Janice Marriott - Common Table

Cad mle filte an chlann, Mia Janice
To Harry, with love Virginia

Janices Introduction

My standing-room-only kitchen in my small inner-city cottage is like a kitchen on a yacht. There are cupboards and drawers on two parallel sides. The third side, separating these two, is the width of the oven. A bright-blue bench runs around the three sides. I love putting gifts from the garden lemons, tomatoes, feijoas, nasturtiums or poppies on the blue bench. The wall opposite the oven holds a skinny fridge and some pull-out shelves. The sink is under the kitchen window which looks out over the garden. I depend on my garden the way most people depend on the produce section of their supermarket, or you farmers depend on your sheep. OK, so theres a supermarket 5 minutes walk away. But you never know when the motorway overbridge might fall down. Always best to be prepared. My garden could be regarded as my earthquake-preparedness kit. Maybe Ive been an office worker too long

My kitchen is so small that Bunsen the old Labrador couldnt lie down in it. While I cooked he used to lie in the doorway, monitoring the progress. He was the official taster, and his reaction always gave me an inflated idea of my culinary prowess.

I dont have too much time or space here for complicated chemical reactions, but I love to cook so I have a few rules. I cook simply and I clean up as I cook. I never have benches full of dishes to clean after cooking a meal. I eat ordinary food that hasnt come into the house in boxes, packets, tins, jars or on its own legs. But I do have some exceptions. I buy anchovies, sardines and mackerel in tins. I buy tins of chickpeas. A quick mash with coriander, chilli and garlic and you have a Friday evening dip the most essential food item on my social calendar. I buy tinned tomatoes in the winter. Cooked down a bit, with a bit of garlic sauted with whatever garden herbs are still providing leaves, they make great tomato sauce. Cooked down a bit more, and they coat a pizza.

I like New Zealand food: grass-fed happy beef, pumpkin soup, and seafood poached in coconut cream. I buy good bread, which is now called artisan bread. I use butter, not margarine. I use lots of olive oil, but most food, including omelettes and mushrooms, taste better in butter. I dont buy frozen pastry. I like making pastry, and what is a kitchen without flour in it? I love making scones.

A quick meal starts with me in the garden hunting for whatevers thriving. It might end up in a pasta sauce or in an omelette with fried sage leaves crumbled over it. In winter I might fill a casserole or a roasting dish and put it in the oven for a couple of hours. I love the smell of cooking in the house. I like to watch Tenz the cat sitting staring at the oven door, swaying slightly. A little black pottle of Kapiti ice cream is the perfect dessert with stewed fruit from the garden.

Its been a big year for me, making big decisions about my life. I cant worry and do the pros and cons lists without resorting to my favourite junk foods, which are peanuts, licorice and chocolate.

Virginias Introduction

A big box-window in my kitchen captures the early morning sun. In the summertime it lights the white walls and warms the round oak table in the middle of the room; from the window I can see the kitchen garden, overblown with vegetables, the roses are in full bloom and I cannot wait to go out into the day. In the wintertime the sun is thin and frail and the garden hibernates, white and frozen or drab and brown under a grey winter sky. On winter mornings I huddle in the kitchen, hugging the speckled green coal range and do not want to leave its comforting, beating warmth.

A farm house kitchen is the heart and soul of the house. It is not just the room where food is cooked, it is the room where everything happens: its where plans and budgets are discussed, its where casual visitors sit for a cup of tea, where the bank manager lays out the loan forms to be signed, its where births are celebrated and deaths are wept over, its where we talk about our hopes and dreams, its where we eat most of our meals. At the very heart of the kitchen, an old oak table stands encircled by six oak chairs with padded leather seats and that is where we sit. The wall opposite the window is taken up with a huge bookcase which is full of recipe books, reference books, poetry books, and rows of rustic pottery casserole dishes and jugs. The rest of the kitchen is lined with floor-to-ceiling rimu cupboards and bins for flour and sugar, and then there is the speckled green coal range which, whilst not an aesthetic asset, is very dearly loved. There are days when the snow snaps the power lines and the old coal range smokes on, warming the house, heating the water and cooking the meals, and I wonder how I would ever do without her.

A wide stainless-steel bench lies under the box-window, and that is where I work. Beneath the bench there is a big stainless-steel oven, a Titan, which has the great good fortune to be able to clean itself; above the oven sits an induction cook-top which is finger-tip sensitive and very fast on impatient days, and very slow for things that take time like pickles and jams. I am a farmhouse cook, cursed or blessed, Im not sure which, with the need to be able to make everything. I know it would be much simpler to go out and buy bread and buns, chocolates and ice cream, pasta and pastry, chicken stock and pesto, and I do if I dont have time; but when I do have time I enjoy spending hours in the kitchen mucking about with food.

March

My friend Jane said, on our Sunday afternoon walk, that it was a walk like we used to do. Im not sure what she meant by that because of course it wasnt anything like any of our regular Sunday walks for the last thirteen years. On that yellow beach at Island Bay no Bunsen panted along beside us. Bunsen was dead, and the picnic we always have a picnic on the Sunday walk lacked that wonderful quality of performance; us performing for a rapt audience of one concentrating, drooling dog.

We met a yellow Lab lunging through the shallows then spindling himself onto the sand, turning, using his ear as his leading edge: whack! His wet body, thick as a dolphin, hit the sand and he rolled back and forth, happy as a sand Lab, which he was. That was lovely.

Ah well. Lets just walk on.

When I walk, I think. I know you think on your hills, too. What will this year hold? No. I must reword this. I cant have spent all my life working in a bureaucracy, being force-fed all those assertiveness and team-building and communication workshops, and not learnt how to be proactive and positive and in control. What I meant to ponder was: What will I make happen this year? (Time has sped up so much for me now that when I get around to making New Year Resolutions it is already March.) I think that maybe I want to learn to live without a salary. I can feel a fight developing between the me who I have become, and the me of my upbringing. In this corner is the working-class girl from the immigrant family for whom having a job and working hard was the goal, and there, in that corner, is the woman who wants less of the office hierarchy, more honesty in her life, and fewer dealings with people who cant think straight because of the language they abuse. I enjoy my work and admire my colleagues skills and their dedication, but I dont want, any more, to get to work in the morning and find an email in office-speak saying: We acknowledge that a small number of you may have only recently captured your deliverables as formal objectives It used to be funny. Now its tragic.