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Eli Davies is a writer whose work centres around home, food, domesticity and the relationships between these things and the wider environment that we live in. You can now read her writing on Substack too, by the way.
I was introduced to Eli and her work by Dan Hancox - thanks Dan! - who put us in touch to talk about kitchens. Before we spoke via video chat Eli sent me a pdf of an essay she wrote for the literary magazine The Tangerine in 2019 called Homebuilding; any mentions of ‘the essay’ are in reference to this. It’s unfortunately not available online but I’ve tried to give necessary context where I can. I also sent Eli the Meal Machine episode of the Kitchens series I made in 2021, because I felt like the conversations I’d had with myself and others about gender roles and domesticity were very much in harmony with her own - again, have footnoted this when it comes up for clarity.
This letter is a companion to the Moving House, Moving Kitchens episode of Lecker which was recently released; you can hear Eli on that, and read more accounts of moving on the previous letter here.
Lucy Dearlove: So what drew you to this topic... it is the idea of home building, right, that's at the core of it? What made you interested in that in the first place?
Eli Davies: I mean, partly what happened was I started my PhD in 2017, essentially. My PhD was an interdisciplinary literature psychology project about women's experiences with the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
And it started off being about that, like a big sort of broad thing of women, you know, the big public narratives. So it was kind of trying to look at hidden stories. And then it was three months into my PhD. My 12 year relationship broke up.
Which was obviously hugely disruptive. At the time I was kind of half living in Ireland, half in London, we still had our flat together. When we'd made the decision to break up, we had move out of the home, and take apart the home that we built together and I had to move more sort of fully to Ireland in a way that wasn't entirely within my control. It wasn't how I'd planned it.
And so anyway, this whole experience of leaving a home and having to find a new home really informed my academic focus for my PhD. So I became really interested in domestic space. And then my PhD started to focus more specifically on women's experiences with domestic space…so what's happening in the home, and using that as a way in to find stories that haven't really been talked about or heard or valued or all of those things that happens with stuff that happens in the home.
So that became a focus of the literary analysis, the novels and the memoirs and stories that I was reading. But also I interviewed other women about their memories of the home. during the Troubles. And that was the sort of starting point for that, you know, tell me about where you lived, where did you eat dinner? What did you watch on the TV? Who did you share a room with, your siblings? Rather than being like, where were you on, you know, when this riot broke out. Like it was starting from inside the home and then working out.
And of course those stories then became about Bloody Sunday, or, you know, particular demonstrations or bombings, but was starting from the perspective of: you begin with the home and you work out, and that gives you access to a particular, really particular type of story.
Lucy Dearlove: What people make at home, the stuff that they probably, even if you asked them to do, like, a ‘what I eat in a day’ thing, they probably wouldn't talk about this stuff. Because it's the non performative and those are the things that I think tell us most about the way that we live and they're also the things that just don't get preserved because people don't find them noteworthy or interesting and so much of that I think is about women's labour as well. Like what your mum makes on a busy week night, etc.
So I think that's such an interesting way into a very specific historical event.
Eli Davies: I mean, food came up a lot. Maybe that kind of shaped my questioning as well, but what people were eating and how they were, you know, that's such an insight into…you get so much social history around that as well.
And about homes, home design…where was the kitchen, where did you eat dinner? Aand also in a time of historical turbulence. What happens to those gender roles? What happens to domestic roles? They can kind of shift, the homes can become a bit unstable, right?
I'm working on a book on single women and cooking. But originally I had this idea that I wanted to write a book about home building in troubled times. So including my relationship breakup, but also during COVID, I had to move twice, which was horrendous. And, so I was like, Oh, I want to write about that. So the food just became more and more of a focus and it's in relationship to making a home.
What I did in the kitchen, what I cooked. How that makes me feel about space.
Lucy Dearlove: What significance do you think the kitchen has in that process?
Eli Davies: Well, there's different layers to it.
So there's a very practical, material sort of layer to it, which I talk about in the essay1. When I left my home that me and my partner shared, I walked away from all of the stuff that we'd built up, that we'd bought over the years, because I just couldn't face it. It was quite a painful process.
