Kitchen Mess

The kitchen is a mess, as it almost always is. I cannot write these words without hearing myself say them aloud. The sentence I hear in my head can be spoken with different emphases: like the narrator in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, who lets us hear different versions of Rosamond, the anti-heroine’s, question “what can I do?”. I let myself hear, alternatively, the kitchen is a mess, the kitchen is a mess, and the kitchen is a mess. The first singles out the kitchen as place, perhaps announcing its centrality to the household and to the definition of what constitutes a mess. The second reflects, or perhaps wearily anticipates, a protest, say, from a family member, that the kitchen is not as messy as I think. This version of the sentence follows, or perhaps presages, “it looks fine to me.” The third, I think most common, form of this utterance emphasizes and lingers on the idea of mess itself, conjuring in its spoken rhythm a series of sensory images: cluttered counters, dirty dishes, and sticky floors.

Statistically speaking, when I use this sentence, I am most likely addressing my children, now adults, who have heard these words, this sentence, throughout their lives. There is a special form of mess that attaches to them: traces of midnight or morning cooking; pans filled with the detritus of fried eggs or black beans; muffin tins with dry batter ringing the bottoms of each cup. Like a forensic scientist, I can trace by its remainders the story of what has been cooked and eaten in my absence, including when a project has been abandoned in mid-cookery. The words, less often, can be addressed to my husband; the clues to the story of his activities tend to take the form of discarded wrappings, paper bags, or the cardboard and plastic detritus of mid-COVID deliveries. I do, of course, sometimes, often, turn the sentence so I am voicing it to myself. Silently, I survey the counters for mason jars carefully labelled but unreturned to the pantry, and gaze guiltily on the inevitable block of parmesan cheese I intended to place in its special silicone bag but which is sitting, with the grater, just beyond the reach of our tallest dog. As my boys point out in their defense, which almost always takes the form of the tu quoque, I have no doubt left the milk out to rot after using it for coffee. Together, our habits, our characteristic forms of carelessness, produce a household mess which is as much about negotiating relationships as about the things we leave behind.

It has taken me a while to realize that in all of the iterations of these sentences, spoken loudly or under my breath, complainingly, whiningly, or with an attempt at neutral observation, I hear the voice of my mother. This is odd, because at least in my memory “the kitchen is a mess is not a sentence she used,” perhaps because there was never a moment when my mother let things be long enough to frame the situation in this way, no moment when messes were allowed to persist into the present tense. Wrenching myself back to the kitchens of my childhood and teenage years, I hear instead: “Why do you never put a lid on anything?” “Why don’t you ever close a drawer?” Or “What are you learning in your IB science class? Didn’t that teacher ever teach you about rotting food?” As I reach on the keyboard for the terminal question marks, I realize perhaps for the first time that these are not questions. But of course they could be. Why did I (almost) never close a drawer, fit a cap to a bottle, screw a lid on a jar? Why did I tend to leave cupboard doors ajar, drawers half-open, food unprotected, although my science teacher never mentioned it, from contamination? Why is it still hard to do some of these things, to close, return, put away the objects I so eagerly take out? And—a question beyond the horizon of my childhood and indeed my mother’s death—why do I care about mess now in a way I did not for so long? I am not yet ready to provide answers, which may, not surprisingly, involve diving deeper into the mess.

My messiness, it seems, is of a certain kind, or at least takes on familiar forms. All mess is not alike; what counts as mess varies among individuals and cultures. The anthropologist Mary Douglas would say that mess (in her words, “dirt”) is “matter out of place.” When I see food scraps stuck onto a cutting board or at the bottom of my expensive nonstick pan, they constitute mess. In the garbage can, safely locked away from the dogs with a child-proof lock, those same sticky substances are not mess at all, but “garbage,” or more benignly still, “trash.”   More recently, since I have taken up composting, certain kinds of scraps in the garbage are indeed mess, since their place is first the grey countertop bin, and then the yellow barrel on the porch. It does not matter that the scraps in the compost as smell horrible as they do in the garbage can; they are in place and thus are not mess, or dirt, although they will, with luck and hard work become soil.

