The Kitchen as Erogenous Zone

 
It was all in one room in our little church near Woodstock, including our glorious kitchen.

          What is the territorial imperative of the urban kitchen? Is our wretched little closet-kitchen merely a symptom of the urban malaise, or a virus that inflames it? How mean the average New York kitchen is…how ungiving, how sterile and confining, how demeaning, enraging, how anti-erotic. How proudly the landlord bills it: The efficiency…a constricted “U” of tinny electrical timesavers in a cubbyhole. The ultimate in spatial cunning is The Pullman Kitchen, abbreviated into a closet and tucked behind folding doors to conceal the shame.

         Is it a hopelessly irrelevant atavism or is it possible somehow, by love and wheat germ and positive thinking, to transform the urban kitchen into a positive emotional center of family life? The kitchen as artist’s atelier. The family communications room. The natural food factory. The celebration of woman’s liberation. The sensuous kitchen.

         A kitchen window would be human…north light and airborne effluvia nourish my stunted tarragon. And a breakfast nook for two would sweeten the dawn. Banish the clinical white steel and slip me a yard of maple chopping block. I am grateful for small graces. But now I want a live-in kitchen. Not that super Betty-Crockerized vinyl-and-Formica laboratory-cum playpen of suburbia. Give us an erogenous zone for adults. The kitchen as living room, the cooking-eating-entertaining-courtship-communication zone of the apartment, brownstone, or townhouse…warmth, some nostalgic clutter, custom optionals to suit our gastronomic style—a barbecue for those who do, temperature-controlled wine storage, a hood that really grabs the grease, built-in-whatever-you-need, needlecraft-paperdoll-drafting-poetry-writing space and a sink-in sofa.

         Our house in what once was a little country church upstate has that breed of “kitchen”—furry, tufted and down-soft seating before the fireplace; an old potting-shed table salvaged for dining, and the working core: a stage set, open to the room, framed by deep-stained columns, space for everything, gas to cook on, electricity to bake by, handsome copper sautoirs and hood to pull odor and grease away, a painting of Chinese vegetables by Edward Melcarth, herbs hanging to dry from the ceiling beams. It is not always easy to cook decoratively at stage center…to never look harassed, to stifle the gasp when mayonnaise curdles, to assassinate the lobster before the outraged cries of visiting pacifists. But I’m learning. And what a joy. The cook comes to the party. No more the invisible presence, no more sentenced for uncertain term to mince the onion in hateful isolation.

         “It’s dehumanizing,” sociologist Cynthia Fuchs Epstein (author of Woman’s Place) agrees. “The dead-end kitchen—the kitchen out back—is symbolic; it says cooking is a lesser task. Even though dinner is sent out as a gift of love, it may not be perceived that way.” Who knows how many sullen revolutionaries are coming of age “out back.” Even emancipated urban couples—both work, both agree to share domestic tasks—are frustrated by the closet kitchen. They cannot work side by side. They must take turns. One sautées the mushrooms. The other can only lean in the doorway, jiggling ice cubes in fond encouragement.

         Behavioral scientists call it territoriality. Territoriality, they say, explains the eccentricities of domestic murders. When the wife slays her husband, she usually does it in the kitchen. He puts her away in the bedroom. Is it because the kitchen is her turn, the bedroom his? Or because she is most vulnerable in the kitchen, and he in bed? Or might it be that the kitchen caches so many handy weapons while he keeps a loaded pistol in his shirt drawer? “But territoriality is a lot of nonsense,” protests Robert M. Krauss, Columbia University professor of psychology. “Wolves urinate on the corners of their territory. What counts is human contact. A live-in kitchen would get couples together, although husbands are not going suddenly to start baking quiche Lorraine just because you’ve got a double oven.”

