Kitchen Aphorisms
words after Alda Merini’s diaries; a return to Gertrude Stein for a pat on the shoulder; kitchen cupboard ingredients after Marguerite Duras’ practice
For anything beyond this sentence to make sense, you must know that the hour was opportune. At that time in the afternoon, the sun lands on the left upper end of the kitchen counter, above the sink where the terrarium sits. It is yellow and crowded with small cacti, punctuated with purple, pink and yellow flowers, white spines like brittle nails plucking off their torsos. I had set a loaf of pain de campagne to cool on a rack, which was juxtaposed above a hot heavy-duty casserole, and the filter coffee machine was gurgling. The noise was deep and throaty, interrupted by casual bubbling sounds as the water was heating and being pumped, releasing a warm and nutty scent. Coffee was being poured into the jug. I was eating a bruised yellow plum while standing in the middle of the kitchen. Some of the juice had dropped on the floor, my fingers were sticky and clumsy, and I was happily plotting dinner. An endive salad, tossed with a few green leaves and toasted hazelnuts. Dijon mustard and balsamic vinegar for the vinaigrette. Pasta alle vongole for the main. S said she would bring dessert; reminder to keep some space in the fridge for that, sorted. When L joined me in the kitchen, I was standing still, still in the same spot but with my legs spread wider apart, a dollop of fleshy, plum juice on the floor between them. I was holding a hairy stone between my fingers, which were clenched like crab claws. L tilted his head with interrogation, his face stretching sideways in a smile; L only eats fruits if they are unripe green, hard as rocks, the son of a volcanic island.
‘What cooking smell immediately makes you happy?’ L asked.
‘I’m going to surprise you,’ I said as I walked to the sink, grabbed a sponge and wiped the floor. I had all his attention.
There never is a dull day in the kitchen; dinner was a success, too.
Then, the night and, ‘le notti, per noi malati, erano particolarmente dolorose.’ Nights, in Alda Merini’s words, are most difficult for the ill. They are like a witch convent, Merini goes on, an amalgam of whispers, meows and strange jolts. In Merini’s Diario di una diversa (1986), a collection of entries, letters and verses based on her ten-year experience in a mental asylum, nights aren’t haunted but portrayed as crowded rooms. They are the silent hours during which silenced memories become present, thus unavoidable.
Alda Merini (1931 – 2009) was an Italian writer and poet who wrote about illness and nature with spirit and emotional intensity. She was awarded prestigious prizes for her poetry and was twice nominated (by the French Academy and Italian PEN) for a Nobel Prize during her lifetime. In 1964, after a violent fight with her husband, Alda Merini was institutionalised in a mental hospital in Milan where she was subjected to unspeakable torture, from electroshock treatments to coercive control and abuse. Merini’s relationships with her family and literary circles deteriorated. It is also worth specifying that Merini was interned before Basaglia’s reforms on mental institutions were enacted under the Law 180 in the Italian Mental Health Act of 1978, on May 13 of the same year. Led by psychiatrist Franco Basaglia (1924 – 1980), the reform was publicised as radical and divided healthcare practitioners and the public between those who called Basaglia an extreme utopist and those who foresaw progress in his work. It was the world’s first legislation to abolish psychiatric hospitals and to prevent the construction of new institutions, mandating for mental health patients to be treated in non-coercive, community-led facilities instead. Basaglia, who was a man of contradictions and a complex character, recognised that the bill wasn’t a ‘perfect solution’, but it was a first step towards returning their dignity to psychiatric patients.
A few pages after describing her nights, Merini writes that, to her, di fatto, society was dead.
