Of the three of us who lived there, none felt it was their place to impose order, given the terms of our arrangement (something between housesitting and squatting). I didn’t want to complain, but I registered the absences. No kitchen table. No bowl of produce on the counter, or else the mouse made confetti of the avocado rinds and left its little toothmarks in the green. I watched hours of The Great British Baking Show, longing for a hobby I couldn’t have.

When I moved into a new apartment in spring 2016 I nearly cried at the sight of My Kitchen! It was small and oddly shaped. A square galley kitchen with arched doorways that sat like a cube in the middle of the room. It was smaller than the kitchen in the old house, but luxury to me. I had visions of adding counter space, open shelves on a nearby wall, a little peninsula where I could chop. I asked a friend over so I could ramble about my dreams.

Will you both work from home? she said, looking around. She meant my boyfriend and I.

No, I said, eager to get back to the shelves. He still has his office. He needs his own room.

And where is your room? she asked.

Here! I said. The kitchen!

She burst out laughing.

“Area Feminist Says Kitchen is Her Room.”

But she likes to tease me. She knew what I meant. I didn’t have to share it with strangers. I could organize the cupboards how I wanted, decide what things went where—the bowls on the low shelf, for example, because I am short and prefer to eat from bowls, and the plates on the high one, because my boyfriend is tall and likes plates. Only then did I realize that not everyone is a kitchen person, or rather, that I am one.

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You don’t remember being born, but you do remember your first memory, which marks the birth of your waking life. When the lights turned on in my mind I was on the kitchen floor, coming out of a bender of a cry. I saw terracotta tile and I felt my hands on it. Someone suggested a bottle and immediately I felt: better. A developmental milestone, probably, to discover that the promise of comfort is as good as the thing itself.

All my positive kitchen associations flow from that memory. The kitchen is warm, it’s where you’re fed, it’s where comfort and company can be found. It has a womblike thing, though a person can get in trouble saying something like that so early in an essay.

My father’s mother, a first generation Italian-American who changed her name from Domenica to May in her teens, was a kitchen person. Nonni to us—technically plural for “grandparents” in Italian, but Nonna didn’t stick—she moved into her house in the 50s and died on the kitchen floor 62 later, age 93. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that her life transpired in that kitchen, or to say it was a happy one. She loved to cook. Whenever I called to ask how she was doing she talked about whatever was on the stove. When I saw her in person, she swiped through photos on the iPad my uncle bought her to narrate past meals she’d cooked. Pizzas, roasts, meatballs, the kimchi her neighbor had taught her how to make.

In her kitchen was a white wall-mounted telephone whose cord was so stretched by decades of privacy seekers that it had long lost its original coil. You could take it across one threshold to the dining room, through another to the yard, or through another down the short steps to the carpeted basement, but it always led back to the kitchen.

I ask my mom about her mother, a woman who had eight children and died before I was two. Did Melba like the kitchen? Did she cook? Was she good? All I know is she was given away by her parents as a child, happiest when pregnant, and that she once spent a year in bed with depression—nothing of her kitchen life.

Mom texts back:

“I think it was burdensome for her to create dinner 7 days a week for 9 people year after year. She had her go-to recipes for the masses—goulash, Spanish rice, meat and potatoes, mac and cheese—but rarely created new meals. The Betty Crocker Cookbook was her bible. She was good at making what she knew. What she did love was jarring with the girls in the fall (applesauce, peaches, pears, blackberry jam, rhubarb, cherries) and baking pies and cobblers. Dieting was a fad in the ’60s & ’70s and I remember her always struggling between quitting smoking and dieting, or giving up and just smoking. I hope that is helpful?”

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It feels fraught to admit that I like my kitchen; to say, “I enjoy being in the kitchen,” or “my kitchen feels like home to me,” or “I like to be in charge in the kitchen.” Why? For the same reason it feels reckless to say “I want children” or “I enjoy staying at home”—because those who would make it compulsory don’t need the ammunition. I have always been inspired by the case for kitchen liberation. William Thompson and Anna Wheeler’s 1825 Appeal to one half of the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the other Half, Men, to retain them in Political and thence Civil and Domestic Slavery. The Fourierist phalanxes and Owenite communities that relieved women from such solitary labor as “drawing water from a well, carrying it to the house, chopping wood for fires, sweltering over an iron cookstove, grappling with a heavy block of ice, draining an icebox, or emptying slops,” as Dolores Hayden writes in The Grand Domestic Revolution. Melusina Peirce’s demand for pay for housework, in 1868, and her rejection of the “costly and unnatural sacrifice” of her intellectual gifts to the “dustry drudgery of house ordering.” The Italian feminists’ argument, in Counterplanning from the Kitchen in 1975, that serious politics was “kitchen business,” as important to class struggle as the struggle in the factory. Angela Davis’s assertion in 1981 that “housework as individual women’s private responsibility and as a female labour performed under primitive technical conditions may finally be approaching historical obsolescence.”

And yet / if only! Instead I tidy the kitchen, which is gross from neglect. I wipe the surfaces, sweep coffee grounds from the floor. I vacuum and empty the dishwasher and throw out the dead and drying flowers. I flush old liquids down the toilet, rinse jars, fill the sink with hot water and soap so that the food crusted to the bottom comes loose enough to be rinsed. I do all this and still feel like nothing, like the day has gotten away from me, because I have not written, have not left the apartment, have not gone outside.

Would I abolish the kitchen if it meant no housework? Could I? Even at the Oneida Community in central New York, where communal kitchens replaced private ones and “young girls were told to get rid of their dolls lest they learn to be mothers before they had learned to be persons,” the Oneidans “retained one wood-burning stove in a small room they called their ‘Pocket Kitchen.’” Hayden writes: “The warmth of a direct heat source in a small space was appreciated as having nurturing qualities which couldn’t be improved upon. Here was the community medicine chest and a place for telling one’s troubles.”

