The house that still cooks for twelve
By Lorna Beckwith, Editor · · 5 min read
Two people live in the house, and the kitchen is set up for twelve, and nobody who lives there sees anything odd about that.
The stock pot holds sixteen quarts. The refrigerator is the big one with the two doors, bought in 2009 when three teenagers and their friends were in and out of it, and it is kept full, which with two people means it is kept full of things that will not be eaten in time. There are two sets of everyday plates, twelve of each, and a third set for Easter. The Sunday roast is a roast for twelve, and on most Sundays four people eat it, and what is left goes into containers that go out the door with whichever of the four is youngest.
I have been in a number of houses like this and I used to think they were houses that had not noticed the children were gone. I no longer think that. They have noticed. The kitchen is their answer to having noticed.
Sized for the maximum, not the usual
A kitchen, like a church, is built for its fullest day rather than its ordinary one, and the women who run them know this and do it on purpose. The sixteen-quart pot is not for Tuesday. It is for the Sunday in December when all three come, with their people, and there are eleven, and one of them brings a friend, and that is twelve, and the pot is right there and nobody has to borrow one.
The cost of being ready for that Sunday is fifty-one other Sundays of being over-equipped, and a refrigerator full of things that go soft, and the faint, constant sense, which the women I have talked to all describe, of cooking for people who are not there. One of them said it was like keeping a porch light on. She did not say it sadly. She said it the way you describe what the light is for.
The refrigerator, I should say, is the part that tips over into waste, and the women know it. One told me she had started buying the smaller milk and had felt, the first week, like a traitor, and had gone back to the gallon, which goes sour, and which she pours out on Thursdays with a feeling she did not want to describe and then did: that pouring it out was easier than admitting there was nobody to drink it.
What the kitchen is waiting on
It would be easy to say that the kitchen is waiting on the children, and that is partly true, but I think it is more exact to say that it is waiting on the occasion, and that the children are the usual form the occasion takes but not the only one. The kitchen for twelve also feeds the funeral lunch, the neighbor's family when the neighbor is in the hospital, the Bible study that got too big for the church parlor, the daughter-in-law's parents the one time they came. A kitchen that was cut down to two would not be able to do any of that, and the women who keep them have decided, mostly without saying so, that being able to do that is what the kitchen is for, and that the two of them eating off the big plates on a Tuesday is a small price.
I wrote, almost two years ago, about the second pot of coffee being for whoever is still at the table. I would add now that the pot has to be big enough for them, and that somebody decided its size long before anybody sat down.
The other version
There is a different house, and I have been in it too, where the kitchen was cut down when the last child left. The big pot went to the daughter. The second set of plates went to the church sale. The refrigerator is a small one now, and it is full of exactly what two people will eat this week, and nothing goes soft.
The woman who did this is not wrong, and she is not unhappy, and she told me, with some force, that she had spent thirty years feeding a crowd and intended to spend the next thirty feeding herself and her husband, properly, at a table set for two. She has the children for Christmas at a restaurant. They are fine with it. She said this twice, which is one more time than people say things they are entirely sure of.
What I notice, and what I don't know
I notice that the house for twelve is more often full than the house for two, and that this may be cause or effect; people go where there is a pot. I notice that the women in the big kitchens complain more and seem, to me, less lonely, and that the woman in the small kitchen complains not at all and says "they're fine with it" twice. I notice that I am sixty-one and have not cut my own kitchen down, and that I have been telling myself it is because the pot is good quality.
"You don't buy a pot for the people you have," my aunt said once, filling one. "You buy it for the people you're going to feed."
What I do not know is whether the kitchen for twelve is faith or stubbornness, and I have come to suspect that in a kitchen those two are not easy to tell apart, and that the women who keep the big pot would not thank me for trying.