I felt awkward about posting the photo here without a way to embed it (though I was able to share it on Facebook very easily), but I shouted with delight at the photograph of Mark Bittman, the “Minimalist,” cooking away in his echt-minimal kitchen.
I have an essay I’m trying to place about preparing a Thanksgiving feast in the officers’ quarters of Osan Airbase in Korea in 1990 — a meal that with one funny twist was its own triumph. I think that kitchen was even larger than Bittman’s (the hard part was gathering the ingredients).
Bittman’s post brought back those memories, as well as others about preparing feasts under challenging circumstances: military barracks, tiny sublet kitchens, the year I decided to brine a turkey and found myself, at midnight, grappling with a large, cold, wet, bumpy-skinned bird flopping in a vat of salty water. (Next year I returned to my painless trick: buying a kosher bird.)
But Bittman’s minimalist chic is a perfect tone for our time.
I often have very bad kitchen lust. We have a surprisingly nice kitchen for a small, 1950s-era house; it’s a square room that was redone by a previous owner with black tile countertops and matching appliances, and a wonderful reddish tile floor. It’s also the largest kitchen we’ve ever shared; after a series of one-rump kitchens, two of us can be in our kitchen at the same time as long as we aren’t trying to do the same thing. The Kenmore stove (gas top, electric oven) even has one “pro” burner that can bring kettles of water to boil in a flash or stir-fry at the proper temperature.
But then I visit houses with really large, heavily-equipped kitchens — vast parking lots with huge powered islands, countertop that stretches for miles, refrigerators that could chill half of Florida’s food crop, “professional” rangetops and dual ovens — and my brain twitches with envy. That should be my kitchen! I fume to myself. That person doesn’t even cook!
Well. If Bittman can write cookbooks and a cooking column in his dinky Manhattan kitchen, then I can go back to feeling unqualified love for the kitchen we work in.
Oh, and after peeking online at Bittman’s latest edition of How To Cook Everything, call that a sale. Yesterday I bought 3-ish pounds of lamb breast on a whim; I spent less than five dollars and thought, I can make something of this. (Even standard cuts of lamb are very inexpensive in this area, but lamb breast intrigued me.) The 2003 edition has some suggestions. The 2008 edition is even clearer, offering five basting sauces. This will be fun — even in my own minimalist kitchen.
Posted on this day, other years:
Karen, I’m so with you here. My next-door neighbors have the showplace, Viking-stove, marble-countered kitchen, and they order pizza 4 nights a week. But our circa-1929 kitchen has been turning out gourmet meals, 7 nights a week, for 12 years (and lots of them courtesy of Bittman recipes!) We seem to manage just fine.
Right on, Julie! And the lamb riblets… they were fabulous. I used a recipe from Bittman’s “take on the chefs” book with lemongrass and tamarind. It was so good I’m going to do another variation on lamb breast as soon as I see it again in the store.
Though this is it in a nutshell: parboil the breast for 45 minutes; cool until you can handle; cut into individual ribs; marinate for 2 or more hours; grill, basting with whatever seems right. The Vietnamese flavors were magnificent, but just for fun, I think the next treatment will be more “BBQ” or perhaps in the parsley/lemon zone.
Decades ago I had a copy of the Single Girl’s Cookbook by Helen Gurley Brown. (HGB and mid-60’s Cosmo is a whole other subject.) Here’s the nugget that is relevant here: she wrote to the effect that fancy equipment did not make a good cook; practice did. That made sense to me then and still does.
I’m reminded now of my own cooking adventures — driving a roasted turkey across campus one year in college because the oven at the place we were eating had pot roast for the attendee who was allergic to poultry; baking bread on pot lids; my horrid kitchen/bathroom at my first grad school apartment in Iowa City and the feast I managed to prepare there anyway. Good times. Thanks.
Looks like Bittman got a quite a few comments on his tiny kitchen:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/weekinreview/14bittman.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
I remember the first time I had Thanksgiving at my house. The kitchen was as big as a small chevy van. I managed to turn out such a great meal that we still talk bout it to this very day.”Its not the size of the boat,its the motion in the ocean. But remember you can’t get to europe in a row boat!”
Certainly have had my share of kitchens through the years. Now enjoying “the” kitchen, which has it’s drawbacks (keep the thing clean, which many don’t think about when they decide to go “gourmet”. Use only a small part of what is there. Out of six burners and a char grill, I normally use two or three burners most of the time and one oven. Oh that char grill? Three times in seven years. Small is the way to go.
John, my experience was with “the” grill. I was so convinced that I needed a huge grill with a side burner. The grill was too large for most meals, and I used the side burner once. My small Weber fires up fast, which is great since when it’s warm I grill sometimes five nights a week!
The only thing I’d like is a kitchen large enough to have a nook for eating. But like you say… one more thing to clean 🙂