And I just was like, I can't deal with this, you can take it all. Apart from a few choice things, like my Le Creuset…
Lucy Dearlove: Not letting that go.
Eli Davies: Yeah, I'm keeping that. And so when I moved into my own first post breakup home, I had to buy all of that stuff again.
You know these things that you forget that you're gonna need. You buy plates, you buy pans, buy some cutlery. And then there's all of these other little things that become important. And so that is obviously a really important part of the work of home building. It's not talked about enough as work.
But it really takes a lot of emotional and physical energy to do it, as well as money, as well as material resources. So there's that, and then all of the kind of emotional layers of cooking and eating, which for me, at that point, like in 2017, 2018, were very bound up with my relationship, you know, like you talk about in that podcast episode2.
Entertaining people, entertaining his family, entertaining my family, having dinner parties for friends. I love cooking, and I really enjoyed doing all of that, but I was left with this icky feeling about, like, what was I doing there? Like, I was performing this role, this very sort of wifely role. Even though I wanted to do it.
Lucy Dearlove: Yeah, it feels bad that it feels good sometimes.
Eli Davies: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And also, I do think there is this sort of heteronormativity that, when you have people around for dinner, the dinner table becomes a kind of space. Even in the most enlightened relationships. I feel like there were times when we would have friends over for dinner and I just felt like my partner was sort of being the bon viveur and I was clearing plates away and bringing the dishes to the table and looking after everyone.
And it was his space to sort of be fun. And I think about that a lot, the dynamics of the dinner table, as a performance of gender roles, as a work space. It's power dynamics getting worked out or played out.
So, yeah, I had to sort of extricate myself from all of that stuff. And learn how to do it in a way that felt, I don't know, just sort of felt…sort of cheesy phrase, but like, true to myself. I mean, what does that mean? That's meaningless. But like, in a way that I felt okay.
Lucy Dearlove: Yeah. So how have you managed to build that up, I guess in the process of moving? I mean, now, since you've written that essay, like not once, but I'm guessing multiple times?
Eli Davies: Yeah, yeah, I've moved three times since I wrote that. I have to say, I was lucky that my parents helped me out a bit, and you know, gave me advice on stuff, and you know, I was fortunate to have a sort of support network,
But it was acknowledging that actually I really like cooking. And I had this moment – and this was in the last house that I lived in in Belfast, actually, before I moved home – where I was watching Jamie Oliver, one of his 15 Minute Meals or something, and he was getting some spices out from this kind of whole wall of drawers behind him. And I just experienced this pang, and I was like, I want that! And I was like, oh god, what's happening to me? Like, I'm craving all of these really sort of bourgeois…kitchen, sort of Jamie Oliver-esque features.
But that's okay. I had this moment that…like, the kitchen is obviously an important space if you want it to be, because you spend a lot time in it. Like, don't beat yourself up about it. So it's sort of allowing myself to want that and build that up and accepting that in those different homes, the kitchen has been a really important space.
Like the place I moved to after that initial first time in Belfast was an awful, rickety old house. I was there in that awful winter lockdown in 2021, very lonely, doing my PhD. It was a bad time, but actually in the kitchen it was great. That was somewhere that I could make sense of things. I had the stuff I needed. I made myself some kind of extravagant meals. It was sort of all right. Kind of okay. And I think in the fraught process of home building the kitchen is the place where I can do that. I know how to…I know I feel comfortable in that space.
The living room, the bedroom, you know, putting up pictures. All of those things I find very, very daunting tasks. I put those things off, you know, buying nice little cushions for the sofa, all of that. I find that stuff stressful and overwhelming. Mm-hmm.
But when it comes to the kitchen, you know, I've got like seven types of vinegar in my cupboards. I've spent money on a really good knife. For me, I think it takes stripping away – and again, I'm thinking a lot about the writing I'm doing on single women cooking – stripping away the pair element has actually helped me come to terms with it. And that is kind of liberating, in a way.
It's not straightforward, it's still not straightforward. Nigella Lawson talks about this, I think in Cook, Eat, Repeat, the way she openly tailors recipes just for one person. In a way that felt quite unusual, you know. And she was saying it's really important for women in particular to uncouple cooking from care, from care duties for other people. And then doing it for yourself can actually be a really great, illuminating thing to do.
