Cooking With Gas In The Kitchen

Could you take this picture in your kitchen?

I don’t mean are you baking your own bread, that’s unlikely now. But is there any place with a hint of the picturesque in your kitchen?

You cannot worship the god of hard surfaces and become the priest and priestess of the picturesque. The kitchen has become the altar of sacrificed comfort. Reject it. It needs to return to being a pleasant room with a kitchen in it, not a hole in your house into which to ram appliances and particleboard boxes. Formaldehyde! It’s what’s for dinner!

I will say before we begin that even poor people are generally well housed in the United States, and the reliability of utilities into every home like water, sewer, electricity, and so forth would be a source of envy for great portions of the world. We are not complaining here. We have been given the luxury worrying about small things instead of where our next meal is coming from; so we can turn our attention to… well, where our next meal is coming from.

Let’s make a list of generalities.

1. The room has to be pretty big. We’re going to eat in there.
2. No low ceilings. No vaulted ceilings.
3. If you yanked out all appliances, fixtures, and cabinetry, would the kitchen be a pleasant room? If not, start over.
4. Forget row after row of cabinets. Add a walk-in pantry next to the kitchen and get rid of the majority of your wall cabinets. Add windows. The pantry can have all open shelves. Put a door on the room to hide clutter. Putting casework into niches in the walls, so the face of it is flush with those walls is dynamite. Look at the china closet in the second picture.
5. You need light coming in from at least two adjacent sides.
6. Make the sink and drainboards huge. Doesn’t matter what they’re made from Just plain huge.
7. Gang at least two windows over this huge sink, with a broad sill. Three’s better.
8. Never cook with electricity. Fire, baby.
9. Maximize the horizontal space at waist level with nothing on it.
10. Put dishes and glasses on open shelves, or shelves with glass doors. They naturally stack and display well. Keep things you use all the time close at hand. Don’t hide them in the endless cabinets.
11. Never ever show the side of a refrigerator. Any cabinet over a frig should be flush with the face of frig, and extend right down to the floor. Refrigerators used to be sleek and rounded and looked good standing alone in the landscape. They’re not any more.
12. Almost all kitchen cabinets are bland and ugly. Frameless cabinets particularly so.
13. Lower cabinets with doors are almost all useless. Use drawers below waist level wherever possible. Drawers behind doors are four car collision designs. Just have drawers.
14. All corner cabinets are useless. For all the money and trouble you go through to get your stuff diving off a lazy susan in there, or worse still, the floppy door with all the hinges that bangs around and pinches your fingers, they’re not worth doing. Have the corners boxed in and forget them. Use the money you saved to help build the pantry.
15. Never put the microwave above the stove or in the upper cabinets. Pulling occasionally superheated stuff out at eye level is madness. And you always want to defrost things while you are cooking something else. Don’t work over a hot stove. Put it in a lower cabinet and then your kids can make their own popcorn.
16. A cooktop with a separate wall oven is great. It was standard issue in tract houses in the fifties. Now it’s seeing a resurgence. Great. Gets the oven up where you can see it, too. But never NEVER put a cooktop in an island counter that humans have anything to do with the other side of, especially if people sit and eat there. Are you insane?
17. A real table that can be moved around and has fold up leaves that people can eat at in a kitchen is five hundred times more convivial than a counter. Make sure there’s room for the chairs to be pulled away from the table on all sides.
18. A door to the outside if there’s any way it can be done. A real door. No sliders.
19. Frameless cabinets look industrial. If you must go industrial, do it with some exuberance and get yourself a quilted chrome/formica/enameled steel/neon/Cadillac finned 1950s thing going on. Or an elegant 1930s Bauhaus modern if you can’t stand hominess. But eschew the brutalist concrete/honed stone/nuclear power plant plumbing/ expiatory chair look please.
20. Overlay cabinet doors are…are… Never mind. Face frames with inset doors, period. Nothing that looks like it was yanked out of a box and screwed to the wall. Make sure all upper cabinetry has some sort of cap or head on it. The particleboard stuff wrapped in woodgrain wall paper with bland overlay hardwood doors always looks bad. Your cabinetry should look like casework or furniture. And it should look good, or ideally better, after you use it and wear it out a little. You’re going to live in there, you know. If it relies on the look of pristine sterility, that makes you a bacillus in the body kitchen.

The day couples put a television in the bedroom, it signifies a fundamental change in outlook. Placing one in the kitchen is the same. I’m not saying it’s bad. It just represents the failure of the cook, the food, or the company to hold your interest. Just sayin’. But you need music. Plan for it early.

Well there you go. Go to the kitchen designer with this list. Bring defibrillator paddles. You’re going to need them.

Your Kitchen Is Devouring Your Soul

I’ve been installing a kitchen for a friend of mine.

I used to have a lot to do with house construction. It’s very rare for me now. The furniture is everything. I’ve been in thousands of homes; modest, palatial, big, small, desert, arctic, seashore, mountain, underground to apartment aerie. Canada, lots of US states, Central America, Italy. I’ve noticed lots of things about lots of places. But the thing I’ve noticed most, is that 99 times out of 100, the kitchen is devouring the soul of the inhabitants.