         So, realistically…a decaying marriage is not about to be recalcified by tearing down the kitchen wall. The family that uses home as locker room and refueling station is not likely to be fused into a healing togetherness by a built-in espresso machine or home-stewed marmalade. The mate who has never been inspired to pick up a dish towel is not going to put down The Morning Telegraph and load the dishwasher—just because it’s there and so is he. If the kids never bring their friends home and a teenage son hasn’t checked in for three weeks or Mother can’t cook or is afraid of the children and would rather give them hamburgers than fight the boeuf bourguignon battle—“taste it…like hamburger only a little bit chewier, dear,”—well then, forget the kitchen as a garden of intimacy and joy.

         Think of it as a battlefield, sown with insult, anxiety and tension. Many freshly-raised consciousnesses are in feverish retreat from the kitchen. Even the non-militant suburban housewife is announcing she has better things to do than be “a slave to the kitchen.” For some working city wives, the isolation-chamber kitchen may be an ideal retreat. “The space is impossible,” so she doesn’t even have to try. She can warm up carry-out spare ribs, ladle won ton soup from cardboard cartons into Spode bowls or thaw her guilt-fraught TV dinner. The louvered doors will hid her dirty little secret. Offer your rebellious housewife a bigger kitchen and you confront her with a bigger prison. Expose your fast-food fetishist with an open kitchen…the threat is paralyzing.
 

         But the rest of us—passionate epicures, disciples of Julia and vitamin-enriched Adelle, oenophilic status-seekers and determined sensualists—deserve a choice.

         Our enthusiasm for the haute stove grows. New converts to serious cooking discover shallots, Mouli food mills, the ecstasy of communion with yeast. “Cooking under appropriate circumstances can be like a religious experience,” enthused one of our environmental-psychologist consultants. “In communes, eating together is the day’s most meaningful activity,” reports psychologist Gary Winkel, editor of Environment and Behavior. “I wonder if that’s a response to what was missing in their own family life.” Temple University sociologist  David G. Berger finds the turn to basics in food parallels the return to crafts. “It’s a way of saying ‘I am what I produce.’ There’s a real middle-class movement away from frozen foods to real cooking. Men are cooking elaborate things. Perhaps it’s coming out of the barbecue phenomenon.”

         Certainly it mirrors the sensuality explosion. Americans are turning on. To food…to grass…to touching. “people are smelling things,” psychologist Robert Krauss agrees. “They are genuinely awakening to food. There is a sensuality explosion, for reasons I don’t understand. The sensuous woman. The sensuous man. The sensuous latrine cleaner. There seems to be an awareness in people that there are pleasures to be explored, pleasures they’ve been missing. There’s almost a kind of decadence, but I’m not sure that’s bad. Sensuality may be a fad—go the way of the Nehru jacket. If Jack says ‘I just love to make quenelles,’ everybody will start making gefilte fish.”

         New York is in its perennial Roman Spring—echoing the gastronomic excesses of Rome during the Empire as described by Philippa Pullar in Consuming Passions. Sound familiar? The luxurious bathhouses with eunuch attendants, all “marble and magnificence”…members of the oligarchy “pink and plump reclining before mounds of food”…” Trimalchio is there behind a pillar, his wife lies in adultery with Augustus while Claudius bends over a steaming sausage, stuffing handfuls into his mouth…Fortunes are squandered by men who live for their palates.” Apicius spends $2.5 million on food, then poisons himself rather than make do on the remaining 100,000 gold pieces, pitiful sum for an epicure.

         If I complain about walking twenty blocks uptown for fresh coriander, I remind myself of Francis Bacon…dead of pneumonia caught while gathering snow to stuff and preserve a chicken. Is it my hoarding instinct? Zoologist Lyall Watson sees man as The Omnivorous Ape with a need for security. Primitive man stored food on his body. Some still do. Watson explores evolutionary links between food and sex.

         Sex, as Dr. Watson observes, makes people hungry. And food makes people sexy. The candlelit dinner is standard courtship ritual. A polite Eskimo makes a stranger feel welcome in his home by offering both food and the favors of his wife. Watson goes on to explore oral masturbation (chewing gum), oral voyeurism (peering through a restaurant window), oral sadism (making kids eat turnips), oral rape (force feeding), oral exhibitionism (goldfish swallowing), oral incest (cannibalism).

