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I recently moved house. And in the general chaos and upheaval that happens before I actually physically moving, something struck me: what would it be like to learn how to cook in a brand new kitchen?
The most recent Lecker episode is about this and as part of the process of making it I asked my Instagram followers if anyone had recently moved house and would be willing to talk about it. The following people did…
Ruby Mason
Ruby is an editor at SAND, a Berlin-based journal of contemporary writing and art (www.sandjournal.com)
Margaux Vialleron
Margaux writes the newsletter The Onion Papers:
Maria Agiomyrgiannaki
Maria is originally from Crete, now living in London. You can find her on instagram.
Stephen Rötzsch Thomas
Stephen writes the newsletter Ideas With Legs:
Matthew Curtis
Matthew is a co-founder and Editor-in-Chief at Pellicle.
The episode also featured Eli Davies, who will be in conversation on the next newsletter.
I asked everyone the same questions, requesting them to respond in audio form. Here are their answers transcribed (lightly edited for clarity and brevity).
Tell me about your old kitchen.
Matthew Curtis:
Well, I moved into the last rental I had, in a bit of a whirlwind. Mentally, I wasn't doing very well. We had this nice house, but the owners wanted to move back in. Which is fair play. It's their house, but we had to find somewhere to move pretty quickly. And so we settled on the first place we found, and it wasn't the nicest house, but we should be thankful we found somewhere to live that was convenient for us.
And I remember when we moved in, it hadn't been cleaned and the whole house was just covered in, like, bits of paint from it being decorated and the decorators hadn't cleaned up. But the kitchen, you know…it's a two up, two down terraced House in South Manchester, but the kitchen hadn't been cleaned and it was massive. So I just spent some time in there cleaning it and getting to know it.
The oven didn't get hot properly. It basically had two settings: lukewarm or raging hot. It had a gas hob. I love to cook so I sort of worked around it and it was fine but I never really felt particularly inspired to cook in there because it didn't feel like a space that I wanted to spend much time in which is depressing.
One of my favourite things to cook which I did cook in there is a lasagna. I absolutely love spending a whole day making a ragu, making a bechamel, and then assembling that. And then waiting to eat this delicious thing. It's one of the most satisfying things you can cook. And I did that in there a couple of times, but something about that kitchen, it just, I dunno, it was more that I didn't really want to be in there that much.
It's weird for me because I work from home, so I have to be in there a lot whenever I want to make food, but it was just vast and I maybe didn't take advantage enough of how much room I had in there. But it was what it was, it worked even though the oven didn't get hot unless you wanted it to be on a nuclear setting. But there you go.
Ruby Mason: So the kitchen in my old flat was quite small. A lot of Berlin kitchens are kind of long and thin, because older buildings were often built without bathrooms because there were shared bathrooms, downstairs, kind of in the backyard, like outhouses. And, as things got modernised, they often just sliced a kind of slice off the kitchen and made it into the bathroom.
So it was a narrow kitchen, with a big window looking out onto a kind of shared inner courtyard garden, which was just like a lovely green oasis in the city, very serene and nice and quite a busy area. And the kitchen had like a bright purple, yellow and blue and red mosaic. All over kind of half of the walls…yeah, kind of loved it, kind of hated it. That was really kind of the main attraction point. Other than that, it was just kind of a space where over the years, we gathered a lot as kind of a changing shared flat with various flatmates.
I was there for five years, but I used to hang out there before I moved in because my friends lived there. Parties…an improbable number of people would cram into that kitchen. We'd have various shared meals there over the years.
Margaux Vialleron: My old kitchen was a morning kitchen. It was facing east, it had the most incredible aquamarine colour, and I would just bathe in the light every morning. I sat on a tiny stool I left all day long there, and just put some coffee on and started working there.
I think that was the thing I loved the most about this kitchen…it had a door. I could close it and it became a room of my own. I have memory of hosting there, I have welcomed people, I cooked for others, but to me it will always be a room of my own.
Stephen Rötzsch Thomas: When we first were looking for places, it was 100% the kitchen that sold me on the house that we ended up in. It was this beautiful space. They'd extended the back of the house and so it was a quite long kitchen. It had room for an island. The doors were painted all this pastel-ish sort of green and there was this huge curved granite worktop as well as the granite on top of the kitchen island.
