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I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM.
You know, like so much of the country where I live, we got hit with a huge winter storm the other week.
And I went out there with my neighbors shoveled snow, helping each other out with de-icer on the sidewalks over and over again, trying to de-ice the neighborhood so everyone can be safe.
I worked up a sweat and a backache and I get back inside and the first thing I hear is my kid going.
Dad, I want hot cocoa.
First, I was like, man, I was just out there.
You weren't.
But then I remembered, food is about nourishing our bodies, but it's about nourishing our feelings too, right?
And when my kids see snow, hot cocoa just makes her feel good.
So today our show is all about food and feelings.
Later on we'll talk with British food writer Bea Wilson about her new book, The Heart-Shaped Tin, about the emotional relationships people have with their kitchen objects.
We're going to start with Jarell Guy.
So I first met Jarell years ago when she photographed the now iconic cookbook Jubilee by Tony Tipton Martin.
And she didn't just photograph the book, mind you.
She cooked and styled all of the food and props as well.
But it turns out Jarell isn't just a triple threat.
She's a quadruple, I don't know quintuple threat, because she's also a wonderful writer and recipe developer in her own right.
So, after taking some time to take care of herself and her own burnout, I guess all that talent meant that she took on just way too much work.
She's back with a new cookbook called We Fancy, but one where she shows us a whole new meaning of fanciness.
So hey, Jarell, it's so great to talk with you today.
Hi, yes, I'm really excited to be talking to you too, Francis.
Well, thank you, thank you.
So I love the title of your book We Fancy because it's so fun, but also like Like, pretty instantly you figure out the book is kind of the opposite of being fancy.
Like.
One of the how to be fancy tips is to make sure there aren't dishes in the sink when you start cooking, which is such a great tip.
Like I find myself freaking out when I'm making dinner and I'm like why do I have all the dirty dishes from lunch in the sink?
I get so annoyed at myself.
I'm like oh, if I just took that second to put them on the dishwasher beforehand, life would be that much more beautiful.
But I love the idea that that's a fancy thing to you.
So tell us actually what you mean by being fancy.
I mean, I think that that's a great thing that you pointed out.
First, because I think fanciness is a way that you feel.
I think you can't feel glamorous if you're feeling stressed.
You know, like busyness, franticness, that doesn't feel very, very good.
And so a lot of this book was about getting into a good mental space and kind of just tapping into that creative energy, so that you're flowing through the kitchen and you're just, you know, like tapped in and you're like um, just going with the flow, and so that's always been the way that i've cooked and what brought me the most joy, and so i really tried to distill that into like rules, like rules, like quote unquote, but just like um.
I really tried to figure out a formula for this feeling and give it a name.
And that was the name.
Yeah, yeah.
But also, like you know, when you say like fancy, you're thinking like oh, is it like expensive ingredients?
Is it like caviar?
Is it all that stuff?
And actually, as I was reading your you know how to be fancy tips and rules, it actually made me think again.
Not about that stuff, but it made me think about like, The joys of simple things, the joy to be found in everyday things and everyday actions.
You know, it's about mindfulness in a way, right?
How to be mindful and just like kind of be in yourself.
And, like you said, not stressed out and just be like happy you're making dinner for yourself, for your friends or family, whatever.
Just like it's just a way to, yeah, just a way to sort of like center yourself in a really nice way.
Right.
I was thinking like some people have yoga or Pilates or Tai Chi.
And for me it's always been cooking.
That gives me this meditative feel.
You know where I really close off from overthinking.
I can step out of my head and tap into this other place where I'm not worried about anything, um all of the stresses of the day, so things get simpler.
I feel like i, i i can access like better ideas um, my creativity just is like sharper and more refined um, and yeah, i mean, i feel like that's kind of the state that you get in when you're you're you're meditating too, you know um.
And so Yeah, there's a thing in the book where I say, you know like, use your pinky finger to not, you know to kind of just like remind yourself not to take life so seriously.
Yeah, and it and and i was thinking about it later like pick your fingers yeah, pick your yeah, pick your finger up.
Um, just like be silly, be goofy, like disconnect from the character you've been playing all day, and like just you know um unwind uh and, and it kind of made me think like it feels very similar to like if you're ever listening to a meditation and you hear that like you know, like when they play the little bell to kind of like snap you out of, like overthinking, or just you know it just like taps you into a different place and um, you kind of just like calm down and you're like okay yeah, like this is who i really am.
I've come back to my myself here.
Uh, this is what matters um, and it's not like the craziness that you've been caught up in all day, it's like home and family and like nourishing yourself and you know, taking your time and you know so.
So that was those were the themes of the book.
Yeah, I mean, it is the only cookbook I've ever seen that has that finishes with a page of like journal prompts.
I know I was like, but it is but, But it is a cookbook and there's beautiful food in it.
And so I do want to get to some of the food.
And one of the Be Fancy tips is to garnish your food.
And yeah, that can sound like a chef-y term.