         Great sex blurs the senses. That’s grand. But great food invokes them all. And that’s grand too. Nose. Eyes. Ears. “The Chinese eat jellyfish not just for taste but for crunch,” restaurant consultant George Lang notes. “And they slurp soup because they like the noise.” In food there is texture, taste, status, oral gratification, ego-stimulation and intellect. Lang quotes Lin Yutang. “Food is the only thing you can purchase which becomes part of you.” And as Temple University sociologist Stanley Turner notes: “What better place is there than the kitchen to escape the boredom of life? What else can you do three times a day and get better at every time?” He quotes James Beard: “You can grow old and ugly and if you’re a good cook, the world will still beat a path to your door.”

         So nutritionally, psychically, sexually and anthropologically, it is positively subversive to fight gastronomy and the live-in kitchen. We have so few wood-burning hearths in New York City. We need space and warmth as we cluster round the flow of our pilot lights. Alas, as architect Alan Lapidus observes, “New York City legislates against kitchens and so does economic reality. You’re not selling what’s inside an apartment in New York, you’re selling an address.” Most kitchens huddle blindly in the middle of New York apartments because that’s where the plumbing stack is. If the space exceeds 58 square feet, that requires a window. Moving it to the window means a second plumbing stack. “A builder can get more for a second bedroom than for an eat-in kitchen.”

         Opening up the brownstone kitchen means fighting City Hall, too. “A plan examiner once told me, ‘If it isn’t in this code, it doesn’t exist.’ I envy him his peace of mind,” Lapidus says. “It’s not malicious, it’s just lack of imagination. Each brownstone remodeling is a custom job and you’ve got to go down there and convince the examiner.” Why not promote a complex of apartments for epicures, with live-in kitchen and temperature-controlled wine storage. Call it the Escoffier House. “Find me four people who are interested,” Lapidus responds. We’ll meet at Nathan’s for lunch to discuss it.”

         Many behavioral scientists think it is too late to save the family with home-baked bread and a glorious kitchen. Imagine the Tyrones, of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, clustered around their kitchen table: Mother, a morphine addict; Dad, miserly and hot-tempered; Edmund, the morbid drinker-poet; and James Jr., cynical wastrel. For sheer tenacity of togetherness there is Jules Feiffer’s Newquist family in Little Murders. The kitchen-family-room of suburbia is in great demand, but not for its gastronomic lift. “If you’re looking for what brings people together today,” says psychiatrist Richard A. Gardner (author of the Boys and Girls Book About Divorce), “look at the television set. That’s the magnet. The close-knit family is being overdone. One of the problems in many marriages is the feeling that a good marriage means constant togetherness; people need to get over the guilt of enjoying individual activities.” Communication at the table is hopeless, Gardner feels, unless you have servants. “Kids are shouting and spilling milk and you have to pop up constantly to serve the food.” Psychologist Robert Krauss partly agrees. “People go their own way today. And the city exacerbates that. I’m not sure it’s a bad thing.” “What about the woman who buys canned spaghetti?” asks psychologist Melvin Kornreich. “If she’s not even willing to boil spaghetti for seven minutes, she doesn’t need a live-in kitchen. And some people don’t like to be watched using their hands,” Kornreich observes. “The kitchen with a table makes for the possibility, underline possibility, of closeness and comfort and intimacy. But it depends on the family’s attitude toward eating food.”

         Psychiatrist and family counselor Normal Paul of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the most pessimistic of all. “There’s a centrifugal force pulling people out of the home. Just the intimacy of being with someone in the family causes a strain. I don’t think there ever were any good old days. That’s a distortion of memory. Sure, you were all together in the kitchen, but there was an undercurrent of tension. If it was so great there’d be a perpetuation of it.”

