The Kitchen
An edit of the considered kitchen. Notes on surfaces, the pantry's small architecture, and the few hand tools worth replacing only when they break.
The considered kitchen is the kitchen one returns to. It does not announce itself. It does not announce its renovations. It contains, instead, a small inventory of correctly chosen objects, most of them earned over years, each of them in the place it belongs. We have edited, for this lookbook, the objects we have found to be the considered kitchen's quiet heroes.
A kitchen reveals itself slowly. The first time you cook in it, you notice the obvious - the counter run, the height of the hood, whether the dishwasher opens against the sink. The fifth time you notice the small things: the placement of the salt cellar, the depth of the lower drawer, the corner where the wooden spoons live. The hundredth time, you have either made peace with the kitchen's small failures or quietly corrected them. The objects edited here are the corrections.
The honest position on hand tools is that you should own only what you will use weekly, and the weekly tools should be the best examples you can afford. A wooden spoon, used five times a week for ten years, is a very different object from a wooden spoon used twice and discarded. The good wooden spoon develops a weight in the hand, a slight wear to the bowl that exactly matches the cook's stir, a faint olive-and-onion fragrance that is its own quiet endorsement. The bad wooden spoon - the bag-of-eight at the supermarket - never develops any of this. It is a different object. Buy one good spoon and keep it for thirty years.
The marble pastry slab is, separately, treated in our review pages this issue. Briefly: yes, get one. It will teach you about pastry. The other surface question - the choice of cutting boards - is one we will say less about, except to note that an end-grain hardwood block, twelve to sixteen inches square, is the right answer for ninety percent of domestic cooking, and that the larger and thinner edge-grain boards are inferior in every measurable way. End-grain wears better, dulls knives less, holds up to longer abuse, and ages with more grace. The only argument against end-grain is weight, and weight is, in a kitchen, more often a virtue than otherwise.
Storage, the unspoken half of the kitchen brief, is what most distinguishes the considered kitchen from the merely competent one. The considered kitchen has a place for everything. The competent kitchen has a place for most things and a drawer for the rest. The drawer is not the enemy, but the drawer should be the exception. A pantry that has been thought through - one with shelving sized for the actual jars and tins one keeps, with hooks for the towels and aprons, with a low shelf for the cast iron - is a small ongoing pleasure. A pantry that has not been thought through is a small ongoing irritation. The difference, in our experience, is one Saturday afternoon and a tape measure.
If we have a single argument to make about the kitchen, it is for restraint. A kitchen does not need many things. It needs the right things, kept in the right places, and the discipline to refuse the additions that promise to improve it. The considered kitchen is not, in the end, the well-stocked one. It is the well-edited one.