by Robrt L. Pela

This is a watercolor of the blue bowl I mix cake batter in. The painting is by my spouse, Mr. Grossman, who’s good at everything he does because he’s a Jew.

The bowl was a wedding gift to my mother in 1946. It turns up in something like 700 different family candids, because Italian American housewives take pictures of their people eating stuff at every holiday. I used to play a game when I was a kid: Find a Holiday Mealtime Photo of My Family in Which the Blue Bowl Doesn’t Appear.

There were hardly any.

by Robrt L. Pela

Okay, it’s not really in my cupboard. It’s hanging on my wall. But, seriously, would you want me to use a 70-year-old bundt pan as anything other than an adornment?

This piece reminds me, every day, of how much I love the guy who invented Teflon. Because these old molded cake pans don’t really work. Everything you bake in them, no matter how much you grease the pan, sticks. So what’s the point?

And please don’t talk to me about Jell-o, which hadn't yet been invented when this pan was being used by poor, pre-mid-century housewives.

Pity them.

by Robrt L. Pela

Mr. Grossman couldn’t resist it. And who can blame him? A tin of Spotted Dick (a traditional English steamed dessert containing currants, typically served either with custard or butter and brown sugar) is an hilarious thing, at least if you’re an American. And so he bought it and stuck it in our pantry, where it causes us to titter each time we see it, months later.

Brits are unfazed by a sweet called Dick, spotted or otherwise. But everyone else who comes to our home for dinner gets offered some. I guess we’re easily amused. “Want some spotted dick?”

Still cracks me up.

by Robrt L. Pela

I keep getting up from where I’m sitting to go look at the tablecloth our friend Ruth Beautmont brought over last night. Ruth (a former Floradora girl) knows that Mr. Grossman has a thing for old linens, and when I phoned last night to say, “We’re barbecuing, come over!” she showed up with this amazing old tablecloth.

I know. I’m such a fag.

by Robrt L. Pela

This just in from the Snooty Boots Dept.: Mr. Grossman and I only consume olive oil imported from France.

I know, I know. I'm pretentious. But the trouble is we bought some of this stuff from a moulin in Callas, a Provencal village known for its olive oil. We brought it back to the states with us and, after that, regular olive oil from Safeway tasted like airplane glue.

Here are some foodstuff confessions that will hopefully counteract my snotty attitude about the olive oil situation: I like to eat generic sandwich cookies from Circle K. Also Nacho Cheese Doritos. And when I make guacamole for myself, I just mash up an avocado and dump mayonnaise on top of it.

Okay? Not so snooty.

(But, seriously, if you haven't eaten good olive oil, give it a whirl.)

by Robrt L. Pela

Mr. Grossman and I buy crap that we don’t need. It’s wasteful, but it pleases us to own stuff that just sits around looking nice.

Like this dried-out artichoke. It’s sitting in a bowl in the kitchen. It’s actually not something we bought just because it’s nice to look at, though. We were planning to eat it, but we waited too long and it started to fossilize. We liked how it looked, so we left it.

There’s a bowl full of kiwi in the breakfast room that’s been there since 2003.

by Robrt L. Pela

She rested on the kitchen windowsill of my childhood home all through the Sixties, dressed in a little ceramic dress, standing next to a giant ear of corn. In the parlance of the day, she was what was called “Colored.” And then one day, when I wasn’t looking, she disappeared.

It could be that she fell and broke, and Mom dumped her broken bits into the trash compactor. Or maybe Mom decided it was inappropriate, in that age of the Human Rights Movement, to own a depiction of an Afro American (as they then liked to be called) that might somehow be offensive to a Black person, and she put little Corn Girl into a garage sale.

I don’t know where she went to. All I know is one day she was gone. I searched for her for years and years in antique shops, but she never turned up. Then, about a decade ago, a new online auction called eBay got going, and within days Corn Girl was mine again.