To me, inside my childhood home, de fait, the kitchen was dead. The door was either locked to hide my parents as they fought violently for as long as parenthood was plural, until a parent was a single iteration and the door was left wide open, but the room behind it wasn’t any quieter. Cracking and popping sounds from the appliances, the cooker humming and the boiler bubbling and the fridge gurgling; the beeping alarm of the microwave, the hissing and failing fan, and the squealing kettle. Every night, the same fanfare drummed in before the battle. I crawled out of bed, tip-toed through the corridor and slipped inside the kitchen so I could unplug the cooker and the boiler and the fridge and the microwave and the kettle, until the ceiling light switched on, brightening the room with the same intensity as the cold sun does after a storm. Mother stood by the doorframe looking at me severely. She never slept. Grandmother didn’t, and I would not sleep either. So: the filter coffee machine. Breathing in, Maman poured water into the back reservoir, three spoons of ground coffee, then switched it on before proceeding with restarting all appliances, starting with the fridge before it leaked. And I tuned in with the kitchen’s soundtrack again as, on the counter, water streamed and dripped. It was rhythmic, timed, predictable, and it had that warm and nutty scent, like my mother’s perfume.
‘Psychoanalysis
always looks for the egg
in a basket
that has been lost.’
Writes Alda Merini in her poetry collection Aforismi e magie (1999).
From Merini’s experience with illness and her personal expressions, thus her oppositions to suits expectations of how, by society’s standards, a sound intellectual woman should think, write and behave, Merini was isolated. But this did not prevent her from feeling, thinking and writing – to stand for herself inside crowded rooms. About her experience in a mental asylum, Merini published the Diario di una diversa mentioned above, followed by poetry collections of wise intensity. Like some of my favourite storytellers of psychology and psychoanalysis – Louise Bourgeois, Leonora Carrington and Anna Kavan, to name a few – Merini’s work both serves and disrupts the trauma narrative tropes. Her – their – writings aren’t acts of resistance, for they are too unreliable, but they are liberating quests, lolling tongues in writing. Actions.
Let me be, they write, be it a hard-boiled egg in a basket.
‘Butter melting in a pan, with garlic and parsley,’ I had answered L as the cold, late-afternoon sun drenched our shared yellow kitchen. The jug in the coffee machine was still steamy after I had poured us cups of coffee.
Nothing that surprising about the actual answer for butter, garlic and parsley form a renowned olfactive gift, I agree, but I am intolerant to dairy, which sets my body in days-long rashes and triggers migraines. Mother would tell you that as a toddler I had refused milk already. The sole smell of dairy sends me over the edge because the mind is good at safeguarding the body, because it is the definition of safety that diverges between people. To address who gets to be safe in this world, we must slow down and consider what makes one feel safe first. Each one of us. For me, it is a narrow space where scent predicts sound, filled with a light that comes horizontally, never from above, where shadows offer hidden shelters. It is a terrarium, or how I have rebuilt my language inside the yellow kitchen I now share with L, a safe space where an aphorism – ‘a short saying expressing a general truth’ – can only be subjective, for it must be experienced before it can be understood – a sensual verity.
DINNER
Not a little fit, not a little fit sun sat in shed more mentally.
Let us why, let us why weight, let us why winter chess, let us why way.
Only a moon to soup her, only that in the sell never never be the cocups nice be, shatter it they lay.
– Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein
I only discovered the writing of Alda Merini and learnt about Law 180 earlier this spring. March 3rd 2026 marked thirty years since Marguerite Duras died, and I am one for needles that stitch open wounds back together; for interdisciplinarity and multilinguism, for exploring alternative ways of being human beyond the compound of anticipations; that is, for letting us be lost eggs in a basket.
‘Very early in my life, it was too late,’ Duras had written on the first page of L’Amant (The Lover). Her writing twined the personal and the political. She said that the story of her life didn’t exist, but the novel of her life did. She wrote against genres and classification, and she celebrated literature for it was her kind of truth. Duras was honest and, be it, vulnerable, always truthful with her words and her practice – and she was renowned to be a good cook and a convivial host. If you have been reading my work before, you will know that I am indebted to Marguerite Duras’ kitchen in Neauphle-le-Château.
In her yellow kitchen, Marguerite Duras had pinned a list of the twenty-five ingredients she needed to always keep in her cupboards. The list stayed up on the wall for her entire life and was never amended for the simple reason that she was the one who wrote it. ‘Parce que c’était moi qui l’avais écrite,’ she said in Practicalities. After Duras, an aphoristic kitchen inventory from me to you, so we may share a meal together:
All storytelling in the kitchen must begin with a sharp kitchen knife and a reliable peeler.
