Food historian Bee Wilson knows that thinking and writing about meals are often the way we talk about all sorts of other things. Emotions that cannot be expressed in words can be poured into a lovingly made dish. And she has a vivid sense, too, of the way that the implements of the kitchen – spoons, knives, boards and pans – can leave strong imprints on the memory. For most of us, watching someone cook is our first experience of seeing adults at work – all that chopping, stirring and concentration. In her latest book, Wilson remembers her mother’s hands turning the blades of an old-fashioned rotary whisk, whipping up eggs for a cheese soufflé. I remember those kinds of whisks: my mother also had one and I can see it now, laboriously churning egg whites into stiff little peaks. 

The Heart-Shaped Tin is a collection of short essays – warmly thoughtful, engaging and often erudite riffs on the strange potency of everyday things. Through them, Wilson threads the story of the breakdown of her marriage. When her husband of twenty-three years walked out, she found herself having to readjust her relationship to the domestic space they had once shared. Who would sit in his usual chair at the kitchen table, for example? What would she do with the particular knife that he used for cutting up pizza for the children? Should she finally throw out the huge, now rusty, heart-shaped tin in which she had baked their wedding cake and birthday cakes for their children?

Wilson, who had already cleared out the house of her late mother, a brilliant Shakespeare scholar who developed dementia in old age, began to spend long, therapeutic sessions at the recycling centre. It led her to reflect on our relationship with stuff – household stuff, the kind that sits on