The Heart-Shaped Tin
Love, Loss, and Kitchen Objects
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
One NPR's Books We Love • One of Waterstones' Best Books of the Year
“Heart-wrenching and heartwarming in equal measure. No one is so good at capturing the everyday magic of kitchens, cooking, and life as Bee Wilson.” —Letitia Clark, author of Bitter Honey
One August day, months after her marriage abruptly ended, a heart-shaped baking tin fell at Bee Wilson’s feet: the same one she had used to bake her wedding cake twenty-three years prior. This discovery struck a wave of emotions that propelled her search for others who have attached magical and personal properties to the objects in their kitchens.
Wilson’s best-selling Consider the Fork considered how kitchen items changed the way we eat; in The Heart-Shaped Tin, she delves into how these objects change the way we live. She meets people who open up about a favorite wooden spoon, a salt shaker inherited from a parent, and a vintage corkscrew collection. Our beloved items become powerful symbols of identity and memory, representing friendship, grief, love, superstition, safety, and even political resistance. Crossing continents, cultures, and time periods, Wilson deftly moves between a 5,000-year-old bottle for drinking chocolate and her children’s favorite melon baller; a metal spoon made by a Holocaust survivor and her mother’s silver-plated toast rack; a bombarded Ukrainian kitchen cabinet and her grandfather’s Wedgwood teapot. In telling these stories, she comes to terms with her grief over the dissolution of her marriage and the loss of her mother after a battle with dementia. The heart-shaped tin, in the end, becomes a moving reminder of the power of new beginnings.
Thoughtful, tender, and beautifully written, The Heart-Shaped Tin is a celebration of the fundamentally human urge to keep mementos, even in an increasingly rational age. It will change the way you look at both precious family heirlooms and humble household objects.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After her 23-year marriage ended, food writer Wilson (The Secret of Cooking) was doing laundry when she knocked to the ground the heart-shaped tin she'd used to bake her wedding cake, sparking her to reflect on the hopeful notion of marriage it had once—but no longer—stood for. Exploring how "kitchen objects can have a life of their own," the author uses items ranging from a salt shaker to corkscrews to investigate impermanence, loss, and what it means to care for a loved one. In "The Kitchen Table," Wilson mourns her marriage and the family life she and her ex-husband once shared at the dinner table ("The very wood seemed to be full of him, as if his hands had left traces on the grain"). "My Grandfather's Teapot" finds Wilson ordering a secondhand teapot that she later discovers was designed by a long-dead grandfather to whom she's able to feel more connected. The strongest essays center Wilson's personal history (her divorce, her mother's death, her children aging); less successful are pieces that revolve around objects that were meaningful to others (a pair of "very old tongs shaped like a pair of clapping hands" prized be a pie maker) or expound more conceptually on the notion of objects having special resonance. Still, this contains plenty of poignant moments.
