The Kitchen

Eleven Rooms

Chapter 14: The Kitchen

The kitchen is the room that smells. Every room has a smell -- the patient room smells of cork and plaster and the particular medicinal scent of the antiseptic that Nurse Thea uses on the bedrails, the corridor smells of the floor finish and the paint and the passing bodies, the garden smells of lavender and rosemary and wet earth after rain -- but the kitchen is the room whose smell defines it, whose smell is its primary offering to the building, whose smell travels, migrates, moves through corridors and around corners and under doors and into rooms where the smell was not expected and is not resisted, because the smell of cooking is the one smell that human beings do not resist, the one smell that enters without permission and is welcomed without objection, the smell that says: someone is making food, someone is caring for you, someone has taken the raw materials of the earth and is transforming them through heat and time and attention into the thing that sustains you, and the sustaining is love, and the love is the smell, and the smell is the kitchen.

Miriam had fought for kitchens in every hospice she had designed. The fight was always the same fight, the fight against the institutional impulse that wanted to replace the kitchen with a cafeteria or a warming station or a meal delivery system, the impulse that treated food as fuel rather than as experience, that measured nutrition in calories and milligrams rather than in the smell of bread baking and the sound of onions sizzling and the sight of a cook standing at a stove with a wooden spoon, the cook's presence being a form of care that no delivery system could replicate, because care is not the food itself but the making of the food, the visible, audible, olfactory evidence that someone is making something for someone else, and the evidence is the kitchen, and the kitchen is the evidence.

She designed the Orchard House kitchen on a November afternoon, the rain falling on the skylight above her desk, the Portland rain that had been falling since October and that would continue falling until June, the rain that was the city's signature, its identifying characteristic, the thing that people mentioned first when they described Portland, the rain that Miriam had lived under for twenty-two years and that she associated with work, with the long hours at the desk during the gray months, the hours when the natural light was insufficient and the desk lamp was necessary and the trace paper glowed under the warm artificial light and the pen moved across the paper and the buildings took shape in the rain, in the gray, in the Portland light that was not like the Bend light, that was softer and grayer and more forgiving, the light of a city that had learned to live without the sun for months at a time and that had developed, as a consequence, an interior culture, a culture of warm rooms and good coffee and the kitchen as the center of domestic life, the room where the family gathered when the outside was dark and wet and the inside was bright and warm and the smell of cooking was the thing that drew everyone together.

The kitchen at Orchard House: six hundred square feet. Open to the common area. Visible from the corridor. She drew it with the same pen, the same trace paper, the same hand that drew the patient rooms and the corridors and the garden, but the drawing of the kitchen was different from the drawing of the other rooms, because the kitchen was the room that resisted the architect's control, the room that demanded to be a kitchen rather than a designed space, the room whose function overrode its form, whose purpose was not to be looked at but to be used, and the using was cooking, and cooking was messy and noisy and smelly and human, and the room had to accommodate the messiness and the noisiness and the smelliness and the humanness without the architect's usual insistence on order and proportion and the careful control of every surface and every dimension.

She drew the range first. A residential range, not a commercial range -- six burners, two ovens, a broiler, the kind of range that a serious home cook would choose, the kind of range that produced the heat and the control that cooking required without the industrial scale that a commercial range imposed, because the kitchen was not a restaurant kitchen, was not a production facility, was not a place where food was manufactured in quantities, was a place where food was made in small batches, for individual patients, according to individual preferences, the way food is made in a home, one meal at a time, one person at a time, the making personal, specific, attentive to the eater rather than to the schedule.

The range was the kitchen's center, the way the garden was the building's center, the way the bed was the patient room's center, each room organized around its essential element, the thing that gave the room its purpose, and the range's purpose was heat, was the transformation of raw into cooked, of cold into warm, of ingredient into meal, and the transformation was visible, was audible, was olfactory, the range producing the sounds and smells that defined the kitchen -- the hiss of a pan, the bubbling of a pot, the sizzle of oil, the crackling of bread crust -- and the sounds and smells traveled from the range through the kitchen into the common area and down the corridor and into the patient rooms, and the traveling was the design, was the architect's decision to leave the kitchen open, to refuse the walls and the doors and the sealed enclosure that would have contained the sounds and smells within the kitchen, because the containment was the thing Miriam was designing against, the containment that said: the kitchen is separate, the cooking is separate, the food is separate from the rest of the building, and Miriam said no, the food is not separate, the food is the building, the smell of food is the building's atmosphere, the way the quality of light is the building's atmosphere, and the atmosphere should be the atmosphere of home.