But really, I think it means you just add a little something.
It can be something even pre-made or something really simple to a dish at the last second, at the end, just to give it another unexpected twist, a little bit of crunchiness or another layer of flavor or texture.
And you have all these really great little finishing touches throughout the book.
And actually at the end, you have a whole section of them.
I want to get to some of these because they're...
Sounds so great.
One is so simple, actually, but so smart.
You have your crispy spiced rice.
It's such a smart little hack because you use basically Rice Krispies but you kind of doctor them up.
Tell us about how you do that and what you use it on.
It's really simple.
You just take cereal, Rice Krispie cereal, and you just season it with a lot of different warm spices like cumin, and you know you could do cayenne.
I mean you can really season it however you want, but you bake that in the oven with a little bit of olive oil and it gets crispy and all the spices just kind of coat it.
And then you can throw that on salads.
You can throw that on grain bowls.
I really.
I actually found this like at a salad spot, like where they were putting crispy rice on the salads.
And that was my inspiration for it because that was my favorite thing.
I would go in there specifically for that crispy rice on top in it.
And so when I recreated at home, I just feel like I'm splurging a little bit more.
I feel like I'm eating out.
And so that was a lot of the concepts of these toppings.
It was like, these are the things that you find at restaurants.
They go a little bit above and beyond.
And to make you anticipate the flavors of the dish, to make you excited, to make you pause a little bit more.
And so you know that was how I was always setting up.
The garnishes is just, you know how do you take this thing.
That I mean, you could have thought of it in advance.
You could have had it already in the refrigerator already.
Or you know, if you have like a parsley dust or something like that, like I gave just regular herbs, sprinkling regular herbs on your dish, these fun names, so that it feels more like an event, you know.
So I have like parsley dust and diamond scallions and it just, it just...
I think naming something also changes the way that you experience it.
So, you know, obviously it's just chopped parsley.
But to call it parsley dust feels just a little bit elevated, a little bit more outside of the norm.
You're giving it away.
You're giving too much away.
Yeah, I'll let people.
No, like on a menu when you see parsley dust, that's worth another $6.
Yeah.
Literally chopped parsley.
But actually.
So to go back to the crispy spiced rice idea, you have another one that I really like a lot.
I'm excited to make this.
You call them falafel crumbles.
And like, again, the magic of naming things in food, I think, is underappreciated because...
Right away.
I think of like the edge, like that little edge, crispy bit, extra crispy bit of the falafel that like fell off.
Yeah.
And I like pick it up off the wrapper that's on the table.
Yeah, yeah.
So I think of that, but you make this sort of in a similar way.
You take instead of rice, you're taking just a can of chickpeas.
Yeah, canned chickpeas.
I drain them and then I bake them in the oven until they're crispy.
And then I pulse them in a food processor, and then I add chopped herbs and then all the spices that you would find in a falafel.
We're like huge falafel lovers.
And so this felt like such a great experience alternative to spending forever making falafel.
You know, because the traditional way of making falafel is you're soaking chickpeas um dry chickpeas overnight.
And we would do that all the time, but I wanted to get to just the joy, I guess, of all of that.
Like you're saying, like the little bits that fall on the table, like how do we get to that quickly?
Like how do we like, you know, like harness that part of it.
And, um, And so that idea came to me and I was like, yeah, like, I don't know.
I don't know if I'll need to make falafel anytime soon, especially on the weeknight, because this comes together so quickly.
Yeah.
So you have this beautiful sort of crumbly bowl.
What are some ways that you like to use it?
So I put it on a Caesar salad, like on salads.
It's really great.
And grain bowls and bowls of rice.
Yeah.
But you can also do it.
I've also like crusted salmon fillets with it.
Oh, cool.
Yeah.
I'll do a little bit of the dressing on the salmon to act almost like a glue.
And then I'll put the falafel on there and then you can like sear it in the pan and get extra.
That sounds so cool.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Scrambled eggs.
Yeah.
Oh, man, that would be so good.
Scrambled eggs and a little bit of, like, yogurt and some flatbread.
Where were you?
I need to, like, brainstorm with you.
A little, like, tomato salad and get these, like, falafel crumbs on top of that.
Yeah.
That would be so good.
Avocado toast over eggs.
Like, delicious.
Yeah.
We'll be back in a minute with more from Jarell Guy, author of We Fancy.
And then it's Bea Wilson, author of The Heart-Shaped Tin.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM, American Public Media.
It's time to level the f*** up.
I'm Robin Arzon, and I light fires.
I'm an executive founder, best-selling author ultra-marathoner mother, proud Latina.
And I'm not done yet announcing Project Swagger, my new weekly podcast, Your Transformation Toolkit.
I'm gonna cut through the noise and give you actionable takeaways each week in under 30 minutes.
Elevate your hustle with routines, strategies, and mindset shifts that I have pressure tested.
I have burnt down this Beyonce candle like all the way to the bottom.
We have been trying to manifest.
