Deconstructing the Kitchen

Photo courtesy Flickr

There’s a building at MIT that is famous for the research it has fostered. It’s number 250 or something like that. The reason the structure has been so productive, someone said, is that it’s an old frame wartime unit, and no one has anything to lose by cutting a hole in the floor to accommodate a piece of test equipment.

My place ain’t MIT, but it does afford free experiments in housekeeping. Because it’s a development property, I don’t concern myself with home improvement as an investment strategy. We just keep the place decent, and do what we want with the workspace.

About ten years ago, just because I thought it would look cool, I dreamed about replacing the stove with a high-tech kitchen rack system and a collection of small appliances. I had seen an elegant propane camp stove at the local outdoor store and had a yen to use one at home. We preferred an electric stove, but I longed to stir-fry over high heat.

One day the stove died in the middle of a batch of bread, and I raced out to realize my vision. While the dough was rising, I collected shelving, a propane set-up, an electric kettle, a portable convection oven, and a little automatic drip coffee maker. The hardware cost twice as much as a new stove, but the electricity bill dropped fifty percent the first month. The new gear paid for itself in three months.

The first time I threw a party, I looked around and cursed myself for a fool, but once set up, I discovered that small appliances expanded my work area, because I could spread projects out over all the available space. That made it easy for more people to pitch in on preps.

There have been other pleasant unanticipated consequences of change. In response to the dire safety warnings printed on the gas stove’s cover, I fry on the back porch. Cooking one step outside the kitchen door means I don’t have to exhaust heated air from the interior, there are no wandering fumes under the roof, and the kitchen stays cleaner. Propane cooks hotter than the gas that is piped into the neighborhood.

The electric kettle heats water faster than the stove. The convection oven is more versatile than the one that came with the stove and turns out a better product. I have since added other small appliances and found that a crock pot and an electronic pressure cooker behave like the back of a wood-burning stove, freeing me from supervising pots on burners. The rice cooker makes a mean pot of oatmeal.

Cooking this way reduces stress and saves space in the kitchen, because I can put unused units in the cupboard. Since setting up to fry requires active effort, I fry less often, improving nutrition and, consequently, cognition. Discarding the stove inadvertently restored nineteenth-century folkways to the nineteenth-century kitchen.

We often grill over an outdoor fire rather than smoking up the kitchen with a hot procedure. In the five years since I made the change, we have only resorted to a fast-food bailout three or four times, despite living within a few blocks of all major temptations. We’re healthier, wealthier, and posing as wiser.

The new set-up required fiddling with the wiring, redistributing the juice that had been reserved for the stove. I did not see that coming. The portable cookers are for the most part just as stable as a pot on a burner. Contemporary stoves are so light they must be secured to a wall for safety.

Simple imported small appliances are astonishingly cost-effective. The rice cooker echoes the shape of the traditional Japanese pot, that has a circular lip around the base to gather every bit of available heat. I can warm food on the burner of the coffee dripper.

The new arrangement makes it simple to shift from cooking for one to cooking for thirty. Since the grocery is two blocks away, I supplement a small, under the counter refrigerator with picnic coolers for big bashes. More after the jump.

Build It and They Will Ignore It

Photo Julia Child's kitchen courtesy Flickr

When the vets came home after World War Two, home meant a lot to them, especially because so many of them had suffered during the Depression. The Veteran’s Administration offered home loans and low down payments. Before the war, a mortgage only covered half the price of a house, so fewer people could afford to own property.

Many vets were the children or grandchildren of European immigrants. The class systems of the old countries made the chance to own property very appealing. Except for Alaska, homesteading was closed, but the urge to farm was strong in families who lived in dense inner city neighborhoods, and a high percentage of the general population still lived on farms. The urge toward agriculture was still powerful in the Sixties.

The suburban homestead was marketed as an opportunity to be self-sufficient. The whole point of the yard was that it be used to grow food. Cheap cars, cheap gas, and the National Highway System replaced home grown and preserved food, the consumer economy freed women’s time, and the kitchen shifted toward industrial chow.

