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Daily Mail
4 days ago
- General
- Daily Mail
The Heart-Shaped Tin by Bee Wilson: It is not hoarding if it warms your heart
The Heart-Shaped Tin by Bee Wilson (4th Estate £18.99, 320pp) Get rid of the clutter,' they tell us. Only keep a mere handful of objects which 'spark joy'. Thinking about the chaos compulsive 'hoarders' live in, the advice of Marie Kondo and other de-clutterers is very wise indeed. The trouble is, it underestimates the significance of objects in our lives – things enshrined in memory. Only touch that old-fashioned cup and saucer, or that old ornament of a simpering porcelain shepherdess, and you might be transported back to your grandmother's front room when her display cabinet full of china delighted your childish eyes. Association can make the most humble object sacred. Food writer Bee Wilson understands this well. Her new book is a journey of discovery around a collection of domestic objects – her own and other people's – that are laden with associations and evoke the deepest emotions. It all started the day the heart-shaped tin in which she had baked her own wedding cake 23 years earlier inexplicably fell to the ground from the dresser where it had lain for years. It was as if the rusting old tin object somehow knew that her husband had left her just a couple of months earlier, leaving her heart-broken. It was a painful reminder of past happiness. What did she do with the tin? You have to wait until the last chapter to find out. The symbolism of the heart-shaped tin haunted the author, and she set out on a quest to examine the meaning of other objects within her own life, her mother's, and the lives of friends and acquaintances with varied stories to tell. Roopa Gulati's china dinner service was a good example. The chef and food writer's parents were from the Punjab area of India, and when they came to England they felt they just had to buy a posh dinner service. The elegant Royal Doulton set was so precious neither Roopa nor her brother were allowed to help wash it up. When she finally inherited the set, Roopa kept it in the attic for fear of breakages. But when her husband Dan was diagnosed with a brain tumour, she finally decided to use the china. What is the point of keeping lovely things if you don't use them? Some objects, Bee Wilson believes, seem to possess magical qualities. Why else would something valued by an absent husband seem to carry with it the trace of his DNA – and all the memories of the love you shared? Maybe it's only a drinking glass (say), but the symbolism can be much, much greater than you could ever have imagined. One handheld rotary whisk, used for years for beating eggs and cream, can represent a whole package of what we might call Magical Thinking – treasured moments with a mother, but also all that beloved person's hopes and dreams, their disappointments and death. The author's chapter on the old whisk is one of many moving meditations in this lovely, thoughtful book, as she describes her own mother's decline into dementia, and the final, sad, filial duty of clearing her house after death. She looks at 'a few things that felt especially characteristic of our mother: a beaded necklace, some pretty blue plates, scraps of poems she had written as a child…' Then comes the devastating realisation, '…that most of the articles a person has carefully selected and accumulated across a lifetime are reduced to trash when they are no longer there to use them'. Why keep Mother's favourite pan when your own pan drawer is over-stuffed? Who would want to hang on to the metal gadget for scooping balls of melon – even if your sons used to love using it? Can you bear to look at the ugly kitchen canisters your mother thought so wonderful? What do you do about loving what is actually junk? Such questions could, of course, be dismissed as rampant sentimentality. But that word implies shallow self-indulgence, whereas the feelings Bee Wilson invokes are deep and real. The book's subtitle makes this clear: Love, Loss And Kitchen Objects. The objects themselves are far less important than the stories they tell, or the strange significance they have in somebody's life. For example, why would a man collect corkscrews, especially when screw caps now dominate the wine market? The chapter on this is less about the personal than history itself. The owner of the local deli where Wilson buys delicious treats has amassed a large collection of antique corkscrews, because they create a 'connection' with previous generations. The man grew up in bleak and straitened Eastern Europe, and so the corkscrews evoke 'an earlier and freer Europe in which there were waiters opening bottles of wine and lemonade in lovely cafes'. Just touching one of the old corkscrews 'can offer continuity with the human beings who handled it before us…' As she roams the world and its stories, Wilson meets people who deal with their own loves and losses by projecting irrational emotions on to objects. Why, for example, would a man in a concentration camp painstakingly (and dangerously) create a metal spoon from a piece of tin? Why would specific vegetable corers mean the world to a refugee who felt he could never cook properly without them? In one way these are stories of dependency, but more important is what they tell us about identity. Reading them, I realise how cherishing my grandmother's cheap china figurines represents my pride in her hardworking life. The memory is rooted in class. Bee Wilson divides the essays into Charms, Mementos, Junk, Tools, Symbols, Gifts and Treasure, and covers a wide variety of subjects, from an Italian bowl to a kitchen unit hanging off a wall in bombed Ukraine. The whole collection of entertaining and moving meditations offers historical as well as personal riches, and celebrates the durability of objects that – when we create meaning from them – offer a precious lesson: 'We could try to change our values and see second-hand things as more beautiful and special than the shiny and new.'