This one’s eyes aren’t the same, though. They’re painted on really big, so that she looks startled, and they’re crooked, which makes her look a little sad.

I keep swizzle sticks in her ear of corn.

by Robrt L. Pela

Here's a friendly note to my friends and family: Stop buying me salt shakers. I'm done collecting them. I have 136 of them now, and that's enough. So, seriously, enough already.

Thanks.

by Robrt L. Pela

It was raining, and we were both on deadline. Neither Kate nor I wanted to go back to our apartments to write, so we went shopping for pepper grinders instead. I don’t remember if we knew we wanted pepper grinders, or if we both just found matching ones at that junky antique store where we were always buying crap back then, when we were both single, both living in that old high-rise over on Fourth Avenue.

But I do remember this, every time I look at my little copper pepper grinder: Sometimes it rains in Phoenix. And I am always on deadline.

by Robrt L. Pela

Do people use cookie cutters anymore? I have a big round box of them in my kitchen cupboard, but I never use the fucking things. I like to bake, but I don’t know that I’ve ever read a cookie recipe that included the direction, “Using a star-shaped cookie cutter…”

Every couple of months, I think about pitching the whole lot—the bell-shaped one; the giant heart-shaped one; the goofy Santa one that punches out pancreas-shaped cookies, or that would if I ever used it. But I never do. I know that a few days after pitching them, some cookie recipe I’m attempting will call for “a 3-inch flower-shaped cutter.”

by Robrt L. Pela

My spouse claims that I manage to work into every conversation the fact that we are not allowed by law to marry one another. He’s exaggerating, of course, but I am pretty bitter about this. His accusation came to mind when I sat down to write this essay, which originally began with the sentence “The Seder plate in our home was made by my father-in-law—or rather, the man who would be my father-in-law if it were legal for me to marry his son, to whom I’ve been betrothed for 11 years.”

Anyway. Frank Grossman glazed our Seder plate, sometime before his untimely death in 1978, at one of those paint-it-yourself pottery places. For those who don’t know, the Passover Seder plate (or ke’ara in Hebrew) is a platter meant to hold symbolic foods used by Jews during a Passover Seder. Each of the six items arranged on the plate has special significance to the retelling of the story of the Jews’ exodus from Egypt, which is the point of Passover in the first place.

Probably you already knew all that, but I didn’t when I met my spouse, who celebrates Jewish holidays grudgingly, and only because I make him.

“I’m an ethnic Jew,” he tells me often, “not a religious Jew.”

Whatever. The Jews are all about their dishes, and anything involving dishware gets me going. Jews who keep kosher have a separate set for dairy-based foods and another for meat, and at Passover, those get left in the cupboard and still another set of china gets pressed into play. All this dishware is exciting to me, but not exciting enough for me to abandon atheism in favor of a religion that requires that I throw away all the food in the house once a year. I deplore wastefulness.

Anyway. Our Seder plate is very cleverly painted, with a separate compartment for each of the six foodstuffs (bitter herb; parsley dipped into salt water; a chicken bone; a boiled egg; horseradish, and charoset, a paste made of wine, walnuts and apples). But the person who designed the original ceramic mold was a little whacked out, I think. The horseradish is shaped like a couple of curly-tailed anchovy, and the space for the bitter herb depicts what looks like three over-ripe turnips. Huh?

But the one that bugs me the most is the space for the chicken bone, which depicts an entire chicken leg; a drumstick so meaty and Flintstonian in its girth that it looks more like a weapon than a placeholder for a wee bit of poultry cartilage.

I don’t know why I care. My spouse certainly doesn’t. He recently used our Seder plate to serve cheese and crackers to a couple of cocktail hour drop-ins. Oy.

by Robrt L. Pela

If the house caught on fire, I’d grab my French press and run. Oh, and the cats. I’d grab the cats, too. Except that in my horror fantasies, the cats are waiting patiently by the door (even though they’ve never gone outside in their lives) to be whisked away to safety. Along with my French press, without which I cannot wake up in the morning.

