One Picture
Architectural Digest Isn't Calling
Or, how one little corner of the kitchen became a record of what we've cooked, collected and apparently refused to throw away
There are photographs of House 173 that show the big things.
The porch after weeks of work. A newly painted room. A restored window. A project finally finished after I've spent far too much time writing about every screw, board and minor complication along the way.
And then there's this.
A bookshelf in the kitchen.
Not exactly the stuff of Architectural Digest.
But look a little closer.
I've written plenty over the years about how the kitchen at House 173 has evolved. Yet photographs like this remind me that the things that make a room ours aren't necessarily the things we remodeled.
Sometimes they're just the things that accumulated.
We Apparently Own a Few Cookbooks
The first thing you notice is the books.
There are a lot of them.
American cookbooks. German cookbooks. Baking books. Bread books. Slow-cooker books. Little paperbacks and substantial hardcovers. Some are relatively new and others have been hanging around long enough that opening them practically qualifies as an archaeological dig.
There's Betty Crocker. Bread and baking books. Slow-cooker recipes. And enough German cookbooks to make a visitor briefly wonder which country they're standing in.
Was koche ich heute?
What am I cooking today?
That's a question we've apparently been preparing to answer for decades.
The funny thing about cookbooks is that you don't actually use most of them very often. There are recipes we return to again and again while hundreds of others have been sitting patiently on these shelves for years waiting for their big opportunity.
Still, we wouldn't get rid of them.
Books belong in a house.
Cookbooks especially belong in a kitchen.
And Then There's the Tea
Look up.
Tea tins.
Lots of tea tins.
Harney & Sons has apparently established a small regional distribution center at House 173.
Some hold tea. Others have survived because the tins themselves are too nice to throw away, which is a dangerous quality for any container to possess around here.
"I should save this. I can use it for something."
There are few sentences more responsible for clutter at House 173 than that one.
Keep looking and there are more tins, boxes, jars and containers squeezed into the available spaces. Nothing has been arranged for the photograph. Nobody decided that bottle would look better two inches to the left.
This is simply where the stuff lives.
Keep Looking Down
Below the cookbooks are notebooks and papers, the working end of a kitchen library.
Recipes get written down. Pages get folded. Notes get made. Something turns out particularly well and somebody decides we'd better remember how we made it because, naturally, we didn't follow the recipe exactly the first time.
That's one thing the internet hasn't completely replaced.
A handwritten recipe has history.
Maybe there's a stain on it. Maybe somebody crossed something out. Maybe "1 teaspoon" became "½ teaspoon" after the first batch provided compelling evidence that one teaspoon was a terrible idea.
That's useful information.
There's also a timer, bottles and jars, more tins and tea boxes and, hanging rather inelegantly from one shelf, a pair of blue rubber gloves.
Again... Architectural Digest is probably not calling.
Look Beyond the Books
The photograph gets even better when you stop looking at the shelves.
On the left is the passage connecting the kitchen to the foyer. It's one of those little spaces in an old house that doesn't really qualify as a room but nevertheless does a considerable amount of work.
The basement door is immediately to the right in that passage, although you can't see it from this angle. Considering how much of House 173 has been repaired, refinished, sanded, painted, built and occasionally sworn at down there, it's appropriate that the entrance to the workshop is lurking just outside the photograph.
Along the wall are the coats and hats.
There's the mop.
I'm particularly pleased the mop made it into the photograph.
Every picture needs something that prevents you from getting too impressed with yourself.
And above everything is that little white cabinet.
That's the medicine cabinet I built during the kitchen renovation.
It's a small thing, but that's exactly the sort of detail I enjoy finding in these photographs. During the renovation there were the obvious projects, the things that transformed the kitchen, but there were also these smaller jobs that filled a need. Build something, hang it on the wall and before long you stop thinking of it as something you made.
It simply becomes part of the house.
Years later, you see it in a photograph and think, Oh yeah. I built that.
Beyond the passage, you can just catch the warmer wood tones toward the foyer. I like that little glimpse. The kitchen has its lighter, more practical finishes, and then the old House 173 woodwork starts appearing again beyond it.
One house, but different chapters.
And at the Bottom...
At the bottom of the shelves is another collection entirely.
Oils. Vinegars. Bottles accumulated from things we've cooked and things we apparently remain optimistic about cooking someday.
That's the whole photograph, really.
Cookbooks and tea tins.
Recipes and bottles.
A homemade medicine cabinet.
Coats and hats.
A mop.
And a basement door you can't even see.
None of it seems particularly important. But that's what photographs like this keep teaching me.
After nearly three decades at House 173, the things I enjoy finding in old pictures aren't always the big projects. They're the things around the edges. The little thing I built. The cookbook we still use. The coat hanging in the passage. The bottle that disappeared years ago.
Even the mop.
Nobody takes a photograph because they want to remember the mop. But give the photograph enough years and you're glad nobody moved it.
Because this isn't a photograph of the kitchen we renovated.
It's the kitchen we lived in.
And there's a pretty big difference.
Hey, thanks for stopping by - see ya' next time!
Keywords
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