Our landlords, before they moved out – and now are moving back in – had lived in the house that we were then in. And so they decorated it for them, it wasn't like other houses we'd been in which were just bland and grey and beige and, you know, kitchens in the corner of the living room. This was a space that had been planned, and there were bins at either end of the island which you could chuck things into very quickly and it was all very intuitive, but it was also just absolutely gorgeous. Six lights in ornate glass casings hanging from the ceiling. Absolute nightmares, because as soon as you changed the lightbulb on one, another one decided to start flickering. The sink was huge and ceramic and could fit in anything you needed it to fit.
The oven was a big gas range. My first time cooking with gas since I'd been a student, and I really didn't have any idea just how sticky it could get the things around it, but I loved it. I loved cooking in that place. We would have guests around, and we could live those sort of... ambitious, aspirational dinner party lives that you see in films and pretend are practical for real life, and they're not.
But, once in a while, you can do that, and you can bring people in, and you can cook, and you can have them round, and they can sit and watch you finish dinner at the kitchen island while they drink the cocktails your wife has made them, and, and, you know, grate the parmesan, and put on the records in the dining room.
Maria Agiomyrgiannaki: My old kitchen was in a garden flat behind Turnpike Lane bus station. And my partner and I moved there in August 2019, so that's six months before the first pandemic lockdown. And we moved there from Hackney, I'd been in Hackney for about 15 years but couldn't afford to rent there anymore.
Haringey became home very quickly…the whole surrounding area of Green Lanes and Wood Green and the options to eat out there, but also all the shops there and the options to buy ingredients. I would say that it really inspired me personally and involved my own cooking very much. So that's what happened in that kitchen.
And the kitchen was quite small and kind of L shaped. It had a big window above the kitchen sink overlooking a fence with like ivy on it. And it had a door that led out to a big paved garden.
The garden was almost half the size of the flat, so it was very big. Before we moved in, we asked the landlord to put two big shelves, up on one wall. And one shelf ended up having all of my spices and herbs, and the other shelf was all of my various dried beans and pulses that I bring back from home from Crete.
As I said, six months after we moved in, the first lockdown hit and of course the kitchen became….you know, as we were all doing right around that time, it became a space to be creative in. Everyone was cooking, everyone was making stuff, so it was, yeah, definitely some kind of outlet of creativity and source of sanity, let's say.
That big garden being linked to it, that became kind of…it was almost like it was one space, right? So, we did all the lockdown things. My partner's Italian, so he went very dough-y. He learned how to make bread, so lots of bread and sourdough and all of those things.
But the big thing was that he bought [was] a gas pizza oven which went in the back garden just outside the door and he learns to make pizza. Lots of experiments, lots of big messes and lots of failures, but he perfected it. And then, once the lockdowns were over and the rules eased, then we started hosting people in the garden and the kitchen was always a massive mess, but it was a haven really. Yeah, that was really, really lovely.
So yeah, being part of Green Lanes and having access to all that palette of ingredients in all the shops there. We subscribe to a local North London veg box. So that happened in September, 2020, I think. So they rescue veg that would otherwise end up as waste. There are other kind of national schemes like that. They rescue the food that would end up in waste and they also support local charities that fight food poverty. They're called Street Box, so big shout out to them. So from September 2020 till April 23, so last April, each Friday we got a veg box in our front door, in our front garden.
So the challenge of making that veg box last through the week, making the most delicious food, nutritious food, was something that I found really fulfilling and really inspiring. It really kind of, I don't know, I just really enjoyed doing that. That made me really creative and using the produce and mixing it and yeah, the pulses and the beans. I ended up making tons of really different soups.
What was the last meal you ate in your old kitchen?
Matthew Curtis: I was going through a busy time. I was in the process of buying my first home, which I'm really happy to have done, which is ridiculous at the age of 40. But we had this plan when we got the keys to go to a drive-thru KFC and sit on the floor in the new house and eat it.
When we got into the new house, my partner Diane and I were exhausted and we shared a beer, Burning Sky Cuvée Saison. We sat on the floor in our new bedroom and drank that, but we just had no appetite because we were just exhausted. I'd also been working on the manuscript for my next book, which is called Manchester's Best Beer Pubs and Bars, which is out in October.
