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The Wedding Cake Was a Triumph. The Marriage Went Stale.
In “The Heart-Shaped Tin,” the British food writer Bee Wilson offers a bittersweet ode to the everyday tools we use in the kitchen, along with stories great and small.
Bee Wilson pays tribute to humble helpers like the melon baller and the whisk that, while easy to ignore, feed our life stories. Credit...Rebecca Marshall for The New York Times
Nov. 5, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
THE HEART-SHAPED TIN: Love, Loss, and Kitchen Objects, by Bee Wilson
When Bee Wilson got married, she decided to bake her husband a fruitcake without the glacé cherries he so disliked.
She used a large tin in the shape of a heart, a symbol of love that she admits was a bit on the…
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nonfiction
The Wedding Cake Was a Triumph. The Marriage Went Stale.
In “The Heart-Shaped Tin,” the British food writer Bee Wilson offers a bittersweet ode to the everyday tools we use in the kitchen, along with stories great and small.
Bee Wilson pays tribute to humble helpers like the melon baller and the whisk that, while easy to ignore, feed our life stories. Credit...Rebecca Marshall for The New York Times
Nov. 5, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
THE HEART-SHAPED TIN: Love, Loss, and Kitchen Objects, by Bee Wilson
When Bee Wilson got married, she decided to bake her husband a fruitcake without the glacé cherries he so disliked.
She used a large tin in the shape of a heart, a symbol of love that she admits was a bit on the nose. Over the years, she pulled out the tin now and then to make birthday cakes for their three children, and imagined the “Big Chocolate Cake” she’d bake for her 25th wedding anniversary.
But before she and her husband could reach that milestone, he left her.
“Certain kitchen objects become loaded with meaning in a way that we are not fully in control of,” Wilson writes in “The Heart-Shaped Tin,” a book about the roles that such tools play in our personal stories.
In short chapters, each pegged to, say, a melon baller, a beloved teapot or the scissors used to cut up baby food, Wilson examines the individual histories and larger meaning of things we often take for granted.
It proves an effective device. We have to cook, or at least eat, and most people own a cup or plate, or the memory of one. These items do not have to be expensive to be precious. “Many of the most treasured objects were ones that they or people close to them had held in their hands and used every day,” writes Wilson of the interviews she carried out with a variety of friends and strangers: “a grandmother’s wooden spoon, a mother-in-law’s butter dish decorated with a cow, a saltshaker inherited from a parent” and “cherished through daily touch.”
Wilson’s previous books include a history of food technology, two guides to eating well, and studies of food fraud and children’s eating habits. Although her research chops and deep knowledge of culinary history are evident in this wide-ranging exploration, the core of “The Heart-Shaped Tin” is a sensitive account of endurance in the face of change.
As the chapters progress — relating stories of a smuggled silver spoon, a family’s corkscrew collection, an ancient mortar, a breadbox that has withstood a bombing — we see Wilson adapt to post-divorce life, rearranging her children around the new gap at the kitchen table. We also follow Wilson and her sister as they struggle with the recognition that their mother, a retired professor of Shakespeare, is losing her cognitive capacity to dementia. These two threads hold the book together, even as Wilson ranges widely over time and geography.
The chapters devoted to Wilson’s mother, whom she calls “K,” are particularly moving. “The things we surround ourselves with give meaning to our lives,” Wilson notes. In K’s case, the loss of physical items like her silver-plated toast rack also meant a loss of identity.
Her mother’s fetish for putting breakfast toast in a dedicated rack to keep it crisp had always felt like an affectation, Wilson writes, a practice more typical of a hotel than a modern home. But K had grown up with this cherished luxury, perhaps a part of her own mother’s attempts to cover humble origins. When K becomes convinced that a thief has broken in to steal only this toast rack, Wilson knows to worry. And by the time we see her eating her toast in a care home, K does “not seem to mind” that it is served piled on a plate.
Wilson cites other cases where kitchen objects have allowed people to hold on to their own humanity. She dedicates a memorable chapter to several dishes formed by David Drake, a South Carolina potter who lived in the 19th century. Drake, who may have made over 40,000 pieces in his career, was recognized in his lifetime as a highly skilled artisan.
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Drake signed, dated and inscribed many of his pieces, intended for quotidian home use, with verse — which is remarkable given that he was enslaved. “Knowing how to write was one thing,” writes Wilson, “daring to do it in public and actually signing his name to it was a whole other level of audacity.” His poems were sometimes playful, sometimes pensive, always revolutionary. One of his pots tells a story in a single word, “catenation,” which Wilson defines as “the state of being chained or yoked.” Another hints at the deep sorrows that marked Drake’s life, such as the forced separation from his wife and children.
So much of “The Heart-Shaped Tin” is about loss, but the book is surprisingly comforting, too. Small things carry great power. They can make a home, a family, a biography. We can change the meanings they carry. And when they become too heavy to carry, we are free to give them away.
THE HEART-SHAPED TIN: Love, Loss, and Kitchen Objects | By Bee Wilson | Norton | 310 pp. | $31.99
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