The new-fangled kitchen

"Oh God, tell me the pear bowl made it...."

This was my first thought the other morning, when I entered the laundry room at the crack of dawn to pull some workout clothes from the ever-present pile of clean laundry in front of the dryer, and discovered that one end of the shelving unit, that holds most of our special occasion kitchen wares, had come out of the cinder block wall, sending all of our platters and seldom-used kitchen appliances and baking pans sliding down to the concrete floor.

I was not concerned, at first, about the Limoge plates my aunt had given me, the Pottery Barn platter that was sentimental favorite, or the artisan chip and dip that was a wedding gift from a close friend*, I was worried about a sea foam green, ceramic bowl, in the shape of a pear. This bowl had been H's grandmother, Mama's. The bowl has two compartments, one, larger, the bulbous end of the pear, to hold pasta, the other, smaller end, near the stem, to hold sauce. Every time we pass this bowl around the table, someone has to say, "Don't hold it by the stem!", the way Mama and Pop used to, as in family lore. This bowl, in and of itself, is not especially breath taking. I'm sure many people would pass it up if it were ever out on a garage sale table, but because of its history, it is very special to our family. This got me thinking about the modern day kitchen and all it contains.

H and I spend a short time every Sunday morning drinking coffee and looking at catalogues, before the onslaught of requests for a second round of pancakes or for Daddy to play Wii, and the Williams Sonoma catalogue is one of our favorites. We love it not only for the high-quality pots and linens it contains, but for the specialty kitchen items we find truly laughable. It seems there is a specialized tool for every kitchen task. There are mango slicers, avocado slicer/mashers, banana slicers, strawberry slicers, strawberry hullers, peach and cherry pitters. Whatever happened to a good old paring knife? And the counter top devices available astound in their breadth of function - rice cookers, bread makers (which I thought went out of style with carbohydrates in 2000), deep fryers, panini presses, ice cream and yogurt makers (seriously, who is making their own yogurt? You obviously live on a farm and probably have no electricity and, therefore, no use for such an appliance). To be fair, H and I own three of the six counter top items listed above (the deep fryer being purchased as a gift for H, in a fit of pre-Christmas idiocy, as was last year's Bacon of the Month Club membership), and cherries are a total pain in the ass to pit, as are olives, but I wonder, what of all this kitchen technology will hold any sentimental meaning to our children after we are gone? Will they look at the deep fryer and think, "Oh remember the ONE time Daddy used that?", or will they merely curse the laundry room shelves full of nonsense that they now have to get rid of?

There are pots and pans, not of especially good quality, that H and I still have that belonged to Mama. What I love most about them is being able to see the evidence of all the cooking they were used for in scratches, dings and dents. Growing up myself, during the holidays at my aunt's, we used one pot that was so dented on the bottom from all the potatoes that had been mashed in its depths, it was actually convex , and would wobble around precariously on the burner. But I loved that pot. Will the same be said about H's Calphalon stainless? There was a potato peeler of my grandmother's (insert Irish joke here) that was so old and rusty I'm shocked no one wound up with tetanus, but every year, there'd be so many of us in the kitchen peeling, someone would wind up using it and it made the day seem complete. Not sure our OXO peeler will ever show evidence of anyone's having actually used it, so ingenious is its engineering.

I would be remiss if I didn't admit H and I (but mostly H) find a lot of this kitchen technology pretty cool (except the new at-home sous vide, that spells food poisoning to me), but I think we need to be careful of our kitchens morphing from the center of our homes, filled with stories, into laboratories, filled with tools. And if you use a tool so seldom, it never has a chance to become part of a story, it just takes up space in the laundry room and winds up on the floor one day. Perhaps, if used often enough, even the most modern of gadgets can be part of fmaily history. I gave H a Henkel knife for our first anniversary and he claims it is still "the best gift you ever gave me" (notice, it's not three kids, or a well-cared for home). New knives come on the market and he shies away, loving the heft and balance of this particular blade. I think part of it might be though, that the kids call it "Daddy's knife" and know its special place in the butcher block. Maybe some day, despite their own kitchens full of super-refined cutlery, they will argue over who gets to have it, remembering all the wonderful meals their father cooked using it.

* all of which made it, thank God.