My kitchen bit by bit - 1

"We see books as features and magazines as accents" Foxy Home Staging

Yes I know, I'm devising yet another series to explore in my blog posts, but I've been doing this for a long time now and am every now and then running out of ideas, so here is a new one - focus on a specific bit of my kitchen and go for it.

So - these are very high up shelves above my pantry just as you come into the kitchen. They are unreachable unless you get out a very tall ladder - they are just below the roof, at its highest point.

So why are there unreachable shelves there? Why didn't I think more productively? Well they were there already. That particular segment of the wall was actually one wall of the laundry. We knocked into the laundry to make the kitchen. You can see it here in the early stages - just after having knocked out the dividing wall. I think we used to store little used things up there. Maybe nothing. Maybe we just thought it would be a good idea to have shelves. Whatever they were intended for originally we decided it was silly to take them out, and also not to incorporate into a pantry, because they were just too high to be useful and impossible to access once doors were put into place for the pantry. So there they were. Looking empty.

Let me explain what actually ended up there. On both shelves on the left are two different sets of books that I bought on subscription from Time Life.

Do you remember the days when we bought books, and music records on subscription? Companies would bring out series of books, or records and you would subscribe - sometimes choosing your monthly delivery, sometimes not. I remember when I was a student I belonged to the World Record Club and bought classical records to play on my LP record player whilst I wrote not very wonderful essays. In our early married life we also bought several Time Life series - Art, Geography and History I think. We thought they would be useful reference books for our children.

Time Life was founded in 1961 as the book marketing division of Time Inc. which also produced the magazines Time and Life. Time continues but Life is no more, which is somewhat tragic. I used to buy it occasionally as it contained such wonderful photographs. We also bought Time occasionally, indeed we may even have suscribed to it for a while. Anyway many more series of books than the few that I bought were produced until 2001 when the book division of Time Inc. was closed down.

As a young housewife I bought their most famous cookbook series Foods of the World. Which is not actually up on that unreachable shelf because I ocasionally still dip into it - mostly for reference rather than for cooking, but I did, at one time, make many of their recipes and it also introduced me to some cuisines about which I knew nothing - Russia and China spring to mind but there were others. Apparently they began in 1968 and continued into the late 70s and there were 27 volumes, although I only have 14. I don't know why that is because I'm sure I thought I had the lot.

Anyway they were well regarded and had famous contributors such as Julia Child, M. K. Fisher and James Beard. I saw that Amazon claimed they were collector's items, but also noticed that there was a large variation in the prices they were advertising - from $30.17 to a massive $432.00 for the Italian volume shown above. So I'm guessing that these may just be asking prices, not necessarily what people actually pay. Interesting though. Don't throw out old cookbooks before discovering whether you can get real money for them.

On that top shelf are a few volumes of this series - Healthy Home Cooking which always had a title beginning Fresh Ways with ... I have a vague memory of not being that impressed with this series - this is actually my copy - I scanned it and it's pretty pristine. And no I didn't climb up a ladder to retrieve it, I must have kept it back for reference.

I have just flicked through it and I have to say it looks curiously bland, even anaemic which is not really what you should be saying about pasta today. Nevertheless in its time it may have taught me a few things, although it looks as if it has barely been opened. I probably learnt more about Italian food from Elizabeth David. I suspect that its very blandness was probably the reason I stopped buying books on subscription. This was not a cheap undertaking after all.

On the shelf below is a rather better series, edited by Richard Olney. (I did not recognise the names of any of the team producing Healthy Home Cooking.) This series is called The Good Cook and has volumes on differing aspects of cooking. This volume is the one I remember using the most although I think I probably used some of the others as well. Indeed I thought I had kept this volume available, but apparently not.

When I was stocking my new kitchen I did indeed think of throwing out both of these last two series, but I just couldn't quite make myself do it and then suddenly hit on the idea of them as decoration. Coupled with many old delicious. magazines.

Just out of curiosity I checked out decorating with books, and of course found a whole world of fancy interior magazines with over the top ideas. Mostly not applicable to my just shoving them all up high on a shelf. But I see, looking at the top shelf that I have instinctively used the decorating maxim of The Rule of Three:

"So how exactly do we use the Rule of Three in property styling? It’s simple. We display our decorations in groups of three. It’s important to highlight that this does not mean three individual objects, but three clusters of décor." Foxy Home Staging

I didn't do so well on the second shelf however. Maybe I should have added a piece of decorative pottery or something that never gets used. But that would probably get covered in dust - as I'm sure the books and magazines are as well. I don't think they show the dust as much as a pot would, however. But it's an idea.

Why did I keep those magazines? I confess, purely for the decoration. I had already gone through those magazines and put recipes that I thought I might make one day into a database. It began as Bento and then got changed to something called Tap Forms Mac 5 which shows how old it is and so it will also probably die someday soon and all will be lost. Anyway those magazines - I subscribed to them as well - in the days of Valli Little who provided most of the recipes - were pretty wonderful. I made lots of things from them, and so I was sentimentally attached. Hence their retention on the shelves.

delicious. began as a collaboration between the ABC and News Ltd. - first and current issues below:

Food from the famous and also from an excellent range of staff cooks. I loved it. However, I now see why I lost enthusiasm, when I found that the ABC sold their share to NewsLife Media in 2015, who have changed the content to feature more lifestyle things like trendy restaurants, foodie festivals and personalities. Which are all somewhat irrelevant to me. Mind you the cover of the current one looks tempting. Although it now costs $11.00. NewsLife Media have, however, much improved the digital offering which includes the excellent website.

So when I reflect I now see that I kept all those unlooked at books and magazines partly because it made that top area less empty. I suppose I could have removed the shelves and put up a stunning work of art, or a few of my own photographs of nostalgic France and Italy. But I didn't. Why not? Was it just that I succumbed to my builders - David and Dale - builder and friend of sons - persuading me not to because it was too much of a pain to take them out, and then repair the wall? Was it really just a design decision - along the lines of this designer's thoughts?

"I admit I’m not a cook at all. Don’t enjoy it. Don’t do it. However, in pure irony, I’m a big fan of pretty cookbooks for kitchen styling. I like to display them, look at them for inspiration (even though I will never try the recipe) and share them with family and friends." Designed Simple

Partly they are there perhaps, because there is also an element of nostalgia and personal history in their presence. Every time I look at them - and they are opposite where I work on the kitchen bench, they remind me of a whole range of different things. Memories almost out of sight but not quite gone.

And actually they're not really all that pretty either - you can only see the spines - not the pretty covers. I'm sure all of those interior designers would not be impressed.

POSTSCRIPT

Typically I forgot all about my intention to list old blogs à la Smitten Kitchen. But I only found one for July 2nd. I suspect Wix somehow can't display all of July in this version of the blog, and in the old one, in 2018 I missed a day and in 2017 I must have been away on holiday. So just one to look at today. How those grandchildren have grown!

2019 - Cooking with the grandchildren