One tablespoon of bouillon with a splash of boiled water to thicken a dish for the brisk days. A tablespoon of bouillon with plenty of boiled water to sip in a cup in bed when the fever knocks on the door.
Capers for the battuto and the salad toppings, salty enough to preserve my superstitions; throwing a pinch of salt here and there, but over my shoulder always—
Couscous, one-pot saviour. Cold tabouleh salad; baked tagine.
Dates delight.
But what about savoury snacks? Balena anchovy paste, you peckish friends. Spread on a cracker or the heel of a crusty baguette, or a crumpet, as you please; make a wish, lick your lips for a salty aftertaste, wishful thinking for tomorrow will be another day.
Bottled lemon juice will chaperone summertime anytime.
Yolky, poached, scrambled eggs; eggs and soldiers, beaten eggs for the omelette and the tart’s filling, overjoyed orange shades, eggy hugs, real hens, a treat, though I wish good eggs had a stronger smell, not just boiled eggs gone bad.
If one sinks inside a pillow, a teaspoon of fennel seeds in their meal will bring them a piece of earth. A teaspoon of turmeric is a woodland; a teaspoon of fenugreek is a meadow, a teaspoon of oregano is a seascape, and kitchen cupboards are mercurial landscapes.
Flour is an invariable word.
[It is, oui oui, as, if where I come from bread is a pain, yeast is mighty and there is no commune without bread to break.]
A very good garlic press won’t cure ills but will spook bad mouths away.
O beans. Cannellini beans are mashed, either spread on toast for aperitivo or a subterfuge to thicken a sauce, a soup without cream; borlotti beans are poured in the minestrone whole, with their water; baked butter beans but pureed chickpeas, and the beans are green too, in the soups, but broad in yet another bake. Beans beans, never too many beans.
Oven, whooshing and swooshing, stinky and sticky as it cools down, a necessary dirty thing.
Red red paprika, bleeding, bursting, spicing things up for I may be sick and jolly. A real cook!
Porridge requires no or great efforts, bland or sweet or savoury, but is always spooned. A reliable friend, a moon.
{P.S. coffee, otherwise où va le monde?
}
Rose water, because water doesn’t lose petals.
Sardines, tinned. Mashed sardines on toast, mixed in with a teaspoon of miso, a tablespoon of soy sauce, a squeeze of lemon juice, and sesame seeds sprinkled on top. Or, honestly, straight from the tin.
Tamarind, stir one sour tablespoon in the coconut curry, followed by half a tablespoon, sweet tenderness.
Thyme since I still can’t go back in time, never. I tie my incurable case of melancholia in a knot instead, with bay leaves and rosemary and sage, tightly tied together, in sickness and health we are but say nothing, so hush now, listen instead; stir in, right here, ha, exhale and sit down, hush for you should always keep a stool near the kitchen counter, ok? tuck in, there, sip sip sip but hush, tied in a knot, tucked in, ahh you said. Boo, i heard you.
Za’atar, followed by a dash of olive oil will mend an uninspired dish.
Chut now. Do not slam the cupboard door, thank you and over to you, so tell me, what have you got hidden in your cupboards for us?
margaux
further reading
If you’re after some of Alda Merini’s poetry, Susan Stewart translated Love Lessons in English;
As referenced in this newsletter: Down Below by Leonora Carrington and Asylum Piece and other stories by Anna Kavan;
If you enjoyed my kitchen-based plays on words, might I recommend Kitchen Alphabet?
Kitchen Alphabet
Allegories become tidal in the kitchen, as free as water, as polyphonic as a recipe. a school of empathies for compassion to sprout.
Or, you can still grab a copy of Letters from Another Kitchen, a collaborative zine I made with illustrator Reena Makwana. Thank you for supporting my work, which means a basketful of boiled eggs to me.
thank you for reading The Onion Papers. i’m margaux, a writer adrift, and this is my hybrid newsletter. if you enjoy my work, remember to subscribe and/or invite friends to the party as you keep me going. read more about TOP here.
PS. I write novels too.