pantry stepcousins

Never have condiments older than your kids. If you start to give them names, or begin a college fund for them, you have had them way too long.

Over several years, exploring various recipes, ethnic cuisines, and just because I am a sucker for packaging, my pantry has expanded exponentially. This summer, when I divided in half the detritus of my life into "leave it there" to "move it here", I took inventory.

Most listings for pantries include basics for good home cooking. I remember when I first was a young graduate in the 1970's I carefully cut out a list of the Perfect Pantry from a magazine. I checked off what I had, and took care to acquire those items I was told I needed. Thus armed and fortified, I felt I could cook anything. Anything that is if you lived in the center of the United States and did not make anything beyond meatloaf and chicken with noodles. Not knocking meatloaf, I love it. However, at the time I didn't even make meatloaf and was still trying to have my grilled porkchops cooked by the time I heated up cans of green beans.

However, I began to range, and as I did, so did my pantry. I tried German and soon had dried spatzle, sauerbraten mix and Knorr spices. Moving to Italian, I began to collect various vinegars, tomato paste in toothpaste looking tubes, and a menagerie of pasta. I moved to Mars, or Asian food. Inventoring nori, won ton wrappers, three types of soy, tamari, and wasabi, I was running out of room. India created a need for pappadums, candy coated fennel seeds, dal, and chutneys.

Each new cookbook led to new ingredients, and new flavors. I started to sort my pantry by ethnicity, large Tupperware boxes with labels on them reading: Arabic, Italian, Japanese, & Russian. Through the waxy translucent walls, the colors and shapes hinted at the interior. I began to save jars, and soon had a satisfying collection of dried limes, several types of red pepper, biber, Alleppo, and varieties of dried fruits. Apricots, large dried Calmyrna figs, almonds, pistachioes, walnuts, pecans and pinion would have me imagining the pilafs and desserts ahead. Orris root, linden tea, chocolate honey from Italy in an octagonal bottle, I was in love with it all.

The pantry grew to include cold storage, and the top shelf of the fridge. In my freezer I had three types of coffee including the dense distinctive smell of Turkish powdered coffee, masa, cornmeal, buckwheat for blinis, rice flour, lefsa, and phyllo. My fridge had more types of mustard than most stores, several types of peanut sauce, wasabi, horseradish, honeys, and oils in shades of gold, amber, and olive green. More labels, more bottles, more dishes.

Soon, we had a second fridge to hold the overflow of pasta to keep cold, more spices, and packs of Turkish dried spices, soup mixes and kofta seasoning and saffron from Iran purchased in Istanbul. Specialized turntables, dividers, small bottles, boxes, and spice jars became an additional descriptor of my lust to acquire, try new recipes and experiment. It was fun, it was exciting, and it was acquisitive, filling in my pantry with images of dinner parties, friendship, and gatherings, intimate family meals which would be special. We had a special section for Hawaiian foods, red salt, dried plums, and ling hui mui seasoning my husband loved.

However, I had to move, and it was time to divide the pantry. I took most of the ingredients as I was the only one to cook with them. Who else would love a jar of dried camel-colored limes from Tunisia for tea? They had to go to a new home, and here became the problem.

Should I, I wondered, move them? I had grown so used to some of the pantry that they were my friends, in fact several years old. Probably some were still good, but much was over the top. I spent a day going through the goods, discarding, dividing, and repackaging half. Like Siamese twins, some of my division was not successful, and not worth doing. Others left for a new home, leaving behind colleagues on the shelf.

In September, I moved into my own kitchen. I had a pantry space one eighth the size of what I had left. I placed my bottles carefully, admiring the shapes and geometry of the nuts in their containers in my fridge.Repainting my turntables to match the interior of my newly painted cabinets, I arranged my much reduced level of spices. I missed their old holder, and not all had come with me. In my haste to leave behind the life, I also left behind some things I now realized I must restock. I hadn't even considered the vast assortment of normal things, and had to re- purchase flour, sugar, salt, oil. I had been more concerned with the odd balls, the imported cousins , than my traditional American Perfect Pantry.

And so it goes, By acquiring the unusual, I forgot the usual. I had stopped cooking, instead looked only at the concept of cooking in my last home. Much like the concept of a large part of my life, content was not the same as the imagined life, the imagined dinners. And so, it was time to purchase some new daily items for my pantry.

In go the dog bones for their visits. And, "normal " things like tuna, (OK, plus salmon) and chicken broth, and canned beans.( Cannalini, garbanzo, white, kidney, black ) Still, I get it. The pantry should be for things used, not hoarded, admired, and saved past their prime. Pretty obvious metaphor for life. And I find one eighth the space is just fine. As for the canisters I left behind, I have been buying candles in glass jars with lids. Every time I use up a vanilla candle, I have created a new container for my red lentils, wild rice, brown sugar, and so it starts again. And, I still have those dried limes.