Lucy Dearlove: When you're talking about you finding it most frictionless to build a space in the kitchen, as opposed to the rest of the home, I really get that.
I started out thinking about kitchens as…I felt really annoyed that they were so restrictive, they were this really rigid framework, but I've actually really kind of come around in my thinking and I'm now like…there's actually like a real luxury in that because you can move in somewhere new and the kitchen might not be like to your taste or whatever, but you can immediately create a space for yourself within the framework that already exists.
So I've moved into my new kitchen, and it's actually weirdly quite similar to my old kitchen. Like it's a small separate kitchen with cabinets and kind of in a U shape. It's a little bit bigger, but I was like, Oh, I immediately feel at home because I've got all the things that I had and I don't need any furniture or really any accessories.
I've just got this existing space that I recognise.
Eli Davies: Yeah, exactly. No, that's really true. And so often I've sort of thought, you know, I wish I could move into a house where the living room is just nice already. Someone is taking care of the throws and the, you know, the sort of lamplight. I find all of that stuff really hard. And yeah, you're right, in the kitchen there is a sense that it's kind of there.
Lucy Dearlove: Yeah. It's ready.
Eli Davies: The other thing is…actually, I was thinking about this listening to the Kitchens series, is that I've done quite a lot of house sitting. I was living with my parents in Cardiff for six months but I was back and forth to London quite a bit, and there was lots of house sitting, cat sitting things, like for friends and friends of friends.
That enabled me to spend some time in London. And that was so fascinating, going into different people's kitchens. Because that obviously…again, like, that's where I want to get sorted. You know, I want to work out, like, how I'm going to make my meals. And, you know, what store cupboard things they've got and don't have.
And that was just so interesting. Like, looking at how the kitchen was a sort of window into, like, what people value. But also...what kind of cooking they do, and who they're cooking for, and who's being cooked for, who's doing the cooking. ,
I hope I'm not publicly shaming anyone! Well, I'm not naming, no names. But like, I feel like there's a lot of shame around home building as well.
Lucy Dearlove: Yeah, you feel like you’re not doing it properly.
Eli Davies: Agreed, yeah. Domesticity is this thing, you know, there's this ideal that's sort of held up. Yeah. that people feel constantly that they're failing to live up to. And again, I think this isn't really talked about very much, you know, and it comes in the minutiae of this stuff, you know.
And so, I don't know if you have this, but you know in like the cutlery drawer, you open the cutlery drawer, the cutlery drawer gets filled up with crap, like little crumbs, and dust, and food debris, and you know, and like, I always, you know, open it and think, my god, it's disgusting, I really need to sort this out.
Well, everyone has that.
Lucy Dearlove: Okay. That's so reassuring, yeah. When I moved out of my old flat, we had to hoover it out. I was like, this is so bad.
Eli Davies: I've done that, yeah.
Lucy Dearlove: But yeah, that's so true, yeah.
Were there any other reveals or surprises, being in all these different kitchens?
Eli Davies: It was interesting, I was house sitting for some friend, a couple, they've got two kids and I've known them for a long time.
He does the cooking in the household and he loves it and we talk about it a lot and we'll send each other pictures of stuff that we've cooked. And he had the same things as me, you've got the Maldon sea salt, you've got the spices that I have, you know, very simpatico. And again, thinking about home building and the work of building a home, the store cupboard is another thing, right?
Lucy Dearlove: Yeah, yeah..
Eli Davies: You've got to buy the oil, the pasta, the rice. The spice cupboards can take years to build up because you buy them as and when you need them for a particular dish
So when I was cooking in that kitchen, it was like, oh yeah, this is really nice.
Lucy Dearlove: Yeah, I can imagine that. I've house sat for people, and even though their kitchen has been lovely, I've just kind of felt like I can't cook in it, because…I don't know, just something about…it is definitely a store cupboard thing.
But then, also something about the rhythm of it, like where stuff is. And it's funny, you can't quite put a finger on it, and on the surface of it I'd walk into that kitchen and be like oh my god this is amazing, I'd love to have this kitchen, but then a level below that, it's like…it's not for me.