Carves are not the enemy.
I probably have a piece of bread or a bagel with me at all times, and I am not exaggerating.
Tune in on February 24th for episode one, Building the Skill of Self-Talk.
This is the foundation.
Follow Project Swagger wherever you get your podcasts.
Let's go.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table, the show for curious cooks and eaters.
We're talking with Jarell Guy, author of We Fancy.
Let's get back to it with her.
Um, a dear friend of mine once wrote about this incredibly simple dish that they make for dinner all the time, which is a bowl of rice.
Um, some cabbage red cabbage or green, just thinly sliced.
Get a pan ripping hot and you just throw the cabbage in there.
So it gets a little bit nice and caramelized on the bottom, crusty.
And they just season it with some soy sauce and some sriracha, like the hot sauce.
And then they put that on the rice and then fry an egg or something.
And I was like, One night I was like, okay, sure, I'll do Molly's cabbage thing.
And I was like, oh my God, I love this.
Like, I love this.
The simplest thing in the world.
And the reason why I bring it up is because you have another sauce in your sort of arsenal of delicious things just to make and have on hand.
Your spicy sesame aioli, I thought of it because of the sriracha.
Mm-hmm.
But this is what it's like sriracha, garlic powder, miso, sesame oil, just stirred in the mayo.
So you're basically like seasoning mayonnaise.
Yeah.
It's like a flavor monster.
And I can just imagine, you know, a nice squirt of that on top of that cabbage and the eggs.
That's so crazy, Frances, because I have that recipe in the book of the eggs and the cabbage.
It's like a tip.
Oh, really?
I missed it.
Oh, that's so funny.
I missed it.
But it's like yeah, if you want this egg extra crispy, put a bed of shredded cabbage from the store pre-shredded cabbage.
Because I'm like a huge, like, you know, use the grocery store for help on a weekday.
But yeah, just like throwing some cabbage down there and letting it get extra charred.
I'm obsessed.
Cabbage is so delicious when it's charred like that in a cast iron with oil and it gets so crispy.
Um, eating that with eggs over hot rice with soy sauce.
Yes.
Because my mom is a soy sauce fiend.
And so I grew up eating lots of like.
I don't know if you know what finadini is, but it's just like onions marinated in like yeah, soy sauce and vinegar.
And we would put that on everything.
So we put that over rice.
We put that over eggs.
Um, And so I have a recipe in the book that kind of honors that recipe a little bit.
But it's the green crackly eggs.
And then that's the recipe where I add the cabbage.
What are your green crackly eggs?
So it's using another sauce in the book, which is the chunky charred scallion sauce.
So if you make that in advance, you can keep that in the fridge for a bit.
And then I actually do oats, make savory oats.
Okay.
My mom would always use rice, but when I was young like I, would eat oats and I would season them with soy sauce.
So I kind of like brought that back into the book.
But instead of soy sauce, I use miso for that umami.
And just because I think the color of the soy sauce oats can be a little bit off-putting to other people.
Your food is so beautiful.
Your photography is so beautiful.
I am thinking, boy, that sounds ugly.
Right.
I didn't know how to make that pretty.
Sorry.
That sounds ugly.
So, yeah.
So I was like, I'll make this green.
Like, I love making food green.
You know, like, I think that that just makes me feel like I'm being...
Like, I don't know.
I'm like my brain that I'm doing, doing the most.
And so I like to stir that into the oats and that makes it savory.
But then I add a little bit of miso to bring in that, you know, fermented soy sauce flavor.
And that makes me think of my mom and my childhood.
And then I top that with a really crispy egg.
Cause Chris, like I love crispy edged eggs.
Like they're just like, they have to be a little bit burnt.
Like, yeah.
It's almost like you're, it's not like a fried egg.
It's like a seared egg.
Yeah.
Crack it into like really hot oil.
Yeah.
Crispy edges.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's funny.
I remember when I went to culinary school, they were like, that's not how you fry an egg.
If you fry an egg with a crispy edge, you're failing this class.
Oh, Lordy.
We had to learn to make the fried eggs.
Super silky, not a single bubble, not a spot of brown.
I just think of that thing where like oh, the chef says like this way is wrong and that way is right.
And you're like, I don't know, man.
Crispy egg is pretty good.
I would have failed culinary school completely, because I'm just that person that just does it the other way.
And they're like, why?
You don't listen to instructions at all.
Like, I'm curious about this way.
Because you're such a baker.
Yeah.
No, I don't bake like traditionally though at all.
Like I really don't.
I bake like a cook.
Oh, that's so interesting.
Well, actually, okay.
So, you know, when I first heard of you and your work, you were really known as a baker.
You had this great blog.
Your first cookbook is called Black Girl Baking.
And actually like one of your most famous recipes is...
It's one you created for the New York Times.
It's a strawberry spoon cake.
It's funny.
I went into my app, you know, when you have like the recipe box of like the saved recipes.
And I'm like, sorry, New York Times.