And so I had this double whammy of stress. So what we did is we went home to our old house, which was just…everything was in boxes. And we ordered a KFC, and just ate chicken and, and dunked hunks of chicken in delicious gravy, ate some chips, and had a couple of beers, and that was fine.
It seemed fitting. It was a meal of necessity. I think it's nice to lean on those easy takeaway meals. They stop you from being hungry. They taste nice. They're comforting. It was kind of the fitting end to eating in that house and not cooking despite having this vast kitchen.
Ruby Mason: When I was moving, I was trying not to buy any groceries. So I was just using stuff up for the last couple of weeks. And I think one memorable meal I had was like…in the freezer I found some, like, wild garlic pesto that a flatmate had made. And, yeah, she didn't mind me eating it, and I had a nice meal of that, before I left. I think she picked the wild garlic, in the forest, in Berlin as well, so, very local.
Yeah, the week of my actual move, I had food poisoning from takeaway sushi, which was pretty awful. So I think the very last meal I ate in that flat was probably like dry crackers, because I was still recovering when I moved. Bit of a blur.
Margaux Vialleron: In fact, the last meal I remember making, eating, was breakfast. It was the last day in the kitchen. I had packed the house and in fact, I had moved most of the stuff the day before.
So I was just standing with the last few boxes and, you know, cleaning products. And I had gone to the corner shop in the morning to grab one of those Activia pots to go because I needed something easy and that required no instances whatsoever. And, uh... I'm famously quite unlucky and the yoghurt factory making industrial era failed me on this one.
There was no spoon. So I just crawled through some glass boxes and found this wooden tong and just ate this yoghurt out of this standing in there and…you know what? Looking at it now, it's easy to romanticise I guess. It was the best last meal I could have ever had there. It was one of my own. And I liked that.
Stephen Rötzsch Thomas: The last meal I cooked there was apricot glazed hake. And it was from Lerato's cookbook, Africana, which came out last year and...has instantly become one of my favourite things to have nearby and to cook from almost every other week, maybe.
I liked how vivid the flavours were and it felt like a nice choice, a really comforting choice to close out that sort of chapter of cooking with.
I pan fried some Jersey Royal potatoes. And just had this delicious, rich, flavoursome meal that I could cook not because I had that kitchen but that I could enjoy cooking because I had that kitchen. Because I had the space to move, the space to do what I wanted.
I would always listen to music or podcasts, while I cooked. Normally what would happen is I'd listen to a podcast, but I'm the world's slowest cook. I luxuriate in my cooking. I take two hours to do what should take forty minutes. And so I'd listen to a podcast, and the podcast ends, and then I put on my cooking playlist, which is some seven hours long, and is almost entirely meant to dance around to without really worrying about what else is happening in the world.
And so that's what I could do. I'd put that on, and I made hake, glazed with an apricot sort of jam mix, served with potatoes, and it was a good goodbye.
Maria Agiomyrgiannaki: One more thread, I guess, that runs through all these four years of us living there were, was my tomato-ey eggs. So lots and lots of different variations of like type of scrambled tomato-ey eggs, shakshuka type eggs, menemen type tomato-ey eggs. So lots of different brunch variations of these eggs. And it feels like, yeah, those kind of tomato-ey scrambled eggs was the first thing that I learned to cook as a kid, from my maternal grandmother. And, yeah, just all these different variations with whatever veggies were left from the veg box, whatever was in our pantry.
It's something that I still make and it's a real comfort thing for both my partner and I. The next question you ask is the last meal I ate there, and I think most probably it might have been a version of those eggs, some tomato-ey eggs, so you know, everything being packed, not having lots of stuff around, so, one frying pan.
What’s your new kitchen like?
Matthew Curtis: The new house is really interesting. We've moved to Stockport, but the kitchen hasn't been updated. It's like it's a miner’s cottage. The house has a cellar. It's a very small kitchen and it has a gas cooker, so it's got a hob and a grill and an oven, and it's very small, and I think it might be about 30 or 40 years old.
