The Kitchen by John Ota

Author:John Ota
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Appetite by Random House
Published: 2020-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

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Ed and I continue our dough making. He pours some water into the dry ingredients and then adds my sliced butter to the bowl. He demonstrates with his hands how to squeeze the ingredients together in the bowl to make a dough and then gives me a turn to get my hands into the act. After a minute or so Ed turns back to me and asks, “Do you think the dough’s the right consistency to roll out?” Not having done this before, and being reluctant to admit it, I blurt out, “I guess so,” which of course is of limited help.

Ed’s next instruction is “OK, dust the board and rolling pin with flour.” Then he tells me to take the ball of dough out of the bowl and roll it out on the floured board. The dough hangs together perfectly, and I roll it out gently as flat as a pancake. Ed next tells me, “Give it a little dusting of flour and then fold the pancake in half and roll it again. That’ll get more air in the dough and make a lighter, crisper biscuit.” I begin to feel a quiet sense of momentum and bonding with Ed. We’re getting there. Soon, the dough, Ed and I will be ready for the cookie cutters.

Ed tells me that the linoleum floor has been replaced only once in the history of the kitchen and that the new floor pattern and material are based on the original. The battleship linoleum has a lively random pattern of beige, blue, maroon and yellow squares that complements the institutional mustard-coloured paint on the walls.

Ed hands me a few 1920s metal cookie cutters in the shapes of Christmas trees, stars and wreaths. They don’t look any different from those made today. With the dough flat as a pancake and spread out on the board, Ed directs me to dip the cookie cutter in flour first to keep the dough from sticking to the metal. Of course, in my excitement and mental deafness I forget the flouring process precisely one second after his instruction. The dough stubbornly refuses to drop out of the cutter. I have to poke it out with my fingers, massacring the Christmas tree shape. It’s a good thing I’m not doing brain surgery. Eventually I get the hang of it: dip the cutter in flour, press down firmly and quickly, don’t wiggle the cutter or twist it, just pull it right out again, re-dip in flour…and we create a small army of cookies laid out on cookie sheets that Ed has lined with parchment paper.

Ed mentions that if we were making shortbread in the 1920s, the butter would have been kept cool in the oversized icebox that sits at the rear of the house in its own specially built room. Iceboxes were used from the mid-nineteenth century until the arrival of the refrigerator in the 1930s and stored perishables like milk, cream, butter, fish and vegetables from the garden. Many iceboxes were handsome pieces of furniture.

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