In the Sixties, Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking stormed the bookstores and then the Book of the Month Club. I suspect immigrant grandmothers simply appreciated Child as a resource, but long-established Anglo cooks, for whom food was not an end in itself, responded hugely to Child’s video instruction. As I recall, the show was the first syndicated how-to series. (Incidentally, it was followed by Thalassa Crusoe’s Making Things Grow, that did for the garden what Julia C. did for the kitchen.)

Child and Cuisinart evolved in parallel, and kitchen escalation set in. Just as the cast-iron cookstove replaced open-hearth cooking and generated demand for luxuries like bread and cake, the advent of high-tech kitchen gear in the late Sixties and early Seventies raised the bar in the home kitchen. Bouef bourguingnon replaced pot roast, wine appeared on the ordinary table, and advances in ceramic and stainless steel brought new elegance to the table top.

Just as escalation hit the kitchen, the Oil Crunch happened in ’73. Cooks were chased out into the workforce, and the fast food industry evolved. The notion of a status kitchen remained, however, and it continued to evolve. Alan Buchsbaum’s ragged granite tabletops, salvaged from demolished New York office buildings, generated the huge market for stone counters, and the kitchen grew ever larger and more elaborate while families shrank and spent less time in the house.

Not long ago, I toured a huge, empty, waterfront country place with forty feet of stone counters decorated with a couple of fast food bags from a chain.



More after the jump.

Making Time for Original Work

Carl-here are some notes about surviving to do original work. I grew up with a painter who often crashed on my parents’ couch, I read Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha during a formative month in high school, and trained after college at a vocational art school populated and staffed mostly by veterans, a couple of whom had been combat artists in the Pacific during World War Two. Easily half of the student body still smelled of Viet Nam. The school motto was, “Don’t get married until you can afford it.” The other motto was “Keep your overhead down” and, for the girls, “Keep your prices up.” The atmosphere was unflappable.

In 1972, keeping one’s overhead down was relatively easy, thanks to Johnson’s War on Poverty and the huge vacancy rate in inner cities. That may be bitter news now, but the principles apply. Jack Kerouac describes Japhy Rider’s (Gary Snyder’s) lifestyle in The Dharma Bums-a tiny shack in somebody’s back yard in Berkeley. Snyder, the great poet of the environment, details the thinking behind this approach in his early books. He was one of the Be-ats’, as in beatitude. James Michener’s Sayonara details traditional life in a tiny postwar paper house. I am experimenting with living off-grid in a 1914 Model T garage-nothing I would permit a tenant to experience. There’s a slumlord on Queen Anne who rents out, no kidding, the crawl space under the steps of one of his apartments.

I attended a very expensive school, and student loans did not exist, so the lifestyle was very frugal. Some of the kids bought a hundred pound sack of dog kibble at the beginning of the semester and survived on that, not an option I recommend. There’s a book called The Way of the Wasp that lays out the code of behavior. Steve Jobs went to the same school. When he realized his parents were spending their retirement money on his tuition, he dropped out, couch surfed, and sat in on classes for a year and a half.

Diet for a Small Planet roughs out the basics of peasant chow, inexpensive, green, and healthful alternatives to the three squares approach that dominated when it was first published. Leah Chase’s work for the US Government Printing Office is priceless. The Cornell bread formula in the 60s Joy of Cooking produces a complete protein loaf of bread that a doughmaster friend told me was worth $7.50 in 2005. Stay out of restaurants. As a new bride in 1966, I fed my husband and me on $9 a week, shopping at the Berkeley co-op and a Fillmore district butcher shop that sold lamb neck and live chickens. This was before both Food Stamps and the Abundant Foods program that just gave away cheese and canned chicken, along with other staples and excellent mimeographed recipes. Depression-era government publications detail the most economical ways to run a household. A pressure cooker is a great shortcut. Angelo Pellegrini’s Lean Years, Happy Years is elegant and priceless.