I've only ever like saved three recipes.
Really?
For one of them is that one.
What an honor.
Oh, my God.
Because it's so good.
And it's this beautiful, it's a cake.
You bake it, but it's called a spoon cake because it's so tender.
You eat it right in the baking pan with a spoon.
Mm-hmm.
And I feel like you have a recipe in this book that is sort of its spiritual cousin or maybe its technical cousin.
The olive oil brownie pudding.
Tell us about this one because this sounds incredible.
So yeah, I like this one a lot because it is something that you can eat with a spoon too.
I mean the whole dessert chapter of this book.
I say it's called everything chocolate a la mode or pudding-y subtitle of it, because those are the desserts that I want to eat when I'm just at home.
I'm not trying to do anything fancy.
I want to be able to eat dessert with a spoon.
I want to be able to eat it with ice cream.
I want it to melt on my tongue.
I want it to feel very comforting.
And so yeah, these recipes are ones that I'll make over and over again, because they're actually ones that I crave.
So I melt chocolate on the stove top with a little bit of olive oil.
And I think I like this one because I always have my olive oil right there in the back of the stove.
So, you know, like it's just something that is an ingredient that's always accessible.
So I melt chocolate on the stove with olive oil.
I'll remove it from the heat and then let the residual heat kind of melt the rest of the chocolate.
And then I'll whip eggs and sugar together in a stand mixer.
Until it gets really fluffy and like cappuccino foam, basically.
And then I'll drizzle the warm chocolate into the eggs and sugar.
Yeah.
And sift over some almond flour.
I actually really like to do hazelnut flour for this, because it gives it that like kind of Nutella profile.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then I mix that together and I bake it and I kind of under bake it a little bit, so that the center is molten.
Yeah, it's still a little gooey.
Yeah, it's still a little gooey.
I mean, and that's the same thing with the strawberry spoon cake.
You kind of want it to be a little gooey.
Yeah.
Because you want like the ice cream to kind of like blend in with the molten center.
And, you know, like it just makes this really simply like luscious.
Yeah.
Like hot and like temperature hot and, you know, cold like combo that.
Oh my gosh, that's just like my favorite.
It sounds so good.
But like with the olive oil too, like I love olive oil in sweets.
Yeah.
I remember the first time I ever saw olive oil as a topping in an ice cream place.
And I was like, whoa, that's crazy.
I'd never, you know, why would you ever do that?
And I tried it.
I was like, ooh, it's really good.
Yeah.
And there's like a fair amount of olive oil.
It's like a quarter cup of olive oil.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So like that like really sort of green flavor.
Well, depending on your oil, of course, but like that flavor comes through.
Yeah. but it's gooey.
It's everything you want in a chocolate dessert.
It sounds so super good.
And it like cuts the sweetness a little bit, you know?
So it just feels more, there's just more nuance in the flavor.
You know, it's just like a better range.
It's not just like purely sweet.
I really like when the desserts are like, there's just a lot going on.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
If we have time, I want to get to one more.
It's another baking recipe.
It just sounds so good.
It's your almond and peach cornbread.
Yes.
So I've never In my cornbread life I have kind of come up around real cornbread purists like real Appalachian folks and Southern folks are like no sugar in cornbread, nothing in cornbread.
Cornbread is cornmeal, it's eggs, it's bacon fat, it's pure.
But I love this idea of almond and peach in it.
So talk about that and you have this like chili butter that goes with it.
That sounds incredible.
I mean, i'm just not a purist like i will just do whatever.
I already told you, i don't follow directions.
Yeah i, i mean.
Yeah, that's so funny.
Yeah, i mean i.
So i i, i love cornbread.
I make it to accompany my chilies and stews and stuff like that, and so I love the idea of puring fruit and thinking of fruit not just as like a flavoring, but as like a way to add structure to things when I'm doing gluten-free things too.
So I don't know.
Like I played with that.
And I like this recipe because I just kind of make the base wet ingredients in the blender.
Everything just gets blended together.
And I put preserves in there too.
So I put apricot preserves and I use the apricot preserves in the batter but also as a glaze on top.
You know how, like pastry chefs, they'll like melt a little bit of apricot glaze and like brush their pastries.
Leave that shininess yeah, to give it that pretty shininess.
So that was the whole concept behind this one.
Um was just thinking about this really rustic skillet recipe.
That's so um, not fancy.
It has this like fancy pastry looking glaze on it yeah, right.
And then there's like fruit.
Yeah yeah, there's like fruit inside um, but i was also just like i had peaches like in my in my bowl.
I was like what am i gonna do with this?
Like what can i?
How did you come up with that?
Well, peaches.
Yeah, exactly.
I feel like you automatically become creative or find these fun solutions when you're just looking around at what you have.
I love it.
Well, hey, Jarell, you know what?
An almond peach cornbread sounds very fancy.
Yeah.
Good.
Thank you so much.
It's been so fun talking with you.
Yeah, this was great.