She drew the counters. Butcher block on the prep surfaces -- maple, end-grain, the same wood species as the door frames and the baseboards, the kitchen's materials connected to the building's materials, the material palette unified, and the butcher block was real wood, was the working surface of a real kitchen, the surface on which a cook would chop vegetables and roll dough and place hot pots, and the surface would accumulate the marks of its use -- the knife cuts, the stains, the heat marks -- and the accumulation was desirable, was the patina of use, the evidence that the kitchen was being used, that food was being made, that the surface was not a display but a tool, and tools bear the marks of their use and the marks are not damage but testimony, the testimony of purpose fulfilled.

She drew the open shelving. Not cabinets -- open shelves, the kind found in professional kitchens and in the homes of people who cook seriously, the shelves holding the dishes and the bowls and the glasses in plain view, visible, accessible, the opposite of the closed cabinet that hides its contents behind a door, that requires the opening of the door to reveal what is inside, and the revealing is a delay, a small barrier, a minor impediment to the flow of cooking, and Miriam designed against impediments the way she designed against institutional tells, eliminating them one by one, making the kitchen a place of flow, of continuous movement from ingredient to tool to surface to range to plate to table, the flow uninterrupted by closed cabinets and locked drawers and the petty security measures of institutional kitchens.

She drew the island. A central island, four feet by eight feet, butcher block top, open shelving beneath, the island serving as both workspace and gathering place, the place where the cook worked and the visitors sat, the place where the making and the receiving of food happened in the same space, at the same time, the cook visible to the visitor and the visitor visible to the cook, and the mutual visibility was the kitchen's social architecture, the architecture of togetherness, of the shared space where food is the medium of connection, the thing that brings the maker and the receiver together, the thing that gives them a reason to be in the same room, facing each other, across a surface of maple butcher block, the surface bearing the marks of previous meals, previous cooks, previous visitors, the surface carrying the history of the kitchen the way the cork floor carried the history of the corridor.

Patients eat what they want, when they want. She wrote this in the program and she wrote it again on the kitchen drawing, because the statement was the kitchen's governing principle, the thing that made the hospice kitchen different from every other institutional kitchen, the thing that rejected the schedule and the menu and the tray delivery system of the hospital and replaced them with the freedom of the home kitchen, the freedom to eat scrambled eggs at three o'clock in the afternoon, the freedom to eat soup at midnight, the freedom to eat nothing, the freedom to eat only bread, the freedom that the dying deserve because the dying have lost most freedoms and the freedom to choose what to eat and when to eat it is a small freedom, a domestic freedom, but a freedom nonetheless, and Miriam designed the kitchen to support this freedom, designed the kitchen to be staffed by a cook who understood that the hospice kitchen was not a production facility but a service, a response to individual desire, a willingness to make whatever the patient wanted whenever the patient wanted it, and the willingness was the kitchen's love, and the love was the kitchen's architecture.

She finished the kitchen drawing at three o'clock. She looked at it. She saw the range and the counters and the shelving and the island and the opening to the common area and the corridor beyond, and she saw, in the drawing, the trajectory of the smell, the invisible path that the cooking aromas would take from the range through the kitchen into the common area and down the corridor, the path determined by the building's ventilation system -- Miriam had specified a system that did not exhaust the kitchen air directly to the outside but that recirculated it through the building, allowing the cooking smells to travel, to migrate, to enter the patient rooms and the family rooms and the meditation room and the garden, and the traveling was deliberate, was designed, was the architect's decision to let the smell of food go where it wanted, the way the water in the rill went where the grade sent it, the way the light went where the windows admitted it, without restriction, without control, the smell free, the smell democratic, the smell of home.

She drove to Evergreen House.

In Room 6, Nurse Thea was bringing Lin soup.

The soup was tomato. Miriam could smell it from the corridor, could smell the warm, acidic, slightly sweet smell of tomatoes cooked with onion and garlic and the dried basil that the Evergreen House cook kept in a glass jar on the open shelf above the range, the jar visible, the herb visible, the kitchen's contents visible the way Miriam had designed them to be visible, and the visibility of the herb was connected, through the chain of architectural decisions, to the smell of the soup in Room 6, because the cook had seen the basil on the shelf and had added it to the soup and the basil had released its oils into the tomato and the oils had produced the smell and the smell had traveled from the kitchen through the open plan into the corridor and down the corridor and through the thirty-six-inch door of Room 6 and into the room where Lin lay in the bed and Thea stood beside the bed holding the soup in a ceramic mug, not a styrofoam cup, not a plastic bowl, a ceramic mug, because Miriam had specified ceramic for the kitchen service, had specified real dishes and real mugs and real glasses, had refused the disposable, the styrofoam, the plastic, because the material of the vessel is part of the experience of the food, the weight of the ceramic mug in the hand is part of the experience of holding soup, the warmth of the ceramic against the palms is part of the experience of being held by the warmth of the soup, and the experience is the design, and the design is the experience.

