SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Bee Wilson's new book begins when a baking pan - heart-shaped - falls at her feet shortly after her marriage has ended. Twenty-three years before, she'd used it to bake her wedding cake. What follows is a book that considers and cherishes everyday kitchen goods - a plate from childhood, an old rotary whisk, corkscrews - and why they're so often the source of everlasting memories. Bee Wilson, the acclaimed British food writer, joins us from London. Her new book - "The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss, And Kitchen Objects." Thanks so much for being with us.
BEE WILSON: Thanks so much for having me.
SIMON: Help us appreciate what that heart-shaped tin set off in you.
WILSON: It was something that I had bought with so much hope to bake my own wedding cake in. And then when it fell at my feet a couple of months after he left out of the blue, I felt this was a sign. I thought it was telling me something. And at the same time as I had that thought, I also thought, I'm going crazy. It can't be telling me something. It's an inanimate object. And I think those two feelings together were really what set me off to write this book, which was, how can we look at something that's made of metal in a factory by people we've never met before and think that it's somehow an extension of ourselves?
SIMON: Well, we hold that object in our hands and often do something with it that's in our hearts.
WILSON: Absolutely. We touch these things, and they're woven into our families and our relationships.
SIMON: Please tell us about your mother's silver-plated toast rack. Important to her - and then she was convinced it had been stolen, right?
WILSON: My mother suddenly started talking about the fact she thought that someone had stolen her silver-plated toast rack, which was an extremely valuable object to her. Like many British people, her day would not be complete without a piece of toast in the morning. And one day, she told me and my son, someone's stolen it, and that she'd reported it to the police and they'd politely listened to her.
And then we didn't want to sound too skeptical because she got so angry with us every time we said, are you sure someone's stolen it? But she would elaborate the story and say, well, the thief must've leapt over her fence in one bound and must've wanted to have a picnic. And clearly, the more she told this story, the more it became clear to us that she was in the early stages of dementia. And one of the first stages of dementia for many people is you develop this paranoia that someone's stealing from you. And then over the coming months, she forgot she'd ever had a toast rack. I moved her to a care home to be closer to me. And then - sorry. I - forgive me if I get tearful. I can't talk about this subject without getting very emotional.
SIMON: Yeah.
WILSON: We cleared her house eventually 'cause she was in the care home, and she was never going to go back. And then my sister was the one who eventually found that toast rack at the back of a cupboard.
SIMON: You noticed a kitchen cabinet in the news one day.
WILSON: Yes. This is about Ukraine. So this was a kitchen object that became celebrated from a different emotion from the sadness of the toast rack. It was lionized for its courage and its bravery, and it became a piece of kind of pro-Ukrainian propaganda more or less. In the early days of the Russian invasion in 2022, an apartment block was more or less completely bombed out. And yet on the inner wall of one of the apartments, there was a kitchen cabinet that just clung on to the side of this block of buildings as if for dear life, and it became a meme.
People were putting these slogans out on social media saying, be brave like this kitchen cabinet. Hang on like the kitchen cabinet. And eventually, the woman who owned the apartment was tracked down, and she just said her son had put this cabinet up, and he'd clearly done a very good job. But it's another example of how we look at something that can't have feelings, and maybe it's safer to consider the feelings of a kitchen cabinet than it is to think about what so many Ukrainians themselves were suffering at just that moment.
SIMON: You have a heart-piercing section, too, on a spoon - Jacob Chaim's spoon.
WILSON: Yes. I found this perhaps the most moving story in the whole book. It's now in the Montreal Holocaust Museum. Jacob Chaim, he was a Polish tailor before the war. He and his brother both ended up in Dora-Mittelbau. It was a particularly hellish place. And in common with other concentration camps, food was both inadequate, disgusting, nutritionally just awful and served without any cutlery because the Nazi guards wanted to treat the inmates as if they weren't human, as if they were animals. And cutlery is so fundamental to civilization.
So what Jacob Chaim did when no one was looking, he stole pieces of metal which were meant for making weaponry for the Nazis and made this little spoon for himself. And he didn't just make any spoon. He wanted to make a thing of beauty. And after the war, thankfully, he and his brother survived. He would talk to his family about - it was about being human.
SIMON: Can I ask about your heart-shaped tin now?
WILSON: Yeah. After it fell to the ground and I was feeling so heartbroken and thinking this is a sad tin belonging to a sad person, almost all of my friends I'd told the story of it leaping out in front of my feet to said, you should have a giant divorce party or a separation party and bake yourself a cake in it. And I just didn't feel ready. But then life moves on, and the great theme of the book is that objects can change their meaning because we can change our emotions about them. And a few years on, my 50th birthday came around, and I thought, I will bake a cake. And it honestly felt like a different object. The strangest thing was I'd inflated it in my mind to this huge, colossal cake tin that would be fit for gods or heroes. And then when I picked it up, it was just quite small. And we managed to finish the cake, and I will use it again.
SIMON: I was especially struck when you advised - and I must say, it's something that I hear from my wife - if you don't use the best china now, you may never use it.
WILSON: It's hard to know if that's a happy thought or a sad one, isn't it? But I do think it's true. You may as well use it now. Who knows what's ahead? And if you've been given something beautiful by someone you love, the best way to honor them is use it.
SIMON: Bee Wilson's new book, "The Heart-Shaped Tin." Thank you so much for being with us.
WILSON: Such a pleasure. Thank you.
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