Thank you for having me.
Jarell Guy is the author of We Fancy.
You can find her recipe for that olive oil brownie pudding at splendidtable.org.
So it's pretty weird, I know, to brag about a gift you gave someone else once.
But I think one of the nicest gifts I've ever given was a knife I gave to my friend, a chef, who was starting to learn about Chinese cooking.
And to celebrate I gave him a cleaver that my mother gave me when I moved out of her house many, many years ago.
And I still think about that cleaver, not because I wish I still had it, but because when I do I get to think of two people who mean a lot to me.
And so you know, we all have our own emotional connections to objects, but especially ones, I think, having to do with cooking and eating, because they're two of the most fundamental activities of life.
The wonderful British writer B. Wilson has a new book on exactly this subject.
It's called The Heart-Shaped Tin.
I said, hey, Bea, it's great to see you.
Hi, it's so wonderful to be talking to you again.
Thank you.
Oh, it's such a pleasure.
And it's been a few years.
But I have such a distinct memory that the last time we were talking, you were talking about how a box grater is like a miracle machine.
I remember you saying it's like a hundred knives at your disposal at once.
And you sounded...
Like almost moved by the elegance of a box grater.
I do love my box grater.
I think it's just, I partly love it.
It's one of those things we so take for granted and it's in most of our kitchens and it doesn't get enough love or enough use.
And yeah, I still love my box grater.
Well, I think this is very consistent with your work.
Yeah, because so much of your work is about unearthing these sort of greater meanings.
And your new book is really all about the emotional relationships that people have with their kitchen tools, maybe in a little bit of a different way.
There aren't some people waxing poetic about their box creators in this book.
But tell me how you came to write this book.
I think this book has been inside me in some form for a really long time, because more than a decade ago now I wrote this book called Consider the Fork, which looked at kitchen technologies from a kind of historical angle.
So everything from pots and pans to fire ice, going way back, you know, grinding tools 10000 years ago, kind of stuff.
In that book.
The cooking pot is quite a high tech device and And when I was going around talking about that book after it came out, I kept noticing people would get weirdly emotional about things, whether it was talking about chopsticks versus forks, or whether it was their grandmother's favourite pot or something.
So I kind of parked that thought at the back of my mind that there was a way of approaching kitchen objects that was emotional.
And then this thing happened in my own life that brought the emotions crashing into my own existence in quite a dramatic way, which was my husband of many, many years suddenly left during the pandemic.
It was June 2020 when he left and I hadn't seen it coming.
It was a terrible shock and And then a couple of months after he left, yeah, he left June.
And then this happened in August.
I was stumbling around the house, clearly in a state of grief, when what seemed to happen was that this heart-shaped cake tin, in which I'd baked my own wedding cake many years earlier, seemed to just jump out at my feet in front of me.
And it felt so weird.
It was like a sign.
Clearly, what actually happened is I must have kicked it with my foot.
It wasn't a sign.
It was just a sign I was clumsy.
And that's what you do when you're crying and feeling lost.
But it got me thinking in terms of my own life of why is it I'm having all these magical, strange feelings about kitchen objects?
I felt that my husband's ex-husband's hands had almost left a kind of imprint on the edge of the kitchen table where he used to always sit.
It made me feel weird even to go past that edge of the kitchen table.
I felt strange about the mugs we used to drink from.
And at the same time, my mother was suffering from dementia and I was in that process that many people go through in middle age of negotiating how do you clear a parent's house when they have to leave, and what do you keep and what do you let go of?
And it kind of set me on this quest of looking for other stories from other people as well as thinking about my own life.
And I realized it was such a rich scene.
This book could have been 10 times longer.
Yeah.
So who did you talk to to find these stories?
Did you have to put feelers out and research?
I mean, you do so much research in a lot of the books.
You do bring the history of these objects into play.
But Was it just like you'd have casual conversation and almost everyone had a story?
How did you actually come upon these stories?
Yeah, I love how you just phrased that, Francis.
That's exactly it.
Everyone had a story.
I thought the research was going to be so much harder for this book.
I mean, certain things, as you say, were historical stories.
There was one that's the story of someone called Jacob Haim, who was in a terrible concentration camp during the Second World War.
And he I can hardly talk about it without crying.
He made a spoon for himself.
And that one I just came across on the website of the Holocaust Museum in Montreal.
I've still never seen it in the flesh, but I had the great privilege of managing to speak to Jacob's daughter and some other family members.
So that was a process of research, like I might have done for my earlier, more historical books.
But it's a way more personal book than my other books.
And many of the stories just came from word of mouth.
And what you just said, everyone has a story.
I've realized this even more in the process of talking about the book, doing book events both in the States and the UK, where I live, where audience members, every single person, says It has a wonderful story.
I've now realised.
If you're a shy person, as I am, if you go to a party don't know what to say, just go up to someone and say what's your favourite kitchen implement and why.
And very quickly you get into this deep, emotional, sad stuff to do with love and loss.