Lin held the mug. Her hands -- the thin hands, the bones close to the surface -- wrapped around the ceramic, and the ceramic was warm, and the warmth passed from the soup through the ceramic into Lin's hands, and the passage of warmth was a transaction, a transfer, an exchange between the made thing and the living thing, the soup giving its heat to the hands and the hands receiving the heat and the receiving was a form of eating, a form of nourishment, the nourishment of warmth, of the held thing, of the thing between the palms that was warm and real and made by a person in a kitchen, made with a range and a wooden spoon and a ceramic mug, made with the materials that Miriam had specified and the cook had used and the building had provided.

Lin could barely eat. She brought the mug to her lips. She sipped. The sip was small, was perhaps a teaspoon, was the amount that her body could accept, and the amount was diminishing, had been diminishing for weeks, the appetite withdrawing the way the tide withdraws, slowly, incrementally, the waterline of desire receding from the shore of the body, leaving more and more of the body unfed, unvisited, the appetite gone from the place where the appetite once lived.

But she held the mug. She held it against her face. She breathed the steam. The steam carried the smell of the tomato and the onion and the garlic and the basil, and the smell entered her nose and her mouth and her lungs, and the entering was a form of eating, a form of receiving the food without consuming it, the olfactory consumption that is possible when the physical consumption is not, and the olfactory consumption was enough, was what she could do, was the remnant of the appetite that the disease had not yet taken.

"The soup is good," Lin said to Thea.

"Michael made it today. He makes the tomato soup on Wednesdays."

"Tell Michael it's good. Tell him the basil is right."

Thea smiled. The smile of a hospice nurse, the smile that carries thirty things at once -- the warmth, the sadness, the professional competence, the personal affection, the knowledge of what is coming, the acceptance of what is coming, the refusal to let the knowledge and the acceptance diminish the warmth or the affection -- and the smile was directed at Lin but the smile was also about the soup, about the mug, about the kitchen, about the building, about the fact that a building could provide this moment, this moment of a woman holding a mug of warm soup and breathing the steam and saying the basil is right, and the moment was the architecture, the moment was what Miriam had designed, not the mug, not the soup, not the basil, but the system that produced the moment, the system of kitchen and cook and range and herb and mug and corridor and room and bed and patient and nurse, the system that Miriam had designed and that was producing, seven years after the design and five years after the construction and three years after the opening, this moment, this ordinary, extraordinary moment of a dying woman holding warm soup and breathing its steam and finding the basil right.

Miriam sat in the visitor's chair. She watched her mother hold the soup. She watched the thin hands wrap around the mug. She watched the steam rise from the mug's lip and curl in the air above Lin's face, the steam visible in the slant of the corridor light that entered the room through the open door, the steam moving the way all warm air moves in a cooler space, rising, dispersing, joining the room's air, becoming invisible, the soup's smell remaining after the steam had gone, the smell persisting in the room the way all smells persist, lingering, clinging to surfaces, settling into the cork floor and the warm gray walls and the acoustic plaster ceiling, the room absorbing the smell the way the room absorbed all things -- the light, the sound, the presence of the people in it, the grief, the love, the soup.

"Miriam," Lin said. "Do you remember the soup?"

"Which soup?"

"The soup I made when you were sick. You were eight. You had the flu. You were in your bed on Hawthorne Street, in the bedroom upstairs, the bedroom with the window that faced the backyard, and I made you soup. Chicken soup. I made it from scratch. I made the stock from a chicken carcass and I simmered it for four hours and I strained it and I added the noodles and the vegetables and I brought it upstairs on a tray and you sat up in bed and you held the mug -- a blue mug, do you remember the blue mug? -- and you held the mug and you breathed the steam and you said: the steam is the best part."

"I remember."