It’s not meant to. It costs more in treasure and effort than any other three rooms in a house. And though people are constantly striving to get a kitchen that’s the center of their home, generally they spend all that money and end up with a sort of dismal industrial vivisectionist’s operating room, more or less.

Look at that picture. You want that woman’s kitchen. You tell me you want it something awful. You describe in painstaking detail the cozy, sunlit, roomy, casual kitchen you want, and are willing to pay big dough for, and then — I’m sorry to tell you this — you absolutely refuse to allow any of the elements that make that kitchen look so lovely. You throw it a way with both hands.

It’s not all your fault of course. A sort of grim sameness descends on the whole process. You can choose from an almost endless assortment of the same damn thing. It’s like the industry makes you take three lefts to take a right. But you don’t want to go that way. In my experience, the advice you are going to receive from the vast majority of kitchen designers is a guaranteed lock to make your kitchen about as homey as a podiatrist’s waiting room. So what is it that makes that place in the picture look so luminous across the decades?

Here’s why that picture looks so lovely:

1. The room has a high ceiling
2. The room does not have a vaulted ceiling, making it a cavern
3. The room is lit from at least two sides
4. There is a great big sink
5. There are two great big windows over that sink
6. A little sconce between the windows below eye level
7. Items in constant use are at hand
8. The cabinets are made for the room, and have inset doors and face frames
9. The cabinets are painted and look like they can be refreshed
10. Broad windowsills allow houseplants to grow in the sun
11. There are no fussy finishes or furnishings
12. There is a door to the outside
13. There is room for others to gather
14. There is room for others to help

This is well and ably done, and undoubtedly by an amateur designer. Probably just a carpenter with a pattern book.

Let me point out that that woman is poor. She isn’t holding a basket of eggs that a style magazine just handed to her for a photo shoot. The hens just handed those to her. Money won’t cure your problem. Mostly, money makes it worse.

There was poison put into our intellectual drinking water last century. The brutalists took up the lament that a house, and especially the kitchen, was ” a machine for living.” Let me ask you. Should people be fed into a machine? Do you want to feed yourself and your family into one, every day, for the most essential thing in your life — the marvelous ritual of preparing and eating food — made no less profound for how often you do it?

( More tomorrow)

Life Is Accumulated Error

Our internet friend Patrick down south in the Red Stick State is making a table. He’s asked a question, and it was bound to bring on the logorrhea, mostly off-topic. Here’s the question:

Now, since you’ve offered advice upon the seeking of it, how does one make all the legs on a little table come out the same size? I clamped mine together in sawing and making the dadoes and everything so they’d all be the same height and have the shelves at the same spot and everything, and one leg still came out shorter than the rest (I suspect warpage). Do I just keep sanding the others until they’re evened out?

This is interesting as all get-out. We have encountered the confounding and somewhat counterintuitive “Accumulated Error.”

There is a long and boring explanation of accumulated error regarding mathematics, science, and especially lately climate prediction. We need not trouble ourselves with that here, as we begin with our eyes glazed over from hunching over the tablesaw. No need to keep basting them.

What we are referring to is well known to the man who must measure over and over again. If I measure a foot with a ruler, and make a mark, and then measure again from that mark, and then again for a while, certain dreadful things can begin to happen. First, after about 36 tries, I’ll be outside, and it’s snowing, and I don’t want to go there. But more to the point, if I am making an error — say, the ruler is wrong –and then continue remaking that error, while using my last erroneous point to start making my next mistake, things can get really bad really quick. I said “can” get bad, but that’s just an expression. They “do” get bad, and you get fired or not paid, and so forth. And your table lists to port. What’s happening?

Eisenhower might be the most able executive we ever had as chief magistrate. He said: “A plan is nothing; planning is everything.” He understood accumulated error. You have to take into account the vagaries of constant changes.

Now, back to our table. It wobbles. Patrick is downcast. We must help.

First, Patrick, you’re very cheeky to just make four legs and expect them to turn out alright. A professional wouldn’t figure he’s have any sort of success doing that, and make fourteen or so, hoping to get three good ones and one that don’t look that bad in firelight. The firelight is generally cast from a lovely blaze in your winter fireplace, made from the other ten legs. But you are brave, and do the crossword in pen, and we must help you.

They are all a little different. You tried, but wood is not steel, and you are not a machinist. Your pencil marks, the angle of your head when you read the markings on tools and measuring instruments; hell, the humidity changed and that wood decided it wanted to be closer to the size it was when the birds were chirping in it last week. And you are accumulating errors, and you don’t know how many ways that material and those tools and your own efforts will betray you yet. Wood only really expands or contracts across its grain, so table legs and so forth don’t really get longer and shorter. A dry pine board 11 inches wide might gain or lose 1/8″ in width in a week, but a 12 foot long board won’t gain 1/8″ in length. Tabletops move all around. Legs don’t do much.

