Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Hearth and Home.

That’s the old phrase. Hearth and Home. It conjures up ancient images of thatch-roofed huts and stone fireplaces paved with glowing embers, perhaps topped by low-burning logs or maybe a kettle suspended over the flames. Move forward in time, and we imagine cozy cottages with wood-burning stoves providing heat for comfort and for cooking simple homemade fare. The hearth, the warmth of the homefire, the place where the family gathers to ward off the cold of night and keep the dangers of the rough world beyond our walls at bay, this hearth is the heart of the home.

At some point, though, the hearth and the cookfire diverged. While my great-aunt Italia prepared everything, from the morning coffee to the noonday bread and the evening’s ragout, all on her massive black-iron wood-burning stove, a behemoth that stood in the kitchen and that sent its warmth (and aromas) into every room of the house, the kitchen in my parents’ home had scissored the hearth’s purpose, assigning heat to the furnace, cordoning off cookfires to the tamed domesticity of oven and stove, and relegating flames to the fireplace where they functioned as mere decoration. We did not “gather around the stove” to ward off the night any more than we did so around the furnace.

As someone who enjoys cooking, “hearth and home” remained a catchphrase, but where kitchen became synonymous with hearth, and where (in my mind) the heat of the kitchen was the beating heart of the home.

Until last week.

Last week I learned that, in reality, it is not heat that makes my kitchen a place of love’s labors.

It is cold.

That’s because, a while ago, our fridge died. I woke up, made my super-strong coffee, opened the fridge for some cream and immediately knew something was wrong. The air within was a bit too warm, with a hint of mustiness. I was lucky in that we were able to save everything in the freezer, but everything else—dairy, many condiments, a lot of the veg, all the deli—was lost, not to be replaced until we could get a new appliance installed.

Living without a refrigerator for a week was, thankfully, not much more than a major annoyance and a relatively affordable expense; it was not a crisis. But it did show me how much large a part its simple duty—to keep fresh food cold—plays in my daily life. The refrigerator is like a time-machine, where time slows within its confines. Leafy greens do not wilt. Cheeses do not mold and milk does not sour. Refreshing beverages are ready to hand.

And when the new fridge was delivered and installed, as its refrigerant began to pump through its conduits, bringing life-altering food preservation back to my home, I felt like a hominid standing before a Kubrickian monolith, smashing bones with newly acquired power and insight.

The hearth will never lose its place in our collective consciousness as a symbol of home; its why we now put our single hearth in the main room of our houses, even if it’s fired only by gas jets or a “fireplace” video from Netflix.

But for me, the heart of my home is the kitchen, and the heart of the kitchen is the frigid lifeblood of the refrigerator.

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