One of Snyder’s survival strategies was to insist on being able to pay half of whatever was going on.

Getting rid of your car, if you have one, is a move that increases transportation options. Time spent riding the bus is good for composing and for planning meals. The secret to living without a car and retaining self-respect is to refuse well-intended offers of a ride, unless to refuse is unreasonable. In that case, I post a bread and butter gift roughly equal to the cost of a cab ride.

Don’t know what your personal circumstances are, or what your traditions suggest is the right way to live, but there are some new, controversial, housing units for lease on 23rd that make a certain kind of sense: they’re tiny, single rooms with a private bath and amenities for $450 a month. The way singles run around and live on WiFi in coffee shops, a set-up like that is rational, although a cluster of low-rent tenants is likely to destabilize a neighborhood. I mentioned these new rooms at dinner the other night, and the two young home-owning business-persons at the table shot each other a look, said, “We could get two side by side,” and seemed primed for a good talk on the way home.

The sad thing about living lightly is that it puts one at social risk. It’s a good way to find out who your real friends are, though. When I bailed from that first marriage, with no planning, my first option was a $17 a month cold-water room in a condemned office building on First Avenue. The second option was food and shelter chits in the Morrison Hotel. Fortunately, I had a third option and was able to stay above rock bottom. All my pals on the beach at Alki stayed with the apartment, though, so perhaps even Skid Road would have been an upgrade.

The recent documentary about Townes van Sant has a scene where friends approach the wrecked trailer where he’s living. One says to the other, “He’s in it for the music” with deep certainty. Someone called van Sant a derelict a couple of weeks ago. I dunno. It would make me sad to see my kid living like that, but he would prefer it to living off his girl friend. Drugs, of course, foul judgement. The Burnley School mentioned above trained me to understand art as a 24/7 commitment. Having put family first. I’m closer to being where you are than to where one of my contemporaries might be. Health insurance is not to be underestimated.

I think it’s wise to understand, like the Arts and Crafts community, that no artist is a special kind of person. Each person is a special kind of artist. Alfred Fairbank, of the British Admiralty and the Arts and Crafts community, said, “Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.” That helps keep precious under control. Someone on KEXP last week said or sang, “Nobody’s first, and you’re next.” The English designer David Pye has a book about craftsmanship where he discusses the realities of marketing original work and advises craftspeople to do the 9 to 5, work nights, and hang in there until the break happens. Max de Pree, son of the founder of the Herman Miller company, wrote a management classic, much of which deserves to be memorized. De Pree describes his amazement and chagrin on learning, after the death of one of his key employees that the man had been a very good poet.

Back in the day, certain mountain climbers sawed the handles off and trimmed the bristles of their toothbrushes to save grams of weight in the pack. I think it’s possible to shave milliseconds off the time required for life support, so that even though one has full-time employment, domestic demands are minimal. The first time I vacuumed this house, it took three hours once a week. Now it takes half an hour every two or three weeks.

Assuming your job demands around forty hours a week, blasting the demands of life support will generate a decent amount of leisure to think and produce. The secret to coping with extraneous demands is to remember that routine stuff does not use the degree of focus that original work absolutely requires. I hate to tell you how recently I figured this out. And though nobody’s first and we’re all next, it’s important to remember that the less able must not be permitted to dominate in areas where one wishes to function at one’s best.

The Buddhists talk about taking care of one’s self being a prerequisite for being able to care for anyone else. I am often blindsided by others’ social aggression, but fourteen years in the weight room have at least prepared me to make new mistakes. I hope my guardian angel is a boxer.

Pilates is a haven. I began to realize some of its benefits before I learned that Joseph Pilates had developed his curriculum as a prisoner of war. My sense of the discipline is that it sets things right on many levels and supports healthy self-awareness. Pilates literally unkinks my wiring.

