hers.
Please don’t get all huffy—I’m not making the rules here, and there are obviously exceptions where the Man of the house wears the apron and likes to pretend he’s Gordon Ramsay for the evening. However, for most of us—having won the unquestionable right to work down a coal mine if we should so desire—perhaps we should now try to embrace our relationship with the kitchen: it usually has groovy electrical appliances, pedal bins, tea- and coffee-making facilities, a radio, and all the food (hurrah!!). It’s also the room where the family congregates, celebrates, debates and argues most. Thanks to the trend of smashing walls down to create huge, openplan kitchen/entertaining rooms and the arrival of some breathtakingly stylish kitchen units, worktops and appliances, this room is returning to its original place at the Heart of the Home. And about bloody time too.
So if we stop and think about it for a moment, we soon realise it’s the best room to be in, as it acts like a kind of Family Mission Control, with us at the helm. Doesn’t seem so bad now, does it?
…And the Unofficial Front Line
As we all know, kitchens can be troublesome places, and there are two main reasons for this crossfire: firstly because, despite it being what you consider as your own space, because you work there more than anyone else, it is necessarily a shared space for the entire family to use and make a mess of. This is akin to allowing babies, toddlers, moody teenagers and pre-menstrual mothers to all hang out in somebody’s office just because it happens to have biscuits in it. It’s a recipe for disaster, and someone will probably lose a limb before the day is out.
The second reason for the somewhat volatile nature of the kitchen is because most of what happens in there centres around food—who buys it, prepares it, cooks it, eats it and clears up after it. Whatever your own relationship with food, there is little doubt that it is the source of an enormous amount of stress, and we’ll come to this confusing subject in a little while.
For now, we are dealing with the problem of intrusion. You want the kitchen organised and maintained just so, because you are in there three hours a day and feel it should be your own space with everything where you want it to be: condiments above the toaster, tea and coffee near the kettle, utensils near the sink and pots stacked in the big cupboard in the corner. Perfect. Everything is going well, until He decides to help, by moving the condiments next to the oven, the utensils to a new drawer next to the fridge, and hanging the pots from a special rack thing. Aaargh! Now you can’t find anything, the Marmite has melted and you have banged your head five times on a large frying pan dangling above the sink. Cheers, mate.
The most distressing thing about this kind of Kitchen Conflict is that it leads to the most petty and unwinnable arguments, where each of you knows you are partly right and partly being an arse. You can’t exactly turn around and say, ‘Look, will you just fuck off and leave my kitchen alone—it was just fine before and now you’ve messed it all up’, firstly because he was only trying to help, and secondly because by saying ‘my kitchen’ you commit yourself to being perfectly happy to cook and wash-up for the rest of your lives together. Oh dear.
Similarly he can’t turn to you and say, ‘Jesus, I was just trying to help—I can’t do anything right, can I? Fine—have it all your way but don’t expect me to do anything in here again’, firstly because he knows he will sound like a moody seven-year-old, which is not a turn-on for most women, and secondly because he will absolve all his power in the kitchen forever, thus rendering his late-night bacon sarnies and beer shelf in the fridge Out of Bounds.
Throw children into the mix, with their woefully bad sandwichmaking technique, inability to drink from a cup without pouring half of it onto the table and penchant for leaving the cheese unwrapped so that it dries into a brick within hours, and you have a kitchen that no longer bears any resemblance to the one you so carefully planned and maintained before everyone else trashed it.
So how can a group of people come to share such a communal space harmoniously? Well, it’s certainly a tall order, which even Jamie Oliver would struggle with, but let’s have a go:
Cooking with Mother (…and Father…)
Cooking alone can be very satisfying and therapeutic: the radio is on, everything is relatively under control, your kids are otherwise occupied pulling each other’s hair out upstairs or trying on all your make-up, and a warm ‘Nigella’ glow softly envelops you for a few minutes. Aaaaah.
Then you burn the chicken, there’s a blood-curdling scream from upstairs followed by one of your offspring entering the smoke-filled room clutching a handful of hair, with black mascara all over his cheeks, and all is back to normal again.
If this kind of solo cooking is the only way your family’s meals are ever prepared then not only can it become quite lonely for the chef, but it also means that your children never get to see, feel and learn anything about food at all. This is a shame on a scale way beyond that of Sienna Miller chopping all her hair off or Opal Fruits suddenly being called Starburst. Teaching kids how food works, what it is, where it comes from and how it turns from packets of this and that into a finished meal, albeit a slightly burned or tasteless one, is an absolutely crucial part of their education that will stay with them forever.
Asking a class of eight-year-olds where honey comes from and getting the answer ‘From Tesco’s,