I mean.
So I thought I was going to have to interview many more people and discard lots of material.
And actually, almost everything was golden.
So some people were people I knew already, they were friends.
Some people were friends of friends.
Some people.
There were people where I thought well, I know of this person, I bet they have a good implement.
But then sometimes it was surprising what they chose.
Yeah.
And some of the stories come from certainly your own life.
You mentioned The Heart-Shaped Tin that the book is named after and the sort of very sort of immediate and kind of traumatic emotional event you had.
And some come from your family.
Talk to us about the melon baller.
I mean, something as simple and as almost sort of silly as a melon baller can have great meaning.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of the book is, as I say, kind of sad.
The Melon Baller is more of a comic chapter.
And it's about a strange family ritual that my sons have.
My boys have three kids, very spaced out in age.
My oldest is now 26, which I can't believe.
My youngest is 16.
And then I have a daughter in the middle who's 22.
And the two boys, because there was always a decade between them.
You don't have that much in common.
You're never kind of playing with Lego or train tracks at the same time when there's 10 years between you.
But one thing they do have in common is they are both obsessed with the only melon baller in my kitchen.
And they don't use it like you're meant to use a melon baller, i.e. to make fancy garnishes.
To them, it's something you eat a melon with.
So anytime I buy a melon which actually I really only do in the summer because That's when they're good yeah,
That's when they're good, exactly.
Anyway, both of the boys would say that melon is their favourite fruit.
And so there's just this weird competitiveness where we have a melon in the house and they rush to grab the melon baller and only one person will get it.
And I wrote that chapter about it.
There's a whole theory about objects which comes from someone called Emil Durkheim, which is related to religion and the ways in which, in early religions, people congregate around totems.
And it's really a way of binding groups together by a shared obsession with certain symbols.
And I was kind of joking that in our family, the melon baller has become a totem.
But it's really as with other religious totems, it's really about the shared experience.
I think of caring wildly about this object in a way that's completely silly and not serious.
And also it kind of matters to both of them.
And I think most families have some version of that.
And your daughter stays out of this, like a sensible woman.
She's like, this is ridiculous.
She just is like, plenty of spoons in the kitchen drawer, kind of rolling her eyes.
Yeah.
That's so funny.
Well, it's also like if there's an element of competitiveness to it, too.
There's a power.
There's like a, you know, you said it's like a religious totem.
It's also like a scepter, right?
It's a he who wields the melon baller.
Yeah, it's a lightsaber.
It's a scepter.
It's a sword.
It's a power object.
It's prestige.
And it's also just a silly game as well.
It's a toy.
Bea Wilson's latest book is The Heart-Shaped Tit.
We'll be back with more with her in just a minute.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from American Public Media.
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I'm Francis Lam, and you're listening to The Splendid Table.
We're talking with author Bea Wilson on the emotional lives of kitchen objects.
Let's get back to it with her.
You start the book...
With a story about a family and their best China.
The idea of having the best China or the nice China, rather than your everyday China.
Tell us that story because I think there's such an interesting idea there.
Yeah, I loved this story.
So this came from an Indian British food writer called Rupa Gulati, who's a wonderful person, wonderful writer.
And her family, as you say, they had purchased a whole China dinner service.
They bought it in 1975.
They'd come from India to the UK.
They were the only Asian family in the village.
They suffered a lot of And xenophobia would be the nice word for it, prejudice.
And at that time I think it was the same in the States, owning a whole China dinner service.
It was one of the most prestigious purchases you could make.
And it was kind of how you signaled to the outside world what specialness looked like in your home.
And the way Rupert described it, the particular dinner service, it is beautiful.
I've seen it.
It's made by Royal Dalton and it's a design called Braemar.
It has silver around the edge and then olive green and then a geometric pattern.
And it was so special that only Rupa's father was allowed to wash it up.
Only her mother was allowed to dry.
Her mother would actually set the table for dinner two days before people came round to eat.
Wow.
But I know that's extreme, right?
But there was this atmosphere of wonder and awe, but also fear.
And Rupa's mother sadly died quite young.
And then her dad died and she inherited the china, but she still felt, I can't use it.
It's special.
It's too special.
What would happen if a plate smashed?
And then Rupa's husband was diagnosed with a brain tumour.
And one of the very first things she thought was, I have to get the best China out.
I have to use it now.
Because life's too short not to use the good China when you don't know if you're never going to get a chance to use it.
And so I find it such a beautiful thing that she did for herself really, that she decided she was going to make every day special during this incredibly testing time when she was going to the hospital every day.
But she would begin the day with her slice of ordinary toast off these beautiful shining silver plates.
Hmm.
It's so funny.
This is certainly something that people – I think about a lot.
I never wear my nice clothes.
I have a pair of shoes, and they're not even that nice, honestly.
They're so old at this point.
They're probably out of fashion.
But I spent $100 on them, on this pair of shoes, when $100 could buy more than it does now.
