Death, Divorce, and the Magic of Kitchen Objects: How to Find Hope in Loss

In this adapted excerpt from The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss and Kitchen Objects, Bee Wilson explores how items in our kitchens can become unintentionally meaningful to us over time. She considers the value and meaning of a heart-shaped tin in her own home—a symbol of a marriage that ended after 23 years—and also shares stories of others’ treasured kitchen objects, showing how ordinary things can quietly carry memories of love and loss.

Many people told me that they could still feel the presence of a lost parent or partner in their china cupboard. I met someone who said that the one object belonging to his mother that he and his siblings all wanted when they cleared her house was a glass salad-dressing maker. His mother never rinsed out the garlic at the bottom, just adding fresh garlic before pouring in the oil and vinegar, meaning that this vessel carried the garlicky essence of decades of shared meals. Another person told me that she had a very powerful sense of one of her ancestors, whom she had never met, because she had inherited her rolling pin. A friend told me that the only thing she now had left from her French grandmother was a rusty old herb chopper from long-ago Paris, where her family ran a brasserie. My friend never used this chopper herself, but every time she looked at it she could see her grandmother’s hands, alive and cooking.