It is odd that I should leave so many things out of place, because place means so much to me. My friends, who tend, because they are my friends, to be nice about my messiness, all acknowledge that I am very organized. This appears to mean that I create places in which to put things so they do not, cannot count as mess. Although my pantry does not look quite like the ones in magazines, filled with matching containers, it is, by my lights, a thing (or rather a place) of beauty. All items are decanted into labelled glass jars of what I fondly hope will be just the right size. National foods are perhaps too rigidly and literal-mindedly sequestered from each other; there are parts of shelves for grains, beans and legumes (distressingly similar), and condiments. There is a baking bin and a snack bin, each clearly marked although there are some issues about where to put chocolate chips.  Running parallel, or sometimes at right angles to, these organizing principles, is our household’s most evocative structuring binary: the glutinous and the non-glutinous. Gluten-free flours (and there are many of them) have their own wide space that adjoins “baking.” Buckwheat flour, which despite its name, is gluten free, forms a barrier between the less used glutinous flours (rye, semolina) and the gluten-free flours for which we reach all the time (potato, corn, almond). If a quantity of an item exceeds the jar in which it is placed, there will be a second jar labelled “2 of 2”; it seems my pantry also has a temporal axis.

Speaking of the temporal, I am also quite organized about the life-cycle of some non-food items, like dishcloths and napkins. Over time, with dirt and wear, napkins become dishcloths, and dish cloths become rags, moving around the house as they evolve, or devolve, to their temporary homes in different baskets. Unsurprisingly, it is hard for anyone else to make the distinctions I do that separate an ex-napkin (usually greenish blue) from a dishcloth (usually greenish blue with a permanent stain of turmeric or tomato sauce). When they are dirty, all of these objects go into one holding bin under the sink. Some of these are frankly disgusting; mess in all but the my own definition, they transcend this category once they find their place under the sink (and eventually, it must be said, in the washing machine). Sodden, smelly, covered in bits of things, once in the basket, they do not count as mess as they would if, equally stinky, they were left on the counter or the sink.

I was not always this organized in the kitchen. The, albeit limited, power of my system derives from analogy. At some point in my forties, I imported techniques and processes from my work life to my home life. As someone who has undertaken a series of long archival writing projects, in which every piece of information has to be filed against future use, I have been quite proud of my ability to, as they say, lay my hands quickly on anything I needed in the course of my work. At some point, I decided I needed this efficiency, this feeling of command, at home: it helped to think not so much about storing, or sorting, as filing. I would file my measuring spoons as I filed my notes from honeymoon diaries or transcribed letters from George Scharf to his parents.

It works, but not perfectly. In all my time with my notes about 54 honeymooning couples (108 people), I never once mislaid a piece of paper. Working on my coauthored book about George Scharf, it never took me more than a few minutes to find an image or a letter, whether the files were paper or electronic. I misplace the potato starch all the time and leave the sugar canister, covered in buttery fingerprints, out on the counter long past it has been used for cakes or cookies. I still find certain kinds of domesticity overwhelming, still channel my mother’s frustration and my frustration with my mother as I enter my kitchen.

My mother’s questions are too big to answer, too big for me to fail. Although she supported me in what she always referred to as my “career, “on some level she must have felt, have been brought up to feel, that domesticity was incompatible with work. Thus, the snarkiness about my science teacher(s); thus, her worry about dirt, contamination, matter out of place. I don’t know if it would be any comfort to her—and I hope it would—that my success in conquering the mess in my kitchen, however imperfect, is due precisely to my success elsewhere.

But why speak in terms of failure and success? My husband has over the years repeatedly reminded me that a kitchen that produces food is going to be messy. “If you cook in it,” he says, “it will spend a lot of time being dirty.” It was he who encouraged my younger son, Paul, to produce his “experiments.” At six years old, or even younger, he was inventing new foods, many—but certainly not all—of them inedible, and all of them explosive in terms of kitchen cleanliness. At a very young age he won an otherwise-adult competition at a block party for some sort of chicken dish the prize committee categorized as “unknown.” As I recall, it was delicious. My older son Ross, who now cooks professionally, learned to use the Kitchen Aid mixer at three, when he taught my friend Robyn, herself an excellent cook, to use it to make pastry swans for a baby shower for his preschool teacher. Robyn, who is the tidiest woman I know, no doubt cleaned up the mess, but we will always remember the swans.

And my writing partner, Brian, reminds me that “mess” can also mean “abundance” as in “a mess of pottage,” and that the word “mess” has travelled, perhaps out of the place I made for it, to “mess hall” in the army or to the word for a big institutional meal. Mess and food are inextricably—indeed messily—entwined.