But to me, that sounded like an absurd amount of money to pay.
But I was on a vacation and they were cool.
I was in Berlin, you know, whatever.
I bought this pair of $100 shoes once and I never wear them because I don't want to mess them up.
Yeah.
And now it's ridiculous because they live in my closet.
They might as well not exist.
Right.
But I'm always still feeling like, but when is the right time to wear those nice shoes?
When's the right time?
Exactly.
I think we all have certain objects that we apply these rules of self-denial or postponement to.
I could relate to Rupert's story so much.
It might not be china plates, for you it's shoes.
But we've all got something like that where we're delaying and actually there's something glorious about saying the time is now, we're going to use it now, and if you look at the shoes and decide you don't like them, you don't have to wear them.
You are allowed, even if they did cost you a hundred dollars.
But if you love them, wear them tomorrow.
Wear them for no reason.
Yeah, i'd love that idea.
I love that.
Well, let me ask you this, actually, because I brought the shoes in my life.
And this is a book about kitchen or dining objects and their role in people's lives.
It could have really just as easily been a book about people and their clothes or their relationship with their jewelry, or whatever.
But it's not, right?
There's something special or unique about talking with people about what they cook with or what they eat with.
What is that, do you think?
What sets this apart?
Many things at once.
One is that I think no subject gets you so quickly into someone's childhood home and to their mothers particularly both parents fathers, grandparents as kitchen objects.
If I talk to you about your shoes, you're describing a moment alone in a shop making it's still a momentous purchase.
I can feel the weight of that hundred dollars and yeah, your desire to have this beautiful, fashionable pair of shoes, but you're not telling me about your mother.
Um, When you ask someone what their most treasured kitchen object is, even if their most treasured kitchen object is deciding to cook in a different way from their parents, they're taking you into this intimate space.
So that's thing number one.
Thing number two I think there is something uniquely special about kitchen objects, which actually one of my interviewees, someone called Barry Yorgrau, who's an expert on hoarding
And he had this beautiful image about kitchen objects, which is.
There's another set of experts I quote in the book who divide objects up into these objects of contemplation.
You know, lovely things we like to look at knickknacks, photo frames vases, little pieces of sculpture paintings.
And those are things you look at.
And then there are objects of action.
If you ask a kid what their main possessions are, they're going to be objects of action.
Toys are all objects of action.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But the point is a kitchen object can be and is both.
So let's say you have something like.
I mean, I have my mother's wooden spoons, which are some of my most treasured things.
Sometimes I just look at them and I almost imagine I can see her hand on the handle.
And I often feel about spoons and whisks and all sorts of things that...
There's something to hold on to when someone's hands are gone.
I can't hold my mother's hands, but I can hold her spoon.
But then it's also a tool.
I can pick it up and I can stir things with it and I can make a new soup.
There's a reason to hold it, yeah.
There's a reason to hold it.
And it's, I mean, Rupa also said this wonderful thing about her plates.
She said she had to get them down, partly because life's too short.
But also she said, I want these plates to witness more conversation and experience more food.
It was as if the plates were a kind of family member who were going to taste these different flavours again.
And I love that.
And obviously there's certain kitchen tools that you feel that with more than others.
But I think it's those things.
They are actually getting used and changing their meaning in a very active way.
I mean, jewellery, yes.
You can have jewellery that belongs to a beloved family member or has been given to you.
And that's very special.
Yeah.
Yeah, but you're not going to suddenly change the use of that necklace.
You can't cook something with a necklace.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't know.
I love what you said about Rupa and the China too, because it's like by using them more, you're sort of imbuing them with different meanings.
So it's not just, oh, it's valuable.
And so it's worth something.
No, these are the plates we used when this happened.
And when that other person came over, I love that.
Fresh memories.
Yeah.
And fresh flavors.
Several people.
I was giving this book talk in Washington and someone brought along a crockpot, which was very exciting to me because I'd never seen one.
Oh, really?
And she said...
I know that that's not a kind of exotic item if you live in the States, but I'd read about them.
I'd never seen one.
And it went back to the 70s.
And she said, I genuinely believe that there's still smells of the beef stew that my family has.
I mean, she's washed it many times.
Yeah, sure, sure, sure.
But she could almost feel the perfume of the beef stew on it.
That's so funny.
That's so interesting.
Well, it's funny because if you were to ask me what my, you know, beloved kitchen item is um, there are a few, and for different reasons, but the first thing I would think of is my rice cooker, which is a rice cooker that I took with me, you know, when I lived in my first apartment by myself, while I was still in college.
So that was, I mean, geez, that was 30 years ago.
Wow.
And now that I think about it, I took from my parents' house and it was, you know, their spare one.
So they replaced it.
So it was probably 10 years old at that point.
So it's like a 40 year old rice cooker.
And it's still going strong.
Yeah, I made cooked rice in it two nights ago.
And you know, every once in a while I'm tempted to go buy one of these amazing things, new like Japanese Zojirushi rice cookers that have like computers built in and they can sense like the grain of rice and exactly when it you know.