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There is being a kitchen person, and then there is being a kitchen alpha. A kitchen person likes to cook, to linger, to stand in the kitchen at a house party, and in all likelihood has opinions about what makes a good kitchen. Kitchen alphas, by contrast, step into their natural authority in the kitchen and suffer when they cannot be in charge. All kitchen alphas are kitchen people, but not all kitchen people are alphas.

My dad was the kitchen alpha in my house growing up. My mom made granola and Christmas cookies and weeknight meals for babies, but she had no passion for cooking. (“If I could take a pill that met my nutritional needs, I would,” she once said. Unrelatable!) She might have developed one if she’d married someone else, but as it was she ceded the territory. My dad prefers to cook alone, no talking, watching sports on a small TV on the counter. He takes great pride in plating and attends the biweekly farmer’s market with churchlike devotion, selecting his produce by feel.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I heard a doctor advise against letting your loved ones over 65 go grocery shopping. Cautiously, so cautiously, I suggested that my brother, who was living with them, take over. My dad’s position was clear: Why live if he could not buy the tomatoes himself? Friends with aging parents reported similar stalemates. “Time to set up fake famer’s markets for dads,” said one, “so they think they’re going grocery shopping but it’s a simulation.”

I am a kitchen alpha, too, and though I defer to superior alphas, those better cooks and hosts, I suffer when I cannot buy the tomatoes myself. I was out of town when the pandemic reached my neighborhood. My boyfriend picked me up and together we traveled north to stay with his family. Two full weeks of quarantine meant more cooking and meal planning than I’d ever done in my life, followed by a full surrender of kitchen control. Whiplash. His stepmother Brenda is the daughter of a grocer. There was no chance of me doing the shopping.

My journal entries from that time are the psychic portrait of an alpha deprived but aware of her good fortune. April 24: “Sick of not being able to plan my own meals. Sick of small talk. Sick of having to defer. Sick of not being able to make a clean escape with my coffee, always detained on my way out. Grateful not to pay for groceries. Grateful for someone else to take the lead on meal plans.” I was very, very homesick. I missed my freezer, my Dutch oven, my plane grater, my proofing baskets, my knives. But more than any of that I missed my authority, my autonomy, my solitude.

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Of all the injustices suffered by refugees in camps, the one that haunts me most is the deprivation of access to a kitchen. In “Fairouz in Exile,” Matthew McNaught describes one refugee camp in Bielefeld, Germany, where a hundred newly arrived refugees are housed in a former textile factory. He and his friend Ahmad speak to “three women, two from Homs, one from Baghdad,” who complain about the conditions in the camp, particularly “the horrible taste of the German-style ready meals they were served.” They explain that they are not allowed to cook, and instead tell him what they would if they could:

"Kibbeh bi laban, said one — cracked-wheat dumplings filled with meat and spices, floating in a rich yogurt sauce. Maqluba, said another — an upturned pilaf-like crown of vegetables, meat, and rice. They’d pleaded with the administration to let them cook, they said, and there’s even a kitchen in the building. But health and safety regulations forbade it."

The conclusion McNaught draws from their grief is existential. “I now began to understand,” he writes. “When you’re fed and sheltered but untethered from routine, denied purposeful, activity, robbed of role and responsibility and choice, what is left of you?” The food is so bad, and the kitchen is right there. To deny them access is a petty cruelty.

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In 1989, the photographer Carrie Mae Weems set up a camera across from her kitchen table and, for a period of months, took pictures. The mise-en-scène was always the same. A wooden table. Chairs. A pendant lamp that cast a soft cone of light over everything. Props cycled in and out (mirrors, newspapers, ashtrays), as did characters (a man, friends, a girl). But Weems, the protagonist of the resulting Kitchen Table Series, is always there. We don’t have to ask whose kitchen table it is; we know it’s hers. Something about the way she sits in every chair and never leaves.

The photos are all untitled but captioned in parentheses—Untitled (woman and phone), Untitled (woman with friends), Untitled (woman and daughter with children)—which is in itself a commentary on kitchen life. What happens there? Nothing official worthy of a title, but also: everything. It is the place where the outside comes in and the inside goes out. In “Clothes”, a 1974 poem about what to wear before you die, Anne Sexton suggests her painting shirt, “Spotted with every yellow kitchen I’ve painted.” She writes:

God, you don’t mind if I bring all my kitchens?

They hold the family laughter and the soup.

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What did I do when I was reunited with my kitchen? Oddly, nothing. There was no great release, no mania of baking. No mention of food or eating in my journal at all. Instead I scribbled pages of anxiety and shame and cataloged my numbing strategies, which included cleaning the grates of the stovetop. After two weeks I tried to make bread but something went wrong and it wouldn’t hold its shape. Weeks passed. Finally, one day in July: “Made meatless meatballs for dinner that were shockingly good, plus the cabbage recipe Teo recommended.” A turning point.

This November I made Thanksgiving dinner for the first time in my life. I made, for two, baked triangles of marinated tofu (Brenda’s recipe) over bread stuffing (the internet’s); mashed potatoes and vegan gravy (Brenda’s again), and a lemony salad with dried cranberries to cut the heaviness. I oversalted the potatoes but undersalted the gravy to compensate, and it worked. I wore my apron to the table, and was glad to have no guests to cajole me into taking it off; wearing an apron to the table is both a mark of distinction and the best way to relax, in my opinion. We ate off Nonni’s plates, the same chipped china we use every day, and I was happy.

Dayna Tortorici is editor of n+1.