The Guardian
14-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
The Heart-Shaped Tin by Bee Wilson review – what the contents of our kitchens says about us
Two months after her husband left in 2020, Bee Wilson was startled by the clatter of a baking tin falling on to the kitchen floor. In one way this doesn't seem particularly remarkable: Wilson is an esteemed food writer who presumably has a surplus of kitchen utensils crammed into her bulging cupboards. This tin, though, was different. For one thing it was heart-shaped. For another, Wilson had used it to bake her wedding cake 23 years earlier, taking care to leave out the cherries because her husband-to-be loathed them. (This now strikes her as ominous: 'Maybe a man who was so fussy about cherries was not the man for me.') Lurking at the back of Wilson's mind had been the thought that she would soon be using the heart-shaped tin to bake a cake for their silver wedding anniversary. But now here it was, lying dejectedly at her feet and, she couldn't help noticing, spotted with rust. In this delightful book, part memoir, part anthropological investigation, food writer Wilson explores the way that kitchen objects have the power to move, soothe and even reproach us. There's the plate you feel compelled to eat off because it makes everything taste nicer, or that bowl you keep but can't bear to use because it reminds you too much of the person who gave it to you. In the maelstrom of her new living conditions, Wilson worries that she is overdoing the anthropomorphism: there is a big cast-iron knife that she can't bear to pick up because it is the one her ex-husband always used and 'to touch its smooth handle would have felt like holding his hand'. It turns out that Wilson need not have worried that she was, in her words, going 'mad' by ascribing personalities and human meaning to bits of wood and stainless steel. Magical thinking, the textbooks reassure her, is a universal aspect of human cultures. It also provides the propulsion for this engaging collection of 30-odd short essays organised around ordinary people's complicated feelings for egg whisks and apple corers. Among the kitchenalia that Wilson sets before us is a much-loved pressure cooker belonging to a Tuscan diplomat's wife which saw service after the second world war in Senegal and Mumbai (pressure cookers, incidentally, turn out to be ancient bits of kit, going all the way back to 1679). There's also a silver toast rack that Wilson's mother, slipping into Alzheimer's, is convinced has been stolen by a burglar who wants it for a particularly fancy picnic. Closer to home is a humble red, plastic washing-up bowl. It was a gift from a thoughtful neighbour who spotted that the newly single Wilson was now in charge not only of the cooking for her three hungry children but all the washing up too. The bowl had a cheerful, purposeful look to it, as if urging Wilson to look on the bright side. And it worked: 'Every time I looked at it filled with hot sudsy water, I felt that washing up might actually be cool and Danish rather than tedious and mildly oppressive.' A book concerned with rummaging in other people's kitchen drawers might start to feel claustrophobic, but Wilson is careful to let the light in. She interviews Sasha Correa, a Venezuelan who recalls how for 60 evenings in a row in 2002, her family – five sisters plus their mother and father – went out on to their balcony in Caracas and banged pots for an hour to protest against the authoritarian policies of the country's president, Hugo Chávez. These 'casserole protests' have become a feature throughout Latin America, though recently they have been seen in Europe, too. During the 'Kitchenware Revolution' of 2009-2011, Icelandic citizens clashed and clattered in protest at their government's dire handling of the country's financial crisis. It is no surprise to learn that Wilson's obsession with kitchen vernacular has a genetic element. Her grandfather, Norman Wilson, was the production director of Wedgwood during the middle decades of the 20th century. Under his auspices, thousands of dinner plates and gravy boats sailed out into the world in a variety of patterns from the classic Willow to Summer Sky, a beautiful pale pearlescent blue with a white trim. By far and away Mr Wilson's personal favourite, though, was Kutani Crane, featuring a turquoise crane set against a multicoloured floral arrangement. Although extremely popular with customers, Norman Wilson's descendants found Kutani Crane fussy and clotted, and competed to offload unwanted heirlooms on each other. Consequently, Wilson admits that she has developed ambivalent feelings about the family china. Recently, she opened another little-used cupboard only to find two Kutani Crane vegetable tureens squatting, dusty, unloved and vaguely malevolent. Despite feeling 'strangled' by them, filial obligation had so far stopped her from sending them to the charity shop. Looking at them now, Wilson has a revelation: 'What if I had become the Kutani Crane in the marriage?' – in other words, something that her ex-husband felt a grudging duty towards, but not quite enough to keep. In the end, the tureens, unlike the marriage, get a last-minute reprieve. Bundled up into the attic, they are biding their sulky time until Wilson's children are old enough to decide whether a clean break is in order. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss and Kitchen Objects by Bee Wilson is published by 4th Estate (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
30-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Youth experience in Britain on a charity worker visa
There is already a form of youth experience programme (EU may accept 12-month work visas for 'youth experience' scheme with UK, 25 April), not only for EU citizens but for any nationality to come to the UK. It's the non-renewable one-year charity worker visa. Many charities, including religious communities such as mine in Dorchester, value the enthusiasm and international experience these young volunteers bring. Brother Hugh CobbettSociety of St Francis, Hilfield Friary Bee Wilson's article (Death, divorce and the magic of kitchen objects, 29 April) reminded me that the only thing my daughter has specifically asked me to leave her in my will is her great-grandmother's potato peeler, which still works efficiently after at least 70 ColeBurgate, Suffolk I have a small, round board roughly engraved with 'Bread' – a wedding gift to my mother in 1942 from her grandmother. The donor, wife of a charcoal burner and mother of 17 children, was making the most important wish she could for a 19-year-old bride: may you always have bread on your table. It worked. I can't bear to get rid of BaileySt Albans Were it not for the amore divinos (to name but one) at Savino's in Emmanuel Street, Cambridge, I would surely follow Susan Sayers' daughter to Bologna for wonderful gluten-free treats (Letters, 28 April).Dr Jane Frances Cambridge This is not just a cyber-attack – it's an M&S cyber-attack (Report, 29 April).David ShannonAshton under Hill, Worcestershire
Telegraph
27-04-2025
- General
- Telegraph
A memoir through kitchen utensils? It's extraordinary
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.
