Kitchen-table frolicking

Forget baroque staircases and Pinto-sponsored finery; the one thing that sets the Prime Minister’s pulse racing these days is the humble kitchen. As he put it, “it’s a wonderful experience to visit people’s homes, go into the kitchen, and discuss what they are going through”.

In the space of a few decades the kitchen has risen from a corner associated with menial chores and low status to prime ministerial material- Mark Anthony Falzon

There are all sorts of reasons why I like his room of choice. For one, it kind of makes sense for a self-respecting politician to pick what must be the prime theatre of aspiration and upward mobility in the house. In the space of a few decades the kitchen has risen through the ranks, from a corner associated with menial chores and low status, to prime ministerial material no less.

The ascent is recent enough to be part of living memory. For most common mortals, il-kċina tan-nanna is unlikely to have been a space to brag about. (The expression ‘il-lingwa tal-kċina’, used to pooh-pooh Maltese, was as damning about the room as it was about the language.) Many of us have memories of dark and crammy nooks where most of the cooking was done on a kerosene spiritiera (stove).

The house I live in, for example, has more than enough room to fit a kitchen. And yet the people who lived here before me, who were by no means poor or uneducated, ate meals prepared in a small and dark room below stairs. That’s the room that was properly meant for cooking – there’s even a chimney that snakes its way through the walls all the way up to the roof.

The present is rather different. Indeed the kitchen is one of the major money-guzzlers in the contemporary house. A young woman who works as a secretary was telling me the other day that she’s just spent over €7,000 on a designer kitchen. Considering that that’s about seven times her monthly salary, and that the rest of her flat will have to wait until she’s saved some more, the Prime Minister’s choice begins to look wise.

Given that the kitchen tends to be located at the back end of the house, it will also give him a chance to take in some interiors. On his way in he will probably pass by rooms – typically the ‘sitting’ and ‘dining’ room – done up in gilded furniture and red damask. All safely installed under a protective layer of plastic, of course.

I don’t find this to be in particularly bad taste. It would be if the sofas and armchairs were meant to be sat on – I suppose plastic isn’t the most comfortable of materials to spend an evening sliding about. But they aren’t.

What they are, are prestige items – rather like paintings or figurines, but more prone to collecting dust. It is not at all stupid to cover them in a material that protects and displays them at the same time.

Nor is it particularly odd or lowlife to have rooms in the house that are basically showcases (‘għax-show’, as we put it in disparaging Maltese). The grandest houses of the 17th and 18th centuries often had similar arrangements of which the petit appartements in Versailles are probably the best known example. And yes, the furniture in the state rooms was kept under dust covers most of the time.

On a good day, the Prime Minister can look forward to being shown into what one might call the First Kitchen. That’s because it’s not uncommon for Maltese homes to contain two kitchens. The first will be the designer thing, all brushed aluminium and built-in hobs, the second – used for things like cooking – a bunch of old postform cupboards in a basement.

But let’s assume the average arrangement. It’s clear that Gonzi is keen on getting his hands dirty with some real ethnography. The kitchens he had in mind were not the rarefied spaces of designer homes. Rather, he used the word to mean a space of familiarity. He was, after all, making a point about getting close to people’s daily lives.

For example, he can expect to spend a fair bit of time taking in fridge art while his hosts prepare tea (mug or cup? That is the question). The things we stick on fridges are usually little mementos of trips abroad, likes and dislikes, significant others, and so on. Much the same thing as the souvenirs and framed photos in the hall or salott, in fact.

But while the former have an intimate and mundane quality about them, the salott pieces are more posed and relate to special moments.

It would be strange for someone to blu-tack a graduation photo on the fridge door or to fix a little naff sticker of a London bus on a salott wall. Stranger still to picture the Prime Minister – or Simon Busuttil for that matter – sitting all suited mug in hand and staring at a silly holiday snap.

The humour will no doubt mushroom. There was someone on One Radio yesterday saying that ‘GonziPN’ might want to take with him a spare gas cylinder at €22, or maybe to spend a few minutes going through the various kitchen appliances and working out how much it costs to run them.

The sort of things that are discussed in kitchens I suppose, so no fault there. And, of course, Joseph Muscat, not to be outdone, has gone on record to say he was there before the Prime Minister. (As in “Labour has always been with and for the people”.)

There is an old joke which goes that the people you can expect to find in a Native American wigwam are the wife, the husband, the children, and the anthropologist. Were our Prime Minster politicking on the prairies, things would get a bit stuffy.

mafalzon@hotmail.com