A humorous exploration of the seemingly mundane chore of washing dishes, revealing unexpected pleasures and reflections.
My Manhattan apartment does not have a dishwasher. We’ve debated installing one; there’s room, just barely. I always pull back at the last minute. I like doing the dishes by hand, the more the merrier, the crustier the better. Sometimes music will be playing.
I’ll find myself moved by it, the way the English novelist Barbara Pym was, as she wrote in a 1943 journal entry, when she caught herself weeping to Yehudi Menuhin on the radio one evening while her hands were “immersed in the washing-up water.” More often, there will be silence. I get my best thinking done here, far from a blinking cursor, my raw hands plunged into the soapy warmth. I’m not, in general, the tidiest human being. My favorite haiku, which I keep meaning to have well-printed and framed, is by Kobayashi Issa: But if the kitchen is full of dirty plates and stained coffee mugs, I can’t function. A distracting fly is loose in my subconscious. Let me in there. With a fresh sponge and a, I’ll be done in 10 minutes. My favorite liquid soap is Fairy, the everyday brand from England. It costs a bit more over here, and it’s an affectation, but a modest one. I like Fairy because the yellow bottles are cheerful and because the UK vibe makes me feel a bit like Fergus Henderson, whose cookbooks are sublime. My wife, Cree, who has written cookbooks of her own, does most of our cooking, so I’m the official cleaner in part to even the workload. But I do the washing up when I cook, too. She has no zest for it. She is clearly not the happy procrastinator that I am. I always get in there first. Most people, it seems, are like Cree. They are eager to put this chore behind them. George Orwell, writing in 1945, could not believe people put up with so much “uncreative and life-wasting” drudgery, dish-doing especially. He was writing before dishwashing machines were commonplace, but his points remain valid. “If our methods of making war had kept pace with our methods of keeping house,” he wrote, “we should just be about on the verge of discovering gunpowder.” About dishes, Orwell, a man of the left, thought we should solve the problem communally. He argued that there should be municipal vans that stopped at your door at night and took away your dirty dishes to be cleaned while returning to you a box of your own newly gleaming ones. As it happens, Julia Child also thought communally about cooking. Because so many kitchen items are expensive and space-consuming and used only rarely, she asked, “Why not have a community duck press, lobster pot, fish steamer, pâté en croûte mold, spring-form pan?” If Child had advice about washing dishes, I am not aware of it. But other cooks have weighed in on the topic. Sally Schmitt, the original chef and cofounder of the French Laundry in Yountville, California, now owned by Thomas Keller, wrote in her excellent cookbook,, that there is an art to washing dishes: “The order matters: first glassware, second silverware, then plates and bowls, and finally the large utensils that might need some scrubbing.” Rest in peace, Sally, but this makes no sense to me at all. Save the glasses until last. They’re so thin, tall, fragile, and likely to crumble, like ballerinas with early-onset osteoporosis. I keep them off in a safe spot, because if they’re on the kitchen counter early, some blundering fool (me) will accidentally knock them over. There will be blood. My system is to have no system. I wash whatever is crying out loudest to be washed, the way a person feeds bread to gulls. But order matters to many people. There are many ways to go wrong. In her novel, there is a funny moment in which Lorrie Moore’s narrator asks incredulously, “You emptied the top rack of the dishwasher but not the bottom, so the clean dishes have gotten all mixed up with the dirty ones—and now you want to have sex?” I give my wife a similar look when she puts plates slicked with the oily residue of chili crisp, everyone’s favorite condiment, into my soak. Within 30 seconds, the red oil droplets have spread to every other dish. This delicious stuff is ridiculously hard to get off. So is pesto and chimichurri and vegetables in turmeric and, as I rediscover daily, the saliva that mysteriously clings to a plate after our dog has licked it. It is hard to read this poem without imagining the narrator’s children sprinting away from furious mommy. It took me years to learn that cast iron skillets can indeed be washed with soap and water—once they’re broken in. I seem to clean one of these twice a week, because a roast chicken with onions, carrots, and chunks of halloumi tucked alongside is our favorite meal, and it tastes best when cooked in one. Perhaps one day robots will do this kitchen work, as they do in futuristic novels such as Gish Jen’s, Iris Murdoch’s best novel. I feel this satisfaction especially after a big dinner party
DISH WASHING KITCHEN COOKING HOUSEHOLD CHORES FOOD HABITS REFLECTION
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