You have to light the oven with a lighter by turning the gas on and sticking your hand in the back. And you know what? We've spent all our money, so we have to learn how to use it because it'll be, you know, a few months or maybe a year or more before we can afford [to replace it]. So I'm going to embrace this gas oven and this new kitchen, which is about half the size of my old kitchen, but it just has a feel because we own it.
We've painted it like this dark olive green. So like the outside is coming in and that at once makes me feel like I want to spend time in there. I want to figure out if I can cook my beloved lasagna on this little oven. I'm really looking forward to that.
Ruby Mason: My new kitchen is…yeah, it's the first time I've ever had my own kitchen.
I mean, it's still a rented flat, but in Germany it's pretty common for rented flats to not have kitchens in them. So even as a tenant, you fit the kitchen and like the cabinets and everything yourself when you move in. Which might sound a bit strange from a UK perspective, but on the flip side, tenancies are very secure here. So you usually sign a lease for an unlimited amount of time and you can't really be evicted. You expect to stay for many years and get your money's worth of your things.
So my new kitchen is green, which I love, and has a view out over the east of Berlin. You can see the TV tower and then out kind of into the, the former east and the high rise buildings that are associated with that area. When I moved in, the kitchen was just kind of a shell and I didn't have any, any counters or anything like that.
Stephen Rötzsch Thomas: I'm in this place now where the house we're buying, we know the one we're buying, we're just waiting for everything to work out and do what it needs to do. And one of the defining features of this house is, is the opposite of what was the defining feature that drew me into the last house.
Which is to say that this house that we are buying...does not have a kitchen or it does. It has the room, it has the kitchen as a room and it has an oven and it has a sink, but the oven is a billion years old and I'm not convinced it would even work if I tried. The sink is absolutely disgusting. There are no cupboards, just work surfaces. And so, everything about that kitchen, the moment we get in there, will have to be built again from scratch.
Which is an exhausting idea at this point, having just moved house once, to have to move house again and build a kitchen. But at the same time, it's an opportunity. And I'm looking forward to designing a kitchen? It doesn't feel like the sort of thing I... thought I'd get to do. I didn't think I'd get to own a house. It feels almost out of reach to own.
So the idea that I'm going to potentially own a house and then build my kitchen is lovely and a little daunting. But it's important because all the houses we could look at in our budget were so small that the kitchens were my nightmares. They were the ones, again, that were tucked at the side of the living room, that had no space of their own, and were built for people who don't like to cook much.
Whereas I spend... God, I must spend 15 hours a week cooking meals in my kitchen. And so I want a space that works and feels like home. And that's what I'm looking at now. And I'm going to be building it, I guess, based on all the things I loved about the old kitchen.
Because I'm going to have the smallest kitchen. It's a galley kitchen I'm going to have. And my challenge is building that kitchen in a way that feels like home, that feels exciting and welcoming and comfortable to cook in, but also fits.
Even though I'm still waiting for the mortgage to be sort of confirmed, I went to the estate agent and I asked if they would let me into the house that we're looking to buy. And I took a tape measure. And I measured that kitchen and I have all of that written down so I can eventually start planning. I don't know how I'm going to plan a kitchen. I mean, I know there's going to be tools online, but... I'm still in a space where I think the best way to do it is just to go on The Sims or something.
But I'm already thinking about what that kitchen needs and how I'm gonna work it into the kitchen I want. I'd like a chair tucked away at the end that someone can sit on while I'm cooking for them. I'm gonna get as big a range cooker as I can fit without it feeling stupid. It'll be gas, because, well, Nottingham is usually gas cooking, but also it's just so much quicker and easier and intuitive.
I need to work out the best sink I can get. I'm gonna get a tap with the silly little hose, like I'm in a restaurant kitchen. Because I've had those before and they are so fun, but also quite useful. And I'm going to put a picture on the wall. It's going to be my kitchen and I can decorate it and I can put things on the walls and I can paint it. I have a beautiful picture by an artist I can't even remember the name of. And it's essentially a cartoon orgy of breakfast foods. It's much sweeter than it sounds. I'm going to paint the cupboard doors. And then the most middle class thing I could possibly do, I'm possibly gonna paint them the colour of my KitchenAid. The kitchen has a terracotta floor that is old and tatty and needs a lot of love, but I'm gonna give it that love.