Don’t fret. Make the table as best you can. Make the pieces as accurately as you can. Align your joints. Center the baulks of wood in the clamps so that the center of the screw is in the center of the board you’re clamping, not offset and yanking it one way or the other. Measure assembled rectangles from corner to corner diagonally, and then the opposite diagonal, and when they are the same, the thing is “square.” Do your best to not let the errors accumulate; make only one mistake at a time.

And it will still wobble. Mine do.

Then take the table, if it’s small enough, and place it on the only thing you own that’s flat, which is your tablesaw tabletop, and wobble it. Two table legs, diagonal from one another, will not lift off the tablesaw. Leave those alone for now. Wobble the table until the other two legs are off the saw, and equalize the amount each is off the table. Use something to measure that distance between the bottom of the leg and the sawtable top. Mark that measurement on those two legs I told you to leave alone, those that WILL NOT wobble. I use a scribe, which is like a compass, to make such measurements and markings. Sand or cut to the line. Now the table will not wobble. It’s much harder when the table is bigger to find a flat surface to accommodate the four legs. Kitchen counters are generally very flat, especially if they are stone, as many are these days.

If you make a mistake cutting and measuring for the wobble, over and over, eventually you will get to the top the legs, and you’ll have a nifty cutting board.

By the way, accumulated error is why climate scientists tell you it’s going to be 500 degrees centigrade next summer, or there will be sheets of ice stretching over the Florida panhandle — depending on who gives them their grant money and whether their ruler has 11-1/2″ or 12-1/2″ inches to the foot.

Hi Lefty! Hi Stumpy Joe!

Aw geez.

Look, Pat over at Stubborn Facts is talking about me. And unlike most people, he’s being pleasant about it. I’m impressed a bit.

I’m not impressed for the reasons you might think right off. I’m impressed that another man has the poise to openly say he’s emulating another man. A very imperfect one, at that.

People are always trying to associate themselves with celebrity, for instance. Any tenuous connection they can conjure up — or lie convincingly about — to anybody with the slightest bit of name recognition is the first thing out of anybody’s mouth.

You know, my best friend lives next door to Tom Brady’s mother’s podiatrist’s landscaper’s butcher, so I feel as if I really knocked up Bridget Moynihan!

Well, not quite. Pat is a great big man and I’m not a celebrity. And although I’m Time’s Person of the Year, I doubt Pat is much impressed. I think I’m standing next to the thing that has caught his fancy, and so bask in its reflected glow.

I am an autodidact. At everything. And one aspect of being an autodidact is you often flail away on your own when a little help would have gone a long way. Pat will go farther faster than I would because he knows enough to look around for anything that might help him.

I have no advice for Pat. I used to be loaded up on advice, but I feign being fresh out all the time now. I only respond to direct questions at this point. Everyone involved is the better for that. Unsolicited advice is unerringly bad, in my experience. What isn’t actively wrong is generally ignored anyway. But I have to say something, I guess.

The easy thing is to remind him not to cut off his fingers. That’s considered undesirable among many classes of persons these days. It’s not for me to cast aspersions on those people too haughty to participate in auto-mutilation as a general rule. They are creatures of pride, generally; and people who deem themselves too high and mighty to even consider lopping off a finger or two, or putting out what all thinking persons know is a redundant and superfluous second eye, are not my kind of people. Let them congregate together in the thin ether of snooty society. Pat and I know the joys, cameraderie, and brotherhood of the spinning remorseless blade.

So I will skip that lecture, except to say that Pat has entered a different sort of arena than he is used to, and we should caution him severely. If Pat is a bad lawyer — and I have no reason to doubt that, as he is my friend — he could get his clients put to death or imprisoned for the entirely wrong crime, which might put him off his dinner for an evening or two. He might contemplate the blow that would be to his reputation, and be discommoded mildly by remorse over it, until he watches the lights dim and flicker for a moment as his conscience and his accounts receivable are wiped clean. It is expensive, time-consuming, and tedious to have to own evening clothes and constantly attend funerals if you are a doctor, for another example. If he becomes a serial murderer or some other worthwhile and energetic professional, there will always be lots of clean-up and some paperwork, but the details will fade into the mists of antiquity very quickly, and you will be restored to geniality after the lime burns heal.

But if you make a table, no matter how rude and misshapen, no matter what the vertiginous tilt it might present to the onlooker, no matter how foul the coloration applied to the glue-smeared splintery mess — you will never be able to part with it once you make it with your own hands, and it will haunt you all the days of your life.

You can not even look forward to being dead, as so many of our brethren do — or we do for them — as your heirs and assigns will keep it around to remind them of what a magnificent fool that fellow Pat — or “Old Leftie,” if you’re not careful — was indeed.

A Glimpse of Garter.. Snake

Nature took its foot off my face today. Sun’s shining. There are swans cruising back and forth in the flooded bog behind my house. We can see them from the kitchen window. They did not deign to let me photograph them. Like all truly magnificent things, they must pretend to be modest. I will not trouble them.

It’s interesting standing for a long moment watching the inexorable trickle of yesterday’s rain making its way, as it must, to the sea. A poet should live here. It’s wasted on me. I just figure the shake in the grain of a tree drooped over like that makes it unsuitable for anything but firewood, and go back in and knock boards together.