The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss, and Kitchen Objects

One August day, months after her marriage abruptly ended, a heart-shaped baking tin fell at Bee Wilson’s feet: the same one she had used to bake her wedding cake twenty-three years prior. This discovery struck a wave of emotions that propelled her search for others who have attached magical and personal properties to the objects in their kitchens.

Wilson’s best-selling Consider the Fork considered how kitchen items changed the way we eat; in The Heart-Shaped Tin, she delves into how these objects change the way we live. She meets people who open up about a favorite wooden spoon, a salt shaker inherited from a parent, and a vintage corkscrew collection. Our beloved items become powerful symbols of identity and memory, representing friendship, grief, love, superstition, safety, and even political resistance. Crossing continents, cultures, and time periods, Wilson deftly moves between a 5,000-year-old bottle for drinking chocolate and her children’s favorite melon baller; a metal spoon made by a Holocaust survivor and her mother’s silver-plated toast rack; a bombarded Ukrainian kitchen cabinet and her grandfather’s Wedgwood teapot. In telling these stories, she comes to terms with her grief over the dissolution of her marriage and the loss of her mother after a battle with dementia. The heart-shaped tin, in the end, becomes a moving reminder of the power of new beginnings.

Thoughtful, tender, and beautifully written, The Heart-Shaped Tin is a celebration of the fundamentally human urge to keep mementos, even in an increasingly rational age. It will change the way you look at both precious family heirlooms and humble household objects.