"The steam is the best part. You were eight years old and you understood that the food is not just the eating, the food is the smelling and the holding and the warmth of the mug in the hands, and you understood this at eight, and then you grew up and you designed kitchens for the dying, kitchens that produce the smell of food and send the smell through the building, and the sending is the same thing as the steam, Miriam. The sending is the best part. The sending is the part that reaches the person in the bed who cannot eat. The sending is the part that says: someone is cooking, someone is making food, someone is caring for you, and the caring has a smell, and the smell has found you, and the finding is enough."

Miriam looked at her mother. She looked at the mug in her mother's hands. She looked at the steam that was no longer visible, that had dispersed into the room's air, that had become part of the room, and she understood what her mother was telling her, which was not about the soup and not about the mug and not about the kitchen but about the design, about the life's work, about the twenty-two years of fighting for kitchens and ranges and open plans and the unrestricted movement of cooking smells, the fight that had been, all along, the fight for the steam, for the best part, for the part that reaches the person who cannot eat, the part that travels from the kitchen to the bedside, from the cook to the patient, from the making to the receiving, and the traveling is the architecture, and the architecture is the love, and the love is the smell of soup in a room where a woman is dying.

Lin put the mug down. She had not drunk more than two sips. The soup would cool on the bedside table, the ceramic losing its warmth to the air the way all warm things lose their warmth to the air, the second law of thermodynamics expressed in a mug of tomato soup on a walnut bedside table in Room 6 of Evergreen House, the warmth equalizing, the hot becoming lukewarm, the lukewarm becoming room temperature, the room temperature being the temperature of the room, which was seventy-two degrees, which was the temperature Miriam had specified for all patient rooms, the temperature that was neither warm nor cool but neutral, the temperature that did not impose itself on the body, that did not make the body hot or cold but allowed the body to be its own temperature, and Lin's temperature was changing too, was fluctuating as the disease progressed, the thermoregulation less reliable, the body's ability to maintain its own temperature compromised, and the room's temperature was the compensation, the environmental stability that the body could no longer provide for itself, and the providing was the architecture, was the mechanical system, was the HVAC that Miriam had specified and the engineers had designed and the contractors had installed and the building maintained, the building taking care of Lin's temperature the way the kitchen took care of Lin's appetite, not by satisfying it but by offering, by being there, by providing the possibility of warmth and the possibility of food, and the possibility was enough, the possibility was the architecture, the possibility was the holding.

The smelling is enough.

Miriam knew this. She had known it for years, had known it since her fifth building, Mountain View, where she had observed a patient who could no longer eat sitting in the common area near the kitchen, the patient's eyes closed, the patient's face turned toward the kitchen the way a plant turns toward the sun, the patient receiving the smell of cooking the way a plant receives light, the receiving involuntary, automatic, the body turning toward the source of sustenance even when the body could no longer take sustenance in, and the turning was the evidence, the proof that the smell was enough, that the olfactory experience of food was a form of nourishment that did not require eating, that the nose could eat what the mouth could not, and the nose-eating was a real thing, a documented thing, a thing that palliative care research had confirmed -- that the smell of food stimulates the brain's reward centers, produces the sensation of satisfaction, provides a form of nourishment that is psychological rather than physical but that is no less real for being psychological, because the psychological is real, the psychological is physical, the brain is a physical organ and the smell reaches the brain through physical pathways and the reaching is a physical event and the event is nourishment, is sustenance, is the kitchen's gift to the patient who can no longer eat but who can still smell.

The smelling is enough. Lin knew this too. Lin, who had held the mug and breathed the steam and said the basil was right, Lin understood that the basil was right not because she had tasted it -- she had barely tasted it, had sipped two teaspoons of soup -- but because she had smelled it, because the smell had entered her nose and traveled the olfactory pathway to her brain and her brain had received the information and catalogued it, had placed it on the shelf where the basil lived, the shelf that contained every basil she had ever smelled -- the basil in the chicken soup she made for Miriam in 1984, the basil in the pesto she made every summer from the basil that grew in the garden on Hawthorne Street, the basil in the Italian restaurants she and David had eaten at on their anniversary, forty-two years of anniversary dinners, each one with basil somewhere in the meal, because basil is everywhere in Italian cooking the way light is everywhere in architecture, pervasive, fundamental, the thing without which the thing is not itself -- and the receiving and the cataloguing were the eating, were the nourishment, were the kitchen's gift, and the gift had traveled from the kitchen through the corridor to Room 6, unrestricted, unrestricted the way Miriam had designed it to be, the smell free, the smell democratic, the smell of home reaching the person in the bed the way love reaches the person in the bed, without asking permission, without respecting boundaries, filling the space the way love fills a marriage -- not by design but by presence.