And I'm excited to have a kitchen that is my own. It won't be the size of the one that I've been cooking in for the last few years, it's the one that I've made almost every one of my favourite meals in. It will not have an island. It will barely have room on the counters or in the cupboards.
But it will be exactly the kitchen I want, because I will make that. It will be exactly the kitchen I want, because I will be doing every single thing I can to make it mine.
Maria Agiomyrgiannaki: It does feel a little bit silly. Because we moved out of the old flat because we had a leak, we had rising damp, it was just really months on end of a nightmare situation with the landlord and the kitchen was kind of…walls were crumbling and everything.
Cupboards stinking of mould and just everything reeking of mould. My cutlery, every time I went to take something out of a drawer, like the metal smelling of mould, it's just awful. So this is why this feels stupid because the new kitchen…obviously none of that mould smell, none of any of that but the old kitchen…I do miss it.
It feels like I had arranged it how I wanted it to be with the furniture and with the shelving and everything. And the new kitchen…it feels like this is it and I have to adopt it and I have to make it work basically. So obviously we'll make changes but I…yeah, I miss the old kitchen.
That's what feels silly because it was such a nightmare for months on end before we moved out and this is, you know, sparkly and new and perfect, and I think I'm not getting on very well with that perfection. Anyway, so I definitely miss the connection with a big garden and having visiting cats and birds I could see from the kitchen, and I can't quite describe what I miss….it's quite visceral, I think.
I think I miss the kitchen like it was a person that I haven't seen in a long time. And I think it's because of the emotional connection of how much went…how much time, how much connection, how much, I don't know, during, like, it was a very key space during the pandemic and, and then again, the joy of being able to cook for people following the pandemic after.
And also I think unconsciously feeling, like, surrounded by all the food culture, the food vibes around in Haringey and how that really inspired me. It felt like the food, all the food variety and, it permeated the walls of my flat and came into my flat somehow.
So yeah, I do miss feeling like I am surrounded by something like that. And I miss seeing everything. I miss having my shelves where I could see all my herbs and spices. And yes, it did make it look like a shop. Not aesthetically to everyone's taste, but somehow that display of having everything, being able to see things that are vital ingredients that give flavour somehow work for my brain and my creativity.
The new kitchen is very modern but it doesn't feel like it has a lot of soul for me yet. We're the first people to move into the flat and I'm not sure whether that might have something to do with it. And everything is along one wall, so there's the fridge, then the sink, then the work surface, then the hob, then the oven, and it's all lined, all lined up, so, and maybe it's that thing that it doesn't feel, like, contained, like the L type kitchen felt before.
And the induction hob…the induction hob is my nemesis, I think. There are things that I knew exactly how to do them on my gas hob. I used to do these sliced courgettes in like a dry frying pan, the courgettes a little bit like marinated in oil, and they used to come out like almost like grilled courgettes. It was a perfected art. And now, I don't know, I think I've tried about six or seven times in this induction hob and it just does not come out the same and it's so heartbreaking.
And of course, the box is the other thing, the veg box. So being in a block of flats means that…the box gets delivered overnight, I think they try to do like low carbon emissions and stuff like that, so they deliver it overnight, and it used to be delivered in my front garden, but considering I'm in a gated kind of development, they can't, I don't think it's practical to leave it at the gate of the development, so I will look into it, but not having had that kind of veg box Ready Steady Cook challenge feels like it's chipped away at my inspiration a little bit. I feel not as inspired going into a supermarket or in a shop to just buy veg.
What was the first meal you ate in the new flat?
Matthew Curtis: Well, I was unpacking everything. I got the frying pan out of the box and I fried an egg and I got a loaf of Warburtons. I didn't even do anything to the bread, just a fresh loaf of very soft white bread, the plainest pillowiest bread. I fried an egg over easy in olive oil. I put that in the sandwich, oil splashing onto the bread, and then I got some Daddys ketchup, which is a bit more acidic than most of the ketchups, I don't know if you've compared ketchups, and I bought it because it was a pound cheaper than Heinz, and I'm like, oh yeah, that'll save me a quid.
And that was the first thing I cooked in this kitchen surrounded by our lives in boxes. And, I don't know, there's something nice. It was like…it was a breakfast meal. I think that's a nice start to cooking in a house.
