It’s January, and my own kitchen is getting a bit of a blitz. A couple of the cupboards have see-through doors, and at times I rearrange the contents, looking for a pleasing combination. It is the power of food containers as icons.
In the Night Kitchen is one of my favourite books. By Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are, it is not as well known, though I think it deserves to be.
There was a time when the book was banned from some public libraries in the United States – because the hero, Mickey, falls out of his pyjamas fairly early on in the story, and spends most of the rest of the time naked.
Luckily, he is not too draughty, partly through the adventures he finds in the Night Kitchen. But partly, our attention is taken well away from Mickey, and up to the skyline of the Night Kitchen, which, for me, is where the real magic is found.
Food containers are part of our every day lives. They are familiar, comforting, instantly recognisable, often. Their changes over history are even charted by some, like Robert Opie, whose collecting of packaged household objects in the UK resulted in a museum, now in London.
In Sendak’s book, they become skyscrapers, buildings that form the backdrop of the Night Kitchen. There are people in the kitchen too – and memorable verse, lest I seem to underplay the words side – but there is something about the kitchen writ large that fascinated me.
Other kitchen paraphenalia is also part of the skyline – a box grater, and I think a giant whisk is in there too. And, trying not to give away too much of the story, even the Milky Way in the sky contains real milk.
I was fascinated by what you could learn about the world of the Night Kitchen through the pictures, promises, and so on that were part of the kitchen skyline. Particularly as a British reader, the items in the illustrations were seen from the outside, for me, as dreamlike in themselves.
I still enjoy some of this sense of entering another world when I encounter food packaging from other places. My inner social anthropologist loves a good mosey around supermarkets abroad, learning much from what is placed next to what; what is seen as pure, natural, clean and so on can certainly vary between cultures.
I love the look of food itself, too – don’t get me wrong. Markets, stalls of fruit and veg in particular, are pictures in themselves. But when I see people reuse containers with packaging on – like the large olive oil cans from Mediterranean countries, reused as planters, for example – part of me sighs happily.
Yes, it’s reusing. It’s adding a little separate colour. But just as ingredients, special dishes, take on their own internal mythology too us, depending on where and with whom we encountered them – so too do the food containers themselves.
You’ll be pleased to know I don’t go around kissing the food containers in my kitchen. They’re not those sort of icons.
But there is something of the promise of them, of the anticipation of something good, that is fully part of the Night Kitchen. And for that, I remain extremely grateful.