Yeah, which is really interesting, and I think…I really like that that's the case. The thing that I'm really interested in is why all of our kitchens look the same, but then something else that I've come to realise is that all you have to do is open one cupboard, like, and then all of the differences reveal themselves.
And there's something really nice about that as well, it's almost like bursting at the seams. Like your personality is bursting out of it, or your life is bursting out of it, but it's just behind this like one layer.
Eli Davies: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, completely.
This kind of minutiae absolutely fascinates me, like I'm absolutely obsessed with these sorts of details.
Lucy Dearlove: Yeah, me too. It's really interesting you were talking about the kind of shame because that's something that I was really…when I was unpacking stuff and like putting my new kitchen together, deciding where I was going to put stuff, and I had this like really overwhelming sense of like…but what if I get it wrong?
But then it's like, well, who cares? Who's even going to know? But then it's just this like really, like, deep layer.
Eli Davies: Yeah, I know, I know.
Another crucial thing actually, when it comes to the relationship between the kitchen and homemaking, is that when you're renting – I've been renting, you know, living as a lodger in a house in London – there's only so much control you have over making that space work for you, you know? Not the place I'm living in now, there's a nice kitchen there, but like, yeah, so you have to make it work for you and you don't have that much control.
Lucy Dearlove: In the Homebuilding essay3 you talked about how you collect examples of how domesticity features in public discourse. Is that something that you still do?
Eli Davies: Yeah, it is. I'm doing it particularly for the book that I'm writing at the moment, which is about single women and cooking and that's been completely fascinating. During my PhD, I was looking at examples, obviously, that were specifically set during the Troubles. Novels and memoir, and how the kitchen functions in those spaces. And that was really interesting, because it was thinking about the kitchen as a workspace, but not just in terms of, like, what we normally would think of as cooking and cleaning. Like, work also being done, discussions that are had, decisions that are being made, important conversations that are had. It keeps an open space of violence, in that context.
Lucy Dearlove: Yeah, of course. God.
Eli Davies: So it is a really charged space and crops up a lot in those kind of Irish texts. As somewhere where things happen, you know, drama.
Lucy Dearlove: I have found that kitchens can be sometimes quite conspicuously absent from even novels that are set with scenes in the home. And I guess we now see the kitchen probably most in public discourse when it comes to the price of food, or the price of energy and there's always this ongoing horrible rhetoric about, like, well, if you just cooked from scratch, you know, if you just used your kitchen properly, you would...Yeah. And that's kind of its most visible presence, I guess, which is weird considering how aspirational it is in kind of food media. ,
Eli Davies: Yeah. Like the stuff about energy saving, you know, the money saving experts were coming on and drawing attention to the tiniest minutiae, you know, like the temperatures in your oven, you know, like 10 degrees, turn it down. Where the kitchen then becomes a space of personal responsibility. And it's very atomised and individualised.
And this is another thing. Like rethinking the kitchen as…how can we have more community kitchens? Collectivise our approach to cooking anything a bit more. Because certainly in terms of energy saving and climate change, those kinds of things….it makes so much more sense to share some of those really energy hungry...
I mean, nobody wants to have that discussion because I think in this country particularly, we are very attached to the idea, the certain idea of what home looks like, very individual, you know, nuclear family.
But I really think that should be part of this conversation about how we think about our relationship to home, how if we reconfigure our kitchens in this way, how that also can change how we think about home and community and living and all of that sort of stuff.
Lucy Dearlove: Yeah, that, was something that I looked at a little bit at the end of the Kitchens series that I made. Because yeah, it's basically unviable for us to continue in the way that we are essentially, for whole variety of different reasons.
I don't know if you listened to the podcast 99% Invisible, but they made an episode recently about the Frankfurt kitchen. Which actually was really good.
And they talked about a lot of things to do with the designer of it and the context around it that I hadn't heard before – as someone that's read quite a lot about the Frankfurt kitchen.
Basically, the way that they situated it was how at odds it was with a desire in the States at that point – I don't know how niche this was or how small the movement was – but basically there was this movement to try and like communalise domestic labor and there were these sort of like experiments to try and do that.
