This Pot is Mine

Eli Davies on cooking to ground herself in new kitchens after repeated house moves prompted by precarious rental markets

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! In today’s essay, Eli Davies writes about building up a kitchen from scratch and cooking as a means to stake a claim on a new home when forced to move repeatedly by the vicissitudes of the rental market. Eli’s essay is part of our Cooking from Life strand – a series of essays that defy idealised versions of cooking.

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It is no small task to build up a kitchen from scratch. Where do you start? Plates, pans and cutlery first, surely. Then glasses and mugs, but how many? You’ll be living on your own, but you hope to entertain – maybe lavishly, copiously. And what about other utensils? A potato peeler? A whisk? A mixing bowl?

By the time I moved into my third Belfast home in 2022, I had amassed a nice collection of such equipment. This was the nicest place I’d rented in the city by some distance – comfortably furnished, with a well-fitted-out kitchen. I was particularly thrilled with the sturdy gas rings built into the counter: after years of grappling with shitty electric hobs atop cheap free-standing cookers, I could finally control the heat under my pans. But many things in the kitchen were too high for me – I couldn’t reach some of the shelves, or the cupboards set deep into the corner. So, to my collection of kitchenware, I added something that felt truly transformative: a small stepladder.

The stepladder changed everything. I felt like I’d spent my entire adult life asking taller people – generally men – to reach things for me, or else standing precariously on a chair that I was convinced would collapse any second. No more! Every time I unfolded this new kitchen accessory, I was stupidly proud of my minor act of domestic self-determination. Why had it taken me so long? I wondered.

Such small but profound moments have littered my home life since 2017 – the year that, in a fugue of grief, I abandoned nearly all my kitchen equipment to my ex-partner after we broke up and moved out of our flat in London. The kitchen contained ten years of accumulated items – many of which were rightfully mine – but at the time I couldn’t stomach bringing these things with me as I started my next chapter, whatever that would turn out to be. So, I began again.

My first proper post-break-up home was a small, terraced house in Belfast; I moved there in 2018, one year into my PhD, having spent the previous twelve months living on the north coast, licking my wounds, near my university in Coleraine. I was slightly overwhelmed by the prospect of living on my own for the first time, and it took me ages to make the house mine. For months I perched uncertainly at its edges, cultivating some parts, neglecting others. But I did gradually build up my kitchenware: cutlery, utensils and pans from Argos; a mint-green crockery set, coffee mugs and a griddle pan from Ikea; wine glasses and tumblers from charity shops; a beautiful tulip-shaped beer glass nicked from a local pub. Through these items, I could see tastes and habits of my own beginning to emerge: the small, yellow-patterned mug I liked to drink my coffee from, the tiny thrill of arranging the fruit in a big wooden bowl after the big shop. It was all deeply gratifying, and at the time I didn’t consider what it would feel like to have to take it all apart again.

When you constantly have to move, you also constantly have to make adaptations, to find ways to make different homes work for your body. Who knows how big the rooms will be, how the cupboards and drawers will feel, what size the fridge will be, what state the oven will be in? (In one Belfast house, I discovered a tray full of old, grey grease in the oven soon after I moved in and had to pester my landlord repeatedly to get it cleaned.) But having moved eight times in the past eight years, my priorities are now clear. I struggle with many aspects of domesticity, but in the kitchen, things make sense. This sense of ease has been built up over almost an entire lifetime of cooking: I made my first pasta sauce aged eleven, and since then I’ve gradually developed an almost bodily knowledge of what I need on hand to make something to eat: a good knife for garlic, the best pan for boiling water, and so on.

I’m conscious, though, that when you’re a serial renter at the whims and mercy of an over-inflated and unregulated rental market, this is not straightforward. When your body always stands poised to up sticks and move with little notice, why weigh yourself down with equipment? I remember this unanchored feeling when I first moved to Belfast, before I started to rebuild my kitchen. I would have crisps and cigarettes for dinner, not quite able to commit to the space, not knowing if I was allowed to. A friend of mine – another victim of housing precarity – shared a cautionary tale about the risks of getting ahead of yourself in a rented kitchen: about ten years ago, he treated himself to an expensive set of cooking pots, thinking that at some point in the not-too-distant future he’d have secured his ideal kitchen to use them in. Instead, he’s carted them around from rented flat to rented flat, the beautiful pots never quite fitting in with the spaces which aren’t his, which don’t fit with his way of living, and which serve to remind him of his lack of a stable home.

