From ‘Kitchen’ by Banana Yoshimoto:
“The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. White tile catching the light (ting! ting!).
I love even incredibly dirty kitchens to distraction—vegetable droppings all over the floor, so dirty your slippers turn black on the bottom. Strangely, it’s better if this kind of kitchen is large. I lean up against the silver door of a towering, giant refrigerator stocked with enough food to get through a winter. When I raise my eyes from the oil-spattered gas burner and the rusty kitchen knife, outside the window stars are glittering, lonely.”
There is nothing as homely as a kitchen. There is something so delightfully tender about cooking, found in our intent. If we cook to share with a friend, we cook deliberately, putting in our utmost care to make sure our friend enjoys. The kitchen is a homecoming— a home found everywhere, regardless of our physical location on earth.
I only really began cooking a few months into the pandemic; my friends and I made a habit to always create something for ourselves each time we met. Slowly, this grew into something meditative. I came to associate cooking first with them, then to joy, then to an escape (all the same, in one way or another).
It is one of the things I turned to when everything else felt too hard. If I could not stop my brain from unraveling itself, I could slow it. I could let my hands follow the motions- peel, dice, mix, cook- and let my mind daze. A continuation of Banana Yoshimoto’s ‘Kitchen’ reads:
“Now only the kitchen and I are left. It’s just a little nicer than being all alone.”
There are a handful of sentences that have stopped me and followed me around for the next days, lingering at the back of my mind, begging me to pick them apart. The most recent of these comes from French philosopher Simone Weil in her book, Gravity and Grace: “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”
I have not read Gravity and Grace, nor have I delved into the works of Weil, so I cannot say whether she wrote this in a religious sense. However, I find that devotion can be something separate from religion. Devotion, or “absolutely unmixed attention”— to a task, to a book, to a person— is prayer. And this is cooking to me: an accumulation of care, practice, tradition, and precious (and delicious) yields.
This being said, there are many things I still cannot do. I could not crack an egg up until a couple months ago, I fumble my way through using chopsticks, and I still do not know how to peel an onion without having to take a cry break in the middle. Still, cooking is a tender activity, beloved of mine. I hope you all make something nice for yourselves or your loved ones someday; it is a service not only to them, but yourself.
I’m happy to finally be getting a newsletter out. Junior year has taken a toll on my free time and mental health, but I have enjoyed some beautiful things throughout it: I try to practice my French through the works of sapphic poet Renée Vivien, I’ve newly found and launched myself into the striking poems of Topaz Winters, and I’ve been slowly making my way through Almond by Sohn Won-pyung. All of these are absolute recommendations if you’re seeking writing to gently tug at your heartstrings.
I haven’t been listening to as much new music as I’d like, but here are some of my current rotations: Wildest Dreams (Taylor’s Version), Tangerine, Love to Dream.
Take care of yourselves as fall begins, and thank you for reading.
With love,
Aarushi.
i love this so much. do you have any poetry book recommendations?
this is amazing !! what are some recipes that make u feel most delightfully tender?