And it's just kind of really wild how far we've moved away from that. And I think in the context of…the British Restaurants after the second world war as well, like how quickly they were like stamped out as soon as rationing ended. It's like…get rid of these horrible communist forces. But I think that we're still living with that legacy really, the kind of weird fear around not having this like idealised home life in a nuclear family.
But they would be amazing. Like, imagine just having a restaurant you could go to and have like an affordable meal that was home cooked and...
Eli Davies: Yeah, so good. I think about this, living alone, like those days where I don't want to cook and I could just go to my community kitchen and, you know, sit with my neighbour and have a chat over dinner, or maybe even cook, cook in the, you know, you know, participate in the cooking in the community kitchen.
Lucy Dearlove: Yeah, I have a real desire to do that as well. I would love that.
Eli Davies: Me too!
Lucy Dearlove: So this flat that I've moved into in St. Leonards is in a 1930s block and they used to have a restaurant and communal spaces within the building, which have now largely been like taken over by shops or just are disused. Apparently there used to be a rooftop bar, which I'm trying to get to the bottom of.
And you know, I've had friends who've lived in other mid century buildings that had a similar feature, a restaurant that is now closed. And it's just really interesting because I just think that would be amazing. Why was there no demand for it?
I suppose the answer is that it wasn't profitable, probably.
Eli Davies: Yeah, not profitable. I think it's also…I've been thinking a lot about how our meal times and the way we eat are very shaped by demands like the idea of the lunch hour and Sunday dinner and it's shaped by a certain idea of the working week.
And also the male breadwinner, right? Even though those things, those roles have shifted, I think it's the origin.
Lucy Dearlove: It's still the idea, it still sticks.
Eli Davies: I mean, I've got so much to say about this whole topic!
When I was moving out of my last flat in Belfast I was packing things up and emptying out my kitchen cupboards and I was trying to use up things from the freezer. And that felt really sad. I just got really emotional about that.
I only lived in that flat for a year. It wasn't somewhere that had particular recognition for me in my life. But the kitchen was somewhere that was clearly like…this has been a really important space here. And I'm taking it apart, and that felt sad.
Lucy Dearlove: Yeah, that's interesting that it was that particular activity within the kitchen that had a specific emotional significance. Like, it wasn't just the idea of leaving, which is obviously sad in itself. But it's almost like, that really feels like a symbolic ending to what you've done, what you've lived through in that kitchen.
Yeah, I really get that. I lived in my previous flat for nine years. And just like, so much stuff happened in it. So many things changed in my life while I was there. And I was kind of surprisingly okay about moving. I thought I was going to be really upset on the day that we moved and I wasn't.
But the way that it's got me is that I don't have places for things. I've basically lost everything I own about four times. I think that's made me really sad. I'm like, oh, I know this is my home, but it doesn't feel like it yet, because I can't find anything.
I feel like the emotions of moving home are so complicated, and they impact us in really weird and nuanced ways. ,
Eli Davies: I know. Aother place I moved out of was this weird shifty place that was not in good condition. I had a miserable time in that house.
But…I got really emotional when I turned the fridge off! I got really tearful about it. I was like, what the hell is going on.
Lucy Dearlove: That's so funny. Oh my God.
Eli Davies: I cleaned it all out and there was a finality to it. Just like, right, turn it off.
Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to listen to the podcast episode if you haven’t already.
In a 2019 essay for The Tangerine called Homebuilding, Eli writes: “I occasionally curse the Eli of that moving out week. I make pasta one night, get out a block of cheese from the fridge and then remember, I don't have a grater. We had two in that last flat, I think ruefully.”
‘Podcast episode’ refers to Meal Machine, the episode of Kitchens that I shared with Eli. It’s about gender and domesticity within the emotional and physical space of the kitchen.
Again, ‘essay’ refers to the Tangerine piece, but you can also read examples of this in Eli’s piece about Radical Domesticity for Tribune https://tribunemag.co.uk/2023/02/radical-domesticity
I take on those hosting roles so naturally that I'm not sure anymore if it's because I want to do it or just because it's easier to do it, take control as a woman, not awkward, not being dissonant to our assumed roles. Thanks Lucy