Extra Bites: Bee Wilson

The Heart Shaped Tin

This week on Cooking the Books, Bee Wilson takes us through her years of magical thinking as she examines the emotional life of kitchen objects in 35 short stories - part memoir and part other people's stories.

The book has touched the hearts of so many people and had them pulling out treasures from their own cupboards to tell stories on social media. Here’s Nigella on Instagram:

Whenever I read @kitchenbee, beyond being illuminated and uplifted by her enquiring intelligence, I’m always so grateful for the gentle grace of her company; it feels like being held in conversation with someone clever and kind who just understands what it feels like to be a person in the kitchen and in the world. Bee has something passingly rare in those with her intellectual rigour: a frank, unembarrassed emotional understanding about what really matters in life. This beautifully written book about the deep significance of certain objects in our kitchen – a silver toast rack that belonged to her mother, who died fairly recently of dementia; the heart-shaped tin of the title in which she baked her wedding cake, once a treasured and then a taunting presence after her husband left her; the vegetable-corers that made a Syrian cook in exile feel a sense of home – is nothing less then an intense, compassionate expression of the human condition.

It’s quite something.

Here Bee tells us about the one that got away, the one that didn’t get into the book, and why.

I considered writing about my spider, because it’s such an important element in my cookbook The Secret of Cooking. And I adore it. But then I realised that although I love it and reach for it pretty much every day it doesn’t have such deep personal associations as some of the other objects in my kitchen - maybe because my mother never used a spider- and what I wanted to explore most in The Heart-Shaped Tin was kitchen things that represent people.