This week in my food writing class we’re reading Jane Kramer’s superb 2002 essay “The Reporter’s Kitchen,” first published in The New Yorker. I was introduced to this essay several years ago by Sara Franklin, a PhD candidate at New York University—and professor—whose work these days centers on Judith Jones, editor of Julia Child, James Beard, Marcella Hazan, and Madhur Jaffrey, among others. Sara is also concentrating on the work of Edna Lewis, whom we’ll be reading later this term, and about whom Francis Lam wrote beautifully last fall.

Here’s why we read Jane Kramer:

The kitchen where I’m making dinner is a New York kitchen. Nice light, way too small, nowhere to put anything unless the stove goes. My stove is huge, but it will never go. My stove is where my head clears, my impressions settle, my reporter’s life gets folded into my life, and whatever I’ve just learned, or think I’ve learned — whatever it was, out there in the world, that had seemed so different and surprising — bubbles away in the very small pot of what I think I know and, if I’m lucky, produces something like perspective.

Image: Wayne Thiebaud’s Two Jolly Cones, which appeared on the cover of The New Yorker we’re reading from