Da da da da da, da da.
But I can't because I have this rice cooker ready.
And also it keeps working.
It keeps delivering for you.
And then, each time it does it, you're somehow connected with that younger self who left home for the first time and was embarking on this journey with this rice cooker.
Totally.
It's a companion and a tool at the same time, isn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's funny, I don't remember so much from my life like how I started to use it, how I sort of became an adult with it, right.
I don't think of it in those terms.
But every time I look at it, I remember the counter it sat on, you know, where we would go.
That's how we served our dinner.
We would go and scoop your own bowl of rice.
And then we'd go to the table with our bowl of rice where the rest of the food would be.
So I remember that.
I remember it sitting on the counter and us going to get scoops of rice.
Yeah.
I can't get rid of it.
And it will never break because things made 40 years ago just don't break.
Sometimes you almost want them to break so you can get the fancy Zojirushi one.
But yeah, that sounds like an absolutely irreplaceable item.
Yeah.
And actually, it's funny to connect it back to the book, too.
There's this really great story of a fellow American, Bonnie Slotnick, actually a fellow New Yorker.
She's sort of a legendary used cookbook dealer.
But you have this lovely story of hers with her salt shaker.
Yeah.
So this was another beautiful and kind of sad and happy story.
I didn't know what object Bonnie was going to choose.
I just knew because, as you say, she runs this legendary store which is vintage cookbooks but also vintage kitchenalia.
So...
I knew she was someone who had really strong feelings about objects.
She didn't hesitate.
She instantly said that her most treasured object was a little salt shaker that looks exactly like a tomato.
It's not expensive or precious in that sense.
They were kind of sold for just a few cents in Depression-era America.
She thinks it came from a store like maybe Woolworths.
But it belonged to her mother.
And Bonnie's mother died when she was just 14.
And all these years since I mean it's, I think, maybe close to six decades Bonnie has kept this salt shaker safe.
And she said, sorry, I tear up a lot to talk about this, I'm trying not to cry.
She said, if this breaks, something is going to end.
And it was half the time she was talking about the salt shaker.
It was also just so happy because it was such a jolly object.
It was bright red.
And she said her mother never left the house without wearing bright red lipstick, dangling earrings.
And somehow the salt shaker was Bonnie's mother.
And I could just see it.
I could just see that this object.
It was like carrying a piece of her childhood home around with her and accessing this beautiful world before her mother died.
And therefore I kind of said to her, what kind of thought do you put in it?
Many people who are interested in food.
Now, you can get obsessional about salt and you get the flaky salt.
You get the kosher salt.
No no, you just have to get the absolute bog standard table salt, because that's the only thing that will come out of it.
But that was fine because that was how her mother cooked.
And that's what she wanted to be connected to.
That's like me not being able to get the fancy rice cooker.
Like I can't get like the perfectly cooked individual separate grains of rice because I just I have to use.
You're stuck with this rice cooker.
She's stuck with table salt.
Yeah, but that way they are members of the family, aren't they?
They are either a proxy for other members of the family or they almost become like household pets that you have to put up with their foibles and their moods because they're so special.
I love that.
I love the little tomato salt shaker.
Well, Bea, this has been such a pleasure talking with you.
And it's funny because I look at the book and the table of contents.
You know all the stories are grouped into chapters.
With different themes, you have charms, mementos, junk, tools, symbols, gifts and treasure.
And not to end with a critique of your organizational pattern, but it really seems like all of these objects are all of those things.
They are.
And at least one of the people I interviewed.
When I told him that I was going to put his object in junk, he was like no no no no, you can't.
It's not junk.
So I moved it to memento.
The line between junk and treasure is just all in the eye of the beholder.
And I don't use junk in a pejorative way.
I think I'm all in favour of buying dinner plates in vintage secondhand car boot sale type places.
But you're absolutely right that, yeah, a memento and a gift are usually the same thing.
And a tool and a symbol, like most of the tools actually in the tool chapter end up being quite symbolic.
Yeah.
Well, what a lovely book.
And it's been such a pleasure talking with you.
Thank you, Bea.
Oh, it's been such a pleasure, Francis.
Thank you.
B. Wilson's latest book is The Heart-Shaped Tip.
And that is our show for this week.
We hope you enjoyed it and we'll talk to you next week.
Oh, but hey, before we go.
I know you hear it all the time, but The Splendid Table really is supported by listeners like you.
And we and all of public media need you more than ever.
Thank you for supporting your local public radio stations.
This London Table was created by Sally Swift and Lynn Rosetta Casper and was made this week by technical producer Jennifer Lubke, producers Eric Romero and Maria Wartel and managing producer Sally Swift.
Jordan Turgeon is our digital producer with help from Delonix Wynn.
Our intern is Ruby Sigmund, and Lauren Humpert is our senior podcast production manager.
Thank you for listening.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is APM, American Public Media.
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