Everyone Has a Second Kitchen Now

The pattern is consistent enough across households that it seems worth naming. There is a weekday kitchen and a weekend kitchen, and they are not the same cuisine, and they are not even really the same activity.

The weekday kitchen is local, quick, and adapted to whatever is in the supermarket. Nobody is sentimental about it. It exists to get people fed between one obligation and another.

The weekend kitchen is slow, expensive in time, and performed. It requires a shop that is a bus ride away. It produces more food than the household can eat, which is the point, because the surplus is what gets other people to come.

The second kitchen is not nostalgia. It is a scheduled, repeated, deliberately inefficient way of making a room have more people in it.

What several people described, without being prompted, was a specific unease about the children — who are entirely fluent in the weekday kitchen and treat the weekend one as an event rather than as food.

One person put it as a question rather than a complaint: if the dish only ever appears on a Saturday and always with guests, is the child learning a cuisine, or learning a ritual that happens to involve one?

She had no answer and did not appear to want one. She was, when we spoke, halfway through a stew that takes four hours.