I’ve become one of those people who’d rather not interact with the world until his coffee kicks in. Deplorable. If you happen one day to be my houseguest, it’d be better if you didn’t try to strike up a conversation with me while I’m waiting for my early morning coffee water to boil. If you find me in the kitchen grinding a fistful of beans at, say, 7 a.m., it would be best if you went and sat in the breakfast room until I’ve swallowed a cup or two. Just a friendly warning.

My French press was a gift from my friend Dominick, a sort of “thank you for letting me visit you in France” after he came to see me and Mr. Grossman at our house there one summer. I’ve used it every morning since, and I never share. Of course, no one’s home at our house at 7 in the morning who wants my coffee. Even if I weren’t the only one home, I’ve been told I make my brew “too strong.” And if there were anyone here to hear my reply, it would be, “I didn’t make it for you.”

by Robrt L. Pela

A lot of my favorite kitchen stuff came from my mother. Mom appears never to have purchased a single kitchen item herself; point to any implement specific to food prep in her kitchen, and she’ll tell you who gave it to her as wedding or bridal shower gift in 1946.

My rusty old flour sifter is part of a “kitchen set” given to Mom by my cousin JoAnn, Mom’s favorite niece who died from a rare skin disorder in the 1950s. The sifter still works, although sometimes bits of its shiny chrome flake off when I’m using it.

“What are those little dark specks?” Mr. Grossman asked the other day when I was sifting six cups of flour into a big, green ceramic bowl, part of a set given to Mom by her sister Lucille at her bridal shower 60-odd years ago.

“History,” I told him.

by Robrt L. Pela

I borrowed a baking pan from my mother the other day—one of those square, aluminum Wear-Ever pans made in the 1940s, which is when Mom bought this one. I was making brownies and I don’t like to make them in a rectangular pan. One of my brothers happened to be visiting my parents when I returned it.

“Oh, look, the Barf Pan,” my brother said when I showed Mom that I was returning her bakeware. He was referring to an old metal pan that Mom would position next to our beds when we were sick as kids.

“No, no, no,” I said to him. “This only looks like the Barf Pan. Mom had two of these, and she would never, ever bake in the one we used to puke into when we were little.”

I held up the pan to my mother, whose short-term memory is wrecked, but who can recite the name of every kid in her fourth grade homeroom. “Two of these, right?” I said to her.

“That pan was part of a set your Aunt Mae gave me at my bridal shower in 1946,” she said, glancing up from a game of Solitaire. “There’s only one of them.”

I drove really fast, but it was too late. By the time I got home, Mr. Grossman was just finishing his second brownie.

by Robrt L. Pela

Last week, a reader wrote pleading with me to tell her about my favorite spatula, but I cannot. I’m afraid that if I do, my other spatulas will feel bad. If I single out one spatula, the others might stop working properly. I can imagine those flimsy ones from the dollar store getting their feelings hurt and refusing to flip a hamburger patty, or my oldest one—the one with the duct-taped handle—deliberately breaking the yolk on an over-easy egg.

Instead, I’ll tell you about Great Big Giant Head, which is what we call the thing we keep our spatulas in. It’s a, um, great big giant head, made of ceramic and given to Mr. Grossman and me by our niece-in-law, Allison, a couple of Christmases ago. Mr. G. wanted to put a plant in it, but I know a spatula holder when I see one.

I saw another Great Big Giant Head once in an antique store, exactly the same as ours, which pissed me off because Allison got our Great Big Giant Head off the clearance table at Macy’s in 2005. The one in the antique store was priced at $175, which is more than ten times what Allison paid for mine. I couldn’t resist, so I asked the antique store owner about the one he had for sale. “Oh, yes, those were very popular in Italy shortly after the turn of the last century,” he told me, and I’m sorry I didn’t reply, “You’re full of shit, pal,” because his store closed shortly after that and now I’ll never have the chance to tell him that.