         Sociologists have a word for it: bimodal. Clearly Peg Bracken of I Hate to Cook ignominy has a passionate following among the women interviewed by motivational psychologist Paul Fine. To them, cooking is drudgery. Three times a week they eat Chicken Delight or carry-out pizza. They see family togetherness in the car at McDonald’s more emotionally enriching than tension over a home-cooked meal. “Their desire to achieve in areas beyond the household shows up in all our research,” reports sociologist Marjorie Fine. At the same time men and women who have already achieved outside the household are drifting blissfully back to the kitchen.

         Environmentalist Winkel is convinced that “design does not determine human behavior. But space can inhibit certain roles. So much depends on the way the family conceptualizes itself as a unit.” The Brooklyn unit known as Douglas and Donna Higgins sees itself as kitchen people. Doug Higgins is a set designer and his affection for color and clutter is magic in the Higgins’s Fort Greene brownstone kitchen. “In our early brownstoning days when we were so busy weeping and crying (over remodeling despairs), the kitchen was our comfort. That has persisted,” Donna Higgins says. “My three-year-old stands at the sink for hours playing with the water. The six-year-old colors at the kitchen table, and that’s where Doug sits when he’s building a model or polishing metal hardware. It’s like our kitchen back in Canada when I was growing up. This summer I even canned for the first time. I put up chili sauce.”

         The great I-Hate-to-Cook legions will never know the divine communion of that sensuous chili sauce.

***

Restaurant Consultant George Lang Builds His Ideal Kitchen

         If your cuisinary fantasy were properly informed and wondrously decadent and you had $35,000 to spend…you might come up with something like the kitchen George and Karen Lang are building in a seven-room co-op duplex they have boldly pared to three rooms and a kitchen. Lang is a restaurant and food consultant and a professional Hungarian (author of The Cuisine of Hungary). Karen Lang, a maser of the art of baking, is an associate publisher of Corporate Financing.

         “My dream,” George confides, “was to have a house with just two rooms—the living-eat-in kitchen and the sleep-and-bathing suite.” Now he has it, with a tub for two to swim in and a refrigerator in the bath “for orange juice and champagne.” Work keeps the Langs apart often. “But the kitchen brings us together, “ Karen points out. “One of us can cook while the other writes or sews…or we can both cook.”

         “In Hungary you live in the kitchen,” George observes. “In peasant houses the stuffed cabbage simmered all day and at night the warm cabbage pot was used as a foot warmer.” Food and bed…inexorably linked.

         There will be two ranges in the Lang kitchen—one home range with electric burners, the other professional and gas; and electric ovens and a radar range for testing. There will be a partners’ desk and drawing board, files, and part of the kitchen library. And a sewing center, a laundry (the laundry chute costs $500), counter dining for four, a chopping block with a hole to shove the garbage down, ripening shelves (mesh with heat lamps), built-in soda fountain and espresso machine ($800), refrigerated cheese keeper, a refrigerated marble slab for pastry, drafting table, a greenhouse herbarium, professional griddle, a restaurant stainless steel sink (deep enough for giant stock pots), an ice machine and ice-cream maker, a vitrine for their napkin-ring collection and a dazzling baking center.

         “Some families have two cars. We’ll have two Hobart Kitchen Aids,”  says Karen.

         “We are considering a built-in deep-fat fryer,” George adds.

         The Langs went through four stages stylistically. First came country. “It seems almost inevitable for anyone who lives in New York,” says George. “Thick slabs of wood and ceramics…but New York isn’t the country. So it’s fake.” Next came a “frame concept.” “A room you could change every time, off-white marble, indirect lighting, like a basic black dress you change with accessories,” says Karen. The frame was rejected.

         Then Karen fell in love with the private dining room of Giannino in Milan. Giannino-revisited was ultimately rejected as too formal, too rigid. “It needs a Venetian glass chandelier over the stove,” Karen concedes. Then George took Karen to New Orleans to dinner at Galatoire’s with its old-time mirrors, whitewashed wainscoting, tiny-white-tile floors and bronze fixtures.

         “This is it,” Karen said.
 

         “Only later I realized it was like a Hungarian coffee house,” George adds with a happy sigh of nostalgia.

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