Play suggestion: The Kitchen

A more unusual recommendation: a theater play by Arnold Wesker, who might provoke some thoughts to those working in an international place.
It was put in scene also recently, in 2011 by London National Theater also broadcasted live in several cinemas across the world.


It is a day in the kitchen of a London restaurant in the 50s where the employees come from all the corners of Europe. The tension raises as rush-hours approach and in between the polyglot stuff shares their hopes and dreams.

Even though restaurants and international food are back in fashion (as they were in the 50s), the play is not about food. It is more about about how we define ourselves by the work we do and, in this high speed live, we forget who we are. In the kitchen French, English, Jewish and German persons work together and stress together. 

Food and homes, and homes away from home

This following story was lived and written in Oxford (UK), where I used to live as a Romanian-Italian student/researcher for quite a few years. Being an Eastern-European and a Southern-European too, food has always meant a lot for me and certainly for my friends too. And I’m not referring here only at the pleasure that food can give you for its palatable qualities but also, and maybe foremost, for the power it has in helping you to express your inner-self, your belonging to a place or to places which have left a mark on you. Food is the way you can talk to others about where you come from, about where you have been, and where you want to be. And there are so many moments in a traveller’s life when you feel the need tell the others about you, when you need to feel home, to recreate home away from home. But where is home when you keep being on the more.... I so many times asked this question to myself. For now, this is my answer:

“My home is in the food I eat and in the language I speak”

We talked about food and about us while Maria was showing me how to prepare a nettle soup using nettles we picked in the garden. Few days before, I was complaining over the phone about all the gardening I had to do because nettles had taken over a large part of the plot I wanted to dedicate to flowers and strawberries. I told her that I had spent the whole morning digging the ground so that I could get rid of the roots and therefore make sure nettles were not going to show up again. On the other side of the phone I could hear her laughing loudly while telling me that I didn’t know how lucky I was. After that she proposed to come to my place the following Saturday and show me what to do with the nettles.

She came on Saturday morning, it was spring and it was not raining. So we went out in the garden and Maria showed me how to pick the young nettle leaves by using a plastic bag as both glove and container. Then she told me that it was almost impossible to find nettles here (London area) at the market in spring time. Although there were vegetables coming from very far away, you could not find nettles she said. She told me that, even if I did not remember it, my mother was for sure making nettles soup for me back in Romania as that was one of the easiest available vegetable in spring time: “Cooking nettles is very much Romanian, this is our food”, she said.   

Back inside the house she cooked the nettles in two different ways: one using a recipe from Moldavia, the Romanian region in the North-East of the country, and the other from central and southern areas of Romania.  We then kept discussing about how Romanian was the use of nettles in the kitchen and I had the feeling that picking those nettles and cooking them was a way for Maria to tell me about her Romanian self and how much a feeling of “home” she was “imagining” and recreating through the food itself. I kept asking her how often she cooks Romanian and she told me: “every day, or, at least I have some Romanian food every day. It is like speaking Romanian every day, you DO eat Romanian everyday”. I could see that for Maria speaking and eating Romanian was very important, there was some sort of emotional relationship that she upheld with flavours, smells and sounds of the past. Yet there was no regret in her voice, no longing to go back, only a clear desire to preserve and express her belonging feeling at home, yet away from home.

Oxford, Spring 2006

By Raluca