It's just got this nice sort of cottage-y feeling kitchen with all these little nooks and crannies. It's got a cellar underneath it. So I'm just kind of looking forward to getting to know this kitchen and I guess letting the kitchen get to know me.
Ruby Mason: First meals were quite snack based, a little bit like living in student accommodation.
When I moved in and I was kind of still doing some DIY on the flat, my partner and I bought rye crackers, cheddar cheese, which is relatively hard to find here, but we found some really nice mature cheddar cheese, a jar of Spreewald pickles, basically gherkins that are like grown in the Spreewald, which is close to Berlin, a very iconic German thing. Um, and had a lot of meals of those, like with those three components, crackers, cheese and, and pickles, which is very satisfying.
I'm still getting used to having my own kitchen. It feels luxurious and extravagant in a strange way. All the fridge space and cupboard space and this luxury of being able to spread out. Yeah, I've been cooking a lot, kind of in batches for myself, making kind of curries and soups and things and freezing them.
Now it's summer and it's kind of hot, so I've been eating this bulgur salad, which is great. It's Turkish, but you get it a lot in Berlin because there's quite a big Turkish population here. Made with tomato puree and spring onion and fresh parsley and mint and bulgur wheat, and pomegranate molasses. Very delicious. Eaten cold.
And...yeah, we'll see. I'm sure lots of cooking is going to be done in the kitchen. I do miss the shared kitchen in some ways. It's this space where people congregated and that social aspect, but it feels like a new phase and I'm really enjoying having the space to myself.
Margaux Vialleron: After that, there were, there were no kitchens because we had to move very quickly in the middle of the London renting crisis and couldn't find anywhere else. So we ended up living for a few months in short term accommodations. And those kitchens are both impersonal and extremely resourceful.
So, you know, you serve your salad out of a pot and you just go, go with the flow. And you know what, I like that. It gives something new to my cooking too. But it was never my space. We've now found somewhere else to rent and there is a kitchen again, which I feel extremely lucky about and privileged to have this again.
The one thing is, there is no door. It's an open kitchen. It's a wall, really. The first meal I made there is a big, big pot of orzo, which is also my favourite. Orzo with some grated courgette. The trick is to have it one yellow and two greens, a bit of parmesan, and some oat cream to make it very smushy.
And that's also a great meal to share. I think this kitchen is going to be about sharing, and that's fine too.
Stephen Rötzsch Thomas: And I don't know what I'm gonna cook in it, the first time I get a chance to cook in there, the first time after I've put in an oven and put in counters and put in cupboards and put all my food and my billions of pans and stupid things.
Once I've shipped in 150 cookbooks and put them in the bookshelves and the next room over because they will not fit otherwise. I'm fairly sure. Whatever I am cooking, it won't be a cookbook, it might just be a risotto.
I like that, actually, no, I'll probably do that.
I'll get my pan. My not a Le Creuset, rip off looking thing. And I'll luxuriate, like I always do. And instead of taking half an hour to make a risotto, I will take one hour. And I will savour the slicing of the shallots and... pan frying of... I don't know. The lardons. The cracking of the rice. And then, then I will eat a risotto in a kitchen that will not be perfect, but will be mine.
Maria Agiomyrgiannaki: The new kitchen, you ask. So, we moved into a flat in a new development in Walthamstow. Luckily, not so far away from Haringey and Green Lanes. The kitchen is a big space together with the living room and the dining room. And the kitchen is all along one wall.
It's very modern. Of course, no gas, but induction hobs. Sadly. And there is a floor to ceiling window that looks onto a row of trees, which feels like you're in the tree canopy, which is really lovely.
So anyway, the first meal we ate there in the new flat, was some souvlaki that we ordered in. Just after the move. Just to share some food with the friends that helped us move. I don't remember what we first cooked in this kitchen. Again, I wouldn't be surprised if it was some kind of tomato-ey egg thing as an easy thing, to keep us going as we unpack.
Thanks for reading! There will be another newsletter around this subject coming very soon. Don’t forget to listen to the podcast episode if you haven’t already!
Loved this, Lucy! We've just moved to France and I'm still getting to know our kitchen.
How lovely! I may try this as a journal prompt and recall the good/bad of my old tiny kitchen and what it was like to cook there.