I've never cared much about cooking. Blame my mother. A woman of her generation, my mother never questioned that, even when she was working as a secretary, it was her job to get dinner (or "supper," as we called it) on the table every night for me and my father. She served up a meat and two veg most weeknights; Horn & Hardart fish cakes on Friday; and a roast on Sunday. But, she also often declared that she hated to cook.
This endless production line of hot meals occasionally ground to a halt. Whenever I had a half day off from school, my mother would pick me up and say, with guilty excitement, "Let's go into the city. I'll get Dad cold cuts for supper."
"The city," New York, was a quick subway ride away, and we'd wander around a department store or sometimes go ice skating in Rockefeller Center. Once in a while, we'd stop into a coffee shop for an early clandestine supper of our own: grilled cheese sandwiches and egg creams. Those escapades left me with an abiding love for New York and a belief that food was mostly just fuel for the more interesting things to do in life.
It turns out that Roz Chast and her friend, fellow New Yorker cartoonist Jason Adam Katzenstein, agree with me! They've co-authored a new graphic book called The Two Saddest Kitchens in which they chronicle, via what they call a "comics conversation," the fear and shame sparked by their own apartment kitchens and their lack of interest in cooking anything in them. (Chast, for the record, also has a home in Connecticut, where she seems to have replicated the existential despair of her city kitchen.)
Lest this subject sound off-putting to you enthusiastic home cooks out there, know that the great food writer and chef Ruth Reichl has blurbed this book, saying: "I don't think I've ever laughed so hard." I second that blurb. Who among us wouldn't at least smile at digressions here that speculate on the backstory of Mr. Clean and his less obsessive twin, "Mr. Clean Enough," or dare to explore what Chast calls "the saddest part of [her] kitchen," also known as, "the cabinet above the refrigerator," filled with "straws from 2004," "forgotten marshmallows," and a "pointlessly large bowl"?
Chast's and Katzenstein's senses of humor meld seamlessly: Both are master observers of what might be called the "uncanny mundane," where everyday objects reveal their inner weirdness. Take a cartoon by Katzenstein of a refrigerator shelf upon which sit two tiny plastic take-out containers. The thought bubble above one container reads: "He's coming back for me tomorrow — he just has to... " The cartoon is entitled: "The Very Delusional Takeout Sauce."
Those familiar with Chast's award-winning graphic memoir, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, about coping with her aging parents, will be glad to know they make cameo appearances here. Chast's mother, we're told, "shov[ed] a soft-boiled egg into [little Roz]" every day, believing eggs were "brain food" and, thus, leaving Chast with lifelong "texture issues" about "goopy" or "viscous" food.
Chast and Katzenstein occasionally turn their gaze to the city outside their kitchens. Intriguingly, they share anxieties about being infantilized by New York, given that it's what Katzenstein calls "the greatest takeout city on Earth." If eating takeout allows Chast and Katzenstein the time to create more original, unpretentious, and hilarious books like this one, I say, "Order on!"
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