A memoir through kitchen utensils? It's extraordinary

Telegraph

27-04-2025

Before I sat down to write this review, I took the dog for a walk and bumped into my neighbour; she had been ill last week, and I had taken round a plate of our roast dinner. Just as I was about to ask after her health, she grabbed me to ask the secret of my roast potatoes. Was it the parboiling? I ventured. (No, she always parboiled.) Was it the inch of fat? (No, she never stinted on dripping.)
At last I hit on the only possible explanation: it must be my husband's roasting tin, inherited from his late mother. Battered and tarnished from years of roast dinners, bent so out of shape that I almost always spill hot fat when taking it out of the oven, and imbued with the memory of a thousand Sunday lunches, it's always the default for our roast potatoes. My neighbour nodded, perfectly happy with this explanation.
In her latest book, The Heart-Shaped Tin, Bee Wilson argues that this understanding is a form of sympathetic magic universal to humans: inanimate objects take on meaning, and maybe even power, simply because of the place they hold in our homes and our hearts. This power is not always welcome – the heart-shaped tin of the title was that in which she baked her wedding cake, and which fell out of a cupboard shortly after her husband left her – but it holds sway even over the most rational of people.
And it stands that if we impart something of ourselves into our kitchenware, our kitchenware can tell us about ourselves. Bee Wilson tells human stories in this book, of herself and others, through a close reading of their kitchen utensils: the refugee experience through a pair of vegetable corers, the cruel diagnosis of dementia through a silver toast-rack. The most moving object (and story) in the book is a spoon – now in the Montreal Holocaust Museum – made by a Jewish tailor forced to work in the Dora-Mittelbau labour camp. The Nazi guards deliberately never provided inmates with cutlery: this spoon, made from a scrap of tin stolen from the production lines, was the tailor's way of showing and preserving his humanity.
But mostly, Bee Wilson tells the story of her own life – her relationship with her parents and her children, her marriage and her divorce. Telling it through kitchen objects feels even more intimate than a tell-all memoir, because, as we appreciate by the end, these objects are a part of us, and sometimes the only part that is left. She doesn't even mention her new partner's name, but I feel I know more about their relationship from a glazed pottery oil dispenser than I would from a more conventional love story.
This is a wonderful and original book, which has made me look at 'stuff' in a different way. I didn't think I would love it as much as I did: I don't spend much time in the kitchen, not any more than my mother did or does – when asked what she can make, she will always say 'reservations' – and the idea of having such a close connection to kitchen utensils used to baffle me.
My husband is different: I once took him to Dabbous, where he spent the starter wondering how the top of the egg was cut so neatly, and the next three courses – after an understanding waiter had brought the device (a German invention resembling an instrument of torture called an Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher, or eggshell breaking-point creator) – happily playing with it at the table. When we got married, he came with a collection of sacred objects to the marriage – the roasting tin, the dinner service for best, the little glass boat that is only ever used for mint sauce – and I brought a salad-spinner.
But though I never had a Sunday lunch with his parents – they died before we were married – using their items every week makes me feel a part of his family that I never had time to be. Our son has a connection to the grandparents that he never met. And the roasting tin does make the best roast potatoes.