I have to struggle to protect the Sabbath. The old blue laws that kept stores and bars closed on Sunday had their uses. Seems to me that a sabbath is a right to which no politic person will object. Even southern slaves back in the day had Sunday, I think. So, if you’re employed full-time and speculating on yourself as well, maybe it would help to define a sabbath as twenty-four hours free of the obligation to perform “unnecessary servile work”, divide that by seven, and use 3.whatever hours a day to work on your own projects. And do that first. I get up at 4:45. It’s a peaceful, wiggly world out there, even on Capitol Hill.

My kid just said a full day off is vital. So grab those three hours a day anyway and call it two days to yourself.

I fight the handmaiden syndrome, and perhaps you struggle with something similar. There’s a fine line to walk between diva and slavey. That’s where Pilates comes in, to foster righteous ambulation and delivery.

The futurist Buckminster Fuller talked in the Sixties about the ratio between productive work time and administrative overhead. That’s what the fuss was about when Ronald Reagan came into office. Don’t know what the numbers are now, but as I recall, Fuller said that production time was something like, urk! four percent. That’s hard to believe and may be incorrect, but the number was appallingly low, even to my untutored eyes.

At home, the trick is to keep the turnaround time for a given task to a minimum. My household never numbered more than three, and I found that the simplest, lowest tech procedures took the least time, cost the least to execute, and took up the least space. Shopping at stores close to bus stops integrates transportation and procurement, and I find doing so less fatiguing than herding a vehicle around a parking lot and lashing myself in and out of safety systems. Walking around reduces stress and keeps me nimble. Except for meat and produce, I do major shopping one afternoon a month, to keep my agenda sane. I finally figured out that clerical work is top priority, that handling paper is more challenging than doing the thinking those pieces of paper require, and that putting off handling paper is harder than those two tasks put together. More after the jump.

Back to School

Photo courtesy Flickr

Catching one's breath

One fine September afternoon long ago but not too far away, I went home after school with a new friend. We goofed around the house for a while, and suddenly her mother and a pal rolled into the kitchen, not quite roaring drunk. They were coming from a lunch celebrating their youngest children’s entry into kindergarten, breaking a mutual seventeen-year streak of toddlers.

That was some first impression, and I made sure to continue the tradition after it became personally meaningful. Restaurants ought to offer specials.

Early autumn is the best time for thorough housecleaning. Once the doors and windows are closed again, and the thundering herd has slowed down a little, one has half a chance of catching up and staying caught up, giving one a clear shot at the holidays. Back in the day, major housecleaning happened in the spring because the whole place was coated in soot from gas light, and the carpets were full of the dirt that weekly hand brushing could not remove.

Japanese clean-room technology has revolutionized housekeeping to the point where an ordinary vacuum and rag seem as primitive as gas light and solid fuel. Substitute high-tech synthetic cloths and work with a HEPA filter bag to remove what the summer has brought to your indoor life. The janitorial community talks about “diluting” dirt-removing the greatest possible fraction of it from the indoor environment. High-tech tools and materials dilute dirt to at least an order of ten more than older gear.

It’s worth reading up on the latest cleaning techniques to illuminate your practices. Home maintenance is an oral tradition handed, often, from mother to daughter, and it preserves folkways that sometimes don’t make any sense. Cheryl Mendelsohn’s Home Comforts lays out the benchmarks of good practice, as do etiquette books. Don Aslett’s housekeeping handbooks are the most effective volumes of liberation literature I have discovered. If you get into the subject, Susan Strasser’s histories of American housekeeping will give you a long perspective on what you do and why you do it.

More after the jump.

2009.08.30 Ready When You Are, CB

Photo courtesy Flickr

On August 5, 2009, I was jolted out of my morning fog by a BBC story about a movie trailer. Not the kind one assumes, but a literal trailer.

A group in Scotland has designed a thirty-ton portable movie house, with sides that pop out to accommodate what look like mohair seats. Every village in Scotland, apparently, has at least one ghost site of a long-gone theater, and the trailer people literally tow it themselves on the back roads from one village to the next. They are dedicated to reestablishing community viewing, and the crowd in the news story seemed happy with their afternoon. More after the jump.