Does size count in the kitchen? Nope. It’s sighs you want — when people eat your food

The saddest kitchen I’ve ever seen was in Fresnaye, a patch of Cape Town’s Atlantic Seaboard where mansions have ocean views to marine infinity, decks bigger than the ones on board Queen Mary, and landscaped gardens tended by topiarists and punctuated by sculptures of dolphins and poodles. (Actually, one of the poodles may have been a topiary salt bush.)

Its owner was a household-name mogul and the kitchen was so big you could have parked a small plane in it. But it was eerily stark. There was nothing in the cupboards, no crumbs in the designer toaster, no food-stained cookbook from last night’s supper.

I waited for others to leave the room and guiltily pulled open a drawer, and opened a cupboard or two. Nothing. It could not have been clearer: the kitchen had never been used.

Recently, I too had a large kitchen, if not as big as that one. It is in our house in Cradock (which hasn’t sold yet) and is big enough to hold an eight-seater dining room table – a lovely old Victorian one full of the marks of others who have used it over its generations of owners – and it is a beloved table around which many stories have been told. A table on which elbows have rested and over which glasses have been clinked; more than a collection of pieces of wood. It holds stories and memories, and that is the point of the kind of table that deserves to be in the middle of a family kitchen.

I have wanted a big kitchen table all my life and it was Cradock that gave it to us. But we still have the table. It came to Cape Town with us, and is in my garage-study-den-studio-thing. I haven’t quite worked out what I should call this strange room where I am writing this. It is a garage, but with my stuff in it, it has become something it was not designed to be.

The table is at the garage door end, and on a hot day, I open the door upwards for the air to flow in and the light to fall on the table, where at the beginning or end of a day I photograph plates of food in natural light.

That end of the space is earmarked to become a studio; it needs softbox lighting, backdrops. It is a venture that will take a bit of time. And on hand, when the weather is right, will be that natural light. I love natural light for photography – it’s my first port of call.

My old desk, which was once a reporter’s desk at Grocott’s Mail in what was then Grahamstown, now Makhanda, stands against a wall, lined with my Olive Schreiner books and a framed portrait of the Victorian writer who captivates me.

My old Yamaha FG-580 guitar, bought in 1976, leans against the desk as a reminder of the young muso version of me, next to my watercolour of a Boer War cannon at Mafeking during the siege of October 1899-May 1900. Cookbooks line the old ball-and-claw radiogram we call Van Riebeeck, against another wall.

The table is in here because there is no room for it in the kitchen. This kitchen would fit into our old kitchen twice. And I had been worried. I’d feared that it would be too confined for me. But in only six weeks it has ceased to be any kind of a problem for me. Even though I cook every day.

And it’s made me realise that the food that comes out of a kitchen bears no relation to its size. Most Britons know this, given the scale of the average British kitchen. With notable exceptions, the ordinary household kitchen in Blighty is a miserably small affair, yet they all seem to cope. We did, for our four years in Chichester, where the kitchen even had a built-in dishwasher – the narrowest I’ve ever seen, half the width of a standard one. Imagine your dishwasher cut in half right down the middle. Yet it did all the work we needed of it – size really doesn’t count for much.

Should aesthetics come into play? Perhaps. I love design, especially art nouveau and art deco. There are some gorgeous toasters and kettles on the market today that have me drooling, and I have been in kitchens where these appliances are on proud display. But that isn’t what makes a great kitchen either.

I can’t deny that my present little kitchen does look good, and that’s thanks to the old dresser standing grandly on one wall, distracting the eye from the sheer… well, lack of size of it all.

I’ve been inside tiny galley kitchens on board modest ships, and on board yachts, which, unlike the much larger ones on the great ocean-going passenger liners, you could get three of into my present little kitchen. Yet sweaty-browed chefs have to make do in those tiny galleys, feeding the rich guests on board posh yachts, at least three times a day, working hours that are unkind to say the least.

Maybe I will install a new stove, a proper big one, somewhere down the line, but I doubt it. My trio of air fryers – two ordinary ones with drawers, and the big 25-litre one that came into my life at Christmas – are doing all the work I need from them. The installation of gas for the hob is still pending and I do need that, but it will come any day now. It is set into the top of a moveable workbench, so has space for a lot of pots and pans and whatnot on its two shelves.

And the confines of this kitchen present a bonus: nearly everything is in easy reach. The lovely old turquoise kitchen dresser from the Fifties came with us and stands against a wall with all the familiar things on its shelves and more inside. I grab the electric beater when I need it, take down a tagine or mixing bowl from the top, in fact everything I needed in the old kitchen is in this one, just nearer to hand. I left nothing behind that I might need.

Oh and this kitchen, despite its size, has a built-in braai. These are the northern suburbs and, yes, even a flat can have a built-in braai in these parts. We haven’t used it yet because, well, it’s been hot, and the last thing we want is more heat inside the house right now. So we’re saving its use for winter, when it can double up as a fireplace.

At other times I might tend a potjie in it, or keep a staanrib going for hours, or just braai something for supper. Imagine tending a tomato-based broth of crustacean shells all day, in a potjie, before slipping in some prawns and mussels and bits of fresh fish shortly before it’s time for supper. I’ll add white wine along the way before it’s time to add the seafood, and decide whether I want some chillies and garlic in it, which herbs to use and which spices.

Maybe I’ll make paella some time. I’ve never done that. (Mental note to invest in a paella pan.) Which brings to mind a memorable but really rather stupid television advertisement from the Eighties. A couple, leaving a dinner party and, say as they drive off, “Pity about that awful smell of cooking from the kitchen”.

Pity about their host’s cooking seems more to the point.

And isn’t that the thing? A kitchen can be huge, or tiny, but if the person using it has the ingredients they need, the tools they need, and knows how to use them, well, the tiny kitchen of the better cook will be better than the massive one inhabited by a man who not only never cooks, but has nothing in his kitchen to cook with.

Even if my new kitchen could have fit into that particular man’s kitchen six times. Choose sighs over size. DM