Free Essays of E. B. White by E. B. White

it has a long way to return before it gets to be a good room again. Last fall, the American Society of Industrial Designers met in Washington and kicked the kitchen around a bit. One of the speakers, I remember, said that we will soon get to the point of eating “simply and fast.” He said we would push a button and peas would appear on a paper plate. No preparation at all.
    It really comes down to what a man wants from a plate of peas, and to what peas have it in their power to give. I’m not much of an eater, but I get a certain amount of nourishment out of a seed catalogue on a winter’s evening, and I like to help stretch the hen wire along the rows of young peas on a fine morning in June, and I feel better if I set around and help with the shelling of peas in July. This is all a part of the pageantry of peas, if you happen to like peas. Our peas didn’t get planted until May 9 this spring—about three weeks later than the normal planting time. I shall hardly know what day in July to push the button and watch them roll out onto the paper plate.
    Another speaker at the designers’ conference said, “The kitchen as we know it today is a dead dodo.” (One solution this man offered for the house of the future is to have a place called a “dirty room.” This would be equipped with appliances for all cleaning problems, and into it would be dumped everything dirty. But in most American homes the way to have a dirty room is to have a small boy; that’s the way we worked it for a number of happy years.) I think the kitchen, like the raccoon, is a dead dodo only if you choose to shoot it dead. Years ago, at the time I bought this house, I examined my kitchen with a wondering and skeptical eye and elected to let it live. The decision stands as one of the few sensible moves I’ve made on this place. Our kitchen today is a rich, intoxicating blend of past, present, and future; basically it belongs to the past, when it was conceived and constructed. It is a strange and implausible room, dodolike to the modern eye but dear to ours, and far from dead. In fact, it teems with life of all sorts—cookery, husbandry, horticulture, canning, planning. It is an arsenal, a greenhouse, a surgical-dressing station, a doghouse, a bathhouse, a lounge, a library, a bakery, a cold-storage plant, a factory, and a bar, all rolled up into one gorgeous ball, or ballup. In it you can find the shotgun and shell for shooting up the whole place if it ever should become obsolete; in it you can find the molasses cookie if you decide just to sit down and leave everything the way it is. From morning till night, sounds drift from the kitchen, most of them familiar and comforting, some of them surprising and worth investigating. On days when warmth is the most important need of the human heart, the kitchen is the place you can find it; it dries the wet socks, it cools the hot little brain. During heat waves, the wood fire is allowed to go out, and with all doors open the kitchen sucks a cool draft through from one side of the house to the other, and General Electric is king for a day.
    Our kitchen contains such modern gadgets as an electric refrigerator, a Macy cabinet, and a Little Dazey ice smasher, and it contains such holdovers from the past as the iron stove, the roller towel, the iron sink, the wooden drainboard, and the set tubs. (You can wash a dog in my kitchen without any trouble except from the dog.) It is remarkably free of the appliances that you see in exhibits whose name ends in “ama.” It does have an egg beater, an electric mixer, and a garbage can that opens miraculously at a slight pressure from the toe. It also has the electric stove, with the dials that you turn. I can’t read these dials without my glasses, and it is usually more practical for me to build a fire in the wood stove than to hunt up my glasses. For that matter, the wood stove almost always has steam up, our climate