Even when there isn't a recession knocking at the door, communally is the best way to cook. Why cook for one when you can cook for twelve, and why work alone when you can have help. My favorite foods are by their very nature communal - soups, breads, cookies - hard to cook for just one.
But more than making great meals, on the cheap, communal kitchens are always places of great friendships, and often real radicalism. While it's easy to think of our work in the kitchen as retro or reactionary, I prefer to imagine the great moments of women's radicalism, forged in kitchen collaborations. The Shaker kitchens were places of great invention and efficiency, after inventing the apple peeler, the Mount Lebanon Shakers supported themselves in part by selling canned applesauce. Certainly this vindicates my own current obsession with canning applesauce (only 20 quarts left in the garage with 7 months to go until the next apple season)!
In recent weeks, friends and I have been cooking up some fantastic survival schemes, a few worth sharing. So, this blog will spill forth, I hope, with tales of my own domestic revolutions, ideas forged with friends and family to make life more communal and more sustainable.
3 Girls 3 Countries 6 Weeks
12 years ago