Pride of Place

It was 1985, and Singer was 81. His wife, Alma, all coiffed hair and high heels, met me at the door of their small high-rise apartment in Miami Beach. "When you're finished talking to him, come see my kitchen," she insisted. "You have to see my kitchen."

"OK, well, thank you," I said, wondering what the "reveal" was going to be, in the lingo of today's reality-TV decorating shows. Had she overseen some spectacular kitchen renovation? Was the Nobel medal hanging over the table?

After the interview, she corralled me for the tour. The funny thing was, it was just a normal kitchen, your standard boxy efficiency, with all the usual features: a pass-through; pots; laminated surfaces. I imagined plastic pillboxes in the cupboards, prune juice in the fridge.

"It's very nice," I said, thinking, "What exactly am I supposed to be appreciating here?"

What I was supposed to be appreciating, I think, was her universe, invisible to my eyes but very vivid to her.

In Alma's generation, the kitchen was the heartbeat of the house. I can still picture my mother in her little 1950s kitchen, forging through her morning routine, negotiating the critical tasks of daily life -- cleaning a chicken, starting a soup, taking the elements off the stove and replacing the foil underneath them, ironing my father's handkerchiefs. "I'm just doing my work," she'd say, if someone phoned while she was at it. The vernacular of her profession could have been termed domesticspeak. She'd "lift a stain" from a tablecloth. She'd "parboil" the potatoes, or "darn" a sock, or "braise" the meat.

I'm not sure I've ever spoken the word "braise" in my life; so many women I know are too busy bringing home the bacon to cook it. A lot of us don't even know how to cook it. That's because a funny thing happened when women were liberated from the tyranny of the kitchen. We got paychecks and validation, but in one quick generation, we became strangers to our kitchens, or infrequent visitors.

When I was a kid, the dinner hour started with the sound of the oven timer and a call that "dinner's ready." What passes for the dinner hour in my house a lot of times -- the dinner minutes -- begins with the sound of the doorbell and me yelling, "Dinner's here."

I can't imagine that this trend is a good thing. "There's been a breakdown of domestic knowledge," says an Ivy League professor I once spoke to who works full time and has three kids. "I'm amazed at how many of my students don't know how to cook. They don't know what a leavening agent is. They don't know the difference between a yeast bread and a quick bread."

Still, the kitchen remains the cornerstone of the house, says my contractor brother-in-law, Jim, who builds them for a living. At least in theory, or in our collective memory. We still need them to be the heartbeat -- the source of nurturing, warmth, sustenance. We need this instinctively, which I think is why guests always seem to gravitate toward my kitchen, even though its offerings are a lot less compelling than they were in the days of my mother, she who preserved her own vegetables and made her own dough.

A shrewd retail kitchen industry seems to have picked up on this yearning, which I suspect is why it's luring consumers into creating uber-kitchens with onyx countertops and $2,000 "coffee systems." Once I was in a high-end kitchen design showroom and asked the manager who its clients were. "Not people who cook," was the answer.

Seems to me that it's a lot of trouble these days to masquerade as a homemaker. It might be a lot easier, and cheaper, to learn how to braise. Seems to me that it's a lot of trouble these days to masquerade as a homemaker. It might be a lot easier, and cheaper, to learn how to braise.