When I’m homemaking now, I return to the cooking skills I’ve acquired over my life to stake a claim on these new spaces – even when that claim turns out not to be very strong. I had to leave that first Belfast house after two and half years to make way for my landlords’ son. It was the end of 2020: Christmas had been cancelled and we were back in lockdown. As a solo New Year’s Eve treat, I decided to cook myself Nigel Slater’s ham and butter beans. I used my bright orange Le Creuset pot (one of the few items that I’d retained from my old life, and an object that has become a kind of totem of homebuilding for me now), cramming it with tomatoes, meat and beans. In the past I’d made this hearty one-pot dish to share, ladling out spoonfuls to people at the table, but that night I made it just for me. The huge gammon joint had come from Dunnes on Annadale Embankment, where I grabbed it because I couldn’t find anything smaller, feeling faintly ridiculous as I carried it to the till. On New Year’s Day I sat among the boxes and packing tape and ate leftover ham with poached eggs and bubble and squeak. On moving day, I wrapped what was left in foil and brought it with me to the new house. It became something of a bit when I told people about it afterwards: For New Year’s Eve, I cooked myself a whole ham!

The scale of that dinner was undoubtedly a bit absurd, but I think it reveals something about what building a home had become for me. My parents gave me that Le Creuset pot one Christmas in the mid-2000s, and it stands out as a shock of colour against chipped surfaces and limescale-encrusted draining boards in my memories of the dreary, cheaply fitted kitchens in my rented homes. It has functioned as a kind of through line or talisman – though, as I write, it sits in a Belfast storage unit, one of many items (including my beloved stepladder) that I’ve been separated from for two years now, as I try to find a stable place to live back in London. My heart aches for those objects! I feel adrift and disoriented without them.

So, how do I make a home in the absence of these objects? I don’t think I can, really. It’s hard, after years of movement and instability, to imagine what a home might feel like when it’s actually mine. I can think about the kitchen, though, with a list of – perhaps quite basic – demands. It will be clean and big enough to fit more than one person at a time, with space for my possessions – my cooking tongs and griddle pan and my stepladder. It will have a freezer not so iced up that it’s unusable, and a good oven with decent temperature control. And it will have a big pot of something cooking on the stove. I love those enormous deep metal pots you see in community kitchens and canteens, full of stews and soups – there’s something so hopeful and grounding about them. Maybe that’s what I’m reaching towards whenever I move into a new place and make a big pot of something hearty (whether it’s in my orange Le Creuset or something else). While it’s sitting on the hob, bubbling away, neither it nor I are going anywhere.

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Lentil Stew

I guess Nigel Slater is my ‘big pot of food’ go-to, because this recipe – another favourite of mine – has been adapted over the years from his lentil and spinach pie recipe in Kitchen Diaries II. It’s a grounding recipe, perfect for claiming space in the kitchen, and works very well with a baked potato and/or sausages, or just served as a thick soup with a bit of bread and butter. This is an easy and forgiving recipe – you can use whatever ingredients you have to hand, and needn’t be overly concerned with exact quantities or cooking times. That said, here are some rough guidelines on how I make it.

Serves 4–6, technically, but I usually make it for myself and use it throughout the week in the various forms mentioned above
Time 1 hr

Ingredients

1–2 tbsp olive oil
1 red onion, finely chopped
1–2 carrots, peeled if you can be bothered and finely chopped
1–2 celery sticks, finely chopped
1 thyme sprig
1 fresh bay leaf
150g green lentils, cooked according to packet instructions, cooking liquid saved
1.5L veg or chicken stock
1 garlic clove, thinly sliced
a dash of balsamic vinegar

Method

1. Heat the oil over a medium-low heat in a big heavy-based pot.

2. Add the onion, carrots and celery and cook for 5 or so mins, stirring regularly, until beginning to turn golden. Add the thyme and bay, and fry for another few mins.

3. Add the lentils and their cooking liquid and give them a quick stir, then add the stock and bring to the boil before reducing to a simmer and adding the garlic.

4. Part-cover with a lid, then leave to simmer for 45 mins or so (you can leave it simmering away longer if you want, but you might have to top up the liquid).

5. Just before serving, stir in a few drops of balsamic vinegar.

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Credits

Eli Davies is a writer and researcher whose work has been published widely, including in the Guardian, Tribune and The