What makes a kitchen the heart of a home?

You can tell a lot about the inhabitants of home from the smells emanating from their kitchen. In my opinion, when it comes to breakfast, you’ll have to go a long way to beat the simple  special smell so synonymous with ‘home’ – bread being toasted and the anticipation of eating it with melting butter and marmalade. A close second is the smell of apples baking stuffed with dates and a cinnamon stick and topped with a butter blob (I leave them in the oven until the skin is all wrinkly.). Coming in at third, especially in Winter, is the comforting smell of steaming maize meal or oats served with a bit of butter, a splash of full-cream milk and a generous spoonful of honey, preferably straight from the honeycomb. 

For a meal, a curry (North Indian is my all time favourite) with top notes of garlic and ginger, medium notes of tomato, chilli, cumin, and coriander and base notes of heady anise and cloves has me undone each time! Mediterranean fare is second, and all things Asian gets the third place on my gastronomical podium. Eish wena (no man) what’s it going to take to get this African to master using chop sticks?

It is often said that we either imitate or do the exact opposite of what we see when growing up.  Well, I didn’t get to see many meals being prepared while I was growing up. If you are perhaps wandering whether I grew up in a home minus a kitchen, was reared in the wild by a pack of wolves, or whether I was an orphan living on the streets eating handouts? You are wrong on all counts!

I did have parents, and we did have a kitchen – in which no meals were prepared!

Our parents were ‘hostel house parents’ to more than a hundred other young ladies. All of our meals were cooked in a large, rather clinical, industrial-styled kitchen by cooks. Regrettably, despite their diligence and sincere endeavour, the food they served was not always pleasing on the eye or the palette for us, the captive youth! I pray that they may be served at east one sublimely delicious meal this side of Heaven! (Cue Babettes Feast).

At home, our ‘non-cooking’ kitchen was a safe-space and a baker’s paradise for many a homesick hostel girl. Our mother was serious about her baking, and cake baking was always on a Friday. Every other day, her firm favourites were crunchies, coconut macaroons, Hertzog cookies (the jam and coconut delights, for those of you who may not know, named after a now politically incorrect former state-president) crumbed apple tart, and fudge, more fudge, always fudge!

My reverance of all things kitchen is thanks to my Ouma’s outdoors farm kitchen in which I watched cream separated from milk and then whipped into becoming butter; large mounds of dough kneaded and pummelled and left to ‘rise to size’ under a patchwork blanket before being baked as bread or mosbolletjies (sweet brioche) in a scorching hot outdoor oven, cabbages and pumpkins ‘slayed’  with a knife that I swear would have put King Saul’s sword to shame, and dough plaited into koeksisters with a rigid freneticism that no longhaired plait-wearing scholar would have survived!

Our farm kitchen had an old rug on which the fox-terriers, hoping to escape the scorching midday small-Karoo heat, lay. More annoying were the ubiquitous flies which necessitated having an unsightly fly catcher hanging from the kitchen ceiling! Surely this didn’t meet health standards? But as Ouma always said, “Wat nie dood maak nie, maak vet!”. (What doesn’t kill you, fattens you).

As much as I loved the spaciousness of the farm kitchens (the outside and the inside one), a small kitchen can have a charm of it’s own.  It was a Jewish neighbour who once said, “In a small kitchen you get to touch sides constantly with those whom you love!”

After a quick visit you know where, it is in our kitchen that I stop first thing in the morning to brew the very first cup of tea, and slowly wake-up…  And then, as I open the kitchen door, and look onto the potted herbs and the rose bushes, the avocado trees, the jasmine, plumbago and the lavender,  I’m ready to face my day. This is the room to which I return most often for comfort and nourishment, and the last room in which I sit and drink red wine and get to share the stories of the day while Claude cooks dinner. He says cooking is a stress release for him (I’m certainly not complaining or going to suggest alternatives. Definitely not after too many years of being hostage to hostel food!) The kitchen is unarguably the heart of our home. Cooking meals that bring both surprise and sustenance is one of the way’s in which my Claude shows love.

To be invited into a kitchen is to be invited and accepted into the very heart of a person or a family. To break ‘bread and wine’ together at a kitchen table is to embrace intimacy with both Jesus and those with you! This is probably why strangers were first invited into the formal livingroom, guests into the family livingroom, and only those considered close friends and allies into the kitchen… 

If Jesus were to visit with me in person, I’m pretty sure that once we’ve embraced (definitely a drawn out hugely emotional affair) at the front door, we’d head straight to my kitchen. I reckon He’s cool with kitchens as long as it’s real and He gets to share His heart, and fill ours to overflowing… (He is the bread of life after all)

So, let me  lift my wine glass to you and say, “L’chaim!” To Life, she is ever wonderful, especially when lived out in a well-used kitchen…

Which room of the house is your favourite?

What’s your favourite food fare?