Note to Myself: Take the Kitchen

When cooking in a vacation rental, the author has been known to travel with supplies, but this June she had a revelation: one needs only a cast-iron skillet to survive.


Article by one of my favorite writers, and with a mention of a librarian.

The house, midcentury modern in design, was once the year-round residence of a painter and his wife. The wife had been a librarian, and the kitchen was a curated archive of faintly antiquated but classic equipment: oblong Pyrex bakers, a spindly, nonergonomic can opener, an electric hand mixer with all its parts laid out in a pullout drawer, against the shelving paper. The crockery was without pattern, in neutral shades of bone and brown and black, and the coffee cups were on the small side. Even on vacation, it took me three or four refills to face the day.