Clues From a Marriage

I’ve got two of the biggest frying pans in domestic use anywhere. My husband liked to fry bacon, not bake it, and he liked pancakes. When we’d been living in the country for about fifteen years, I took a part-time job in a gift shop specializing in contemporary design home accessories. With my employee discount, I acquired several handsome pieces made of ceramic material designed to protect the outside of NASA’s shuttle rockets. On the rare occasions when I cook for company now, I cherish them because they actually do pass from oven to table in pure elegance.

Another dish my husband loved to specialize in was making crêpes. We had a nice little cast aluminum pan, much used. Then one day only a few years ago, he looked at one of the catalogs that come regularly, and fell for a bigger crêpe pan. It resides under the roasting pan in the drawer underneath the oven, unused.

If I were to empty every drawer, inventory each cupboard shelf, I could construct a record complete with documented horizons of our life as a couple. I still have the first egg cups we bought because we liked soft-boiled eggs for breakfast — along with the three egg cozies with images of a lion, a tiger, and a bear that used to keep them warm until we got to the table. There’s the beautiful stoneware server purchased at a local sale where we put in a stint for the benefit of the arts foundation sponsor as hosts. In addition, there is the magnet decorated with Wusthoff, Haenkel, and Sabatier cutlery it took us a lifetime to accumulate. My husband couldn’t abide a dull knife, so there’s the electric sharpener he finally bought to replace his favorite stone. The finishing steel hangs next to the knives.

It’s a temptation to make convenient symbols out of things. Yet, what is more emblematic of homemaking than the feeding of the family, unless it’s the building of the shelter?

Here in my kitchen are the artifacts that could be used to date events in our marriage. I’m willing to bet, this technique would do for any couple whose partnership lasted long enough. You wouldn’t have to wait for the midden to be analyzed, all you’d have to do would be to check the photo albums and the cooking utensils, and you could reconstruct our whole marriage — including such fun things as the platter on which I served our second son’s rehearsal dinner entrée on when the caterer called to say he wasn’t showing up.

Painting: Still-life of kitchen utensils by Cornelis Jacobsz Delff (1570–1643)

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Clues From a Marriage

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