That Nook Is a Kitchen

One of the Christmas gifts I received last month was a copy of Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink. It has several memoirs, essays and even poems about food.

I’ve only read a little of it, but, so far, the writing is brilliant. In “The Reporter’s Kitchen,” Jane Kramer writes:

The kitchen where I’m making dinner is a New York kitchen. Nice light, way too small, nowhere to put anything unless the stove goes. My stove is huge, but it will never go. My stove is where my head clears, my impressions settle, my reporter’s life gets folded into my life, and whatever I’ve just learned, or think I’ve learned — whatever it was, out there in the world, that had seemed so different and surprising — bubbles away in the very small pot of what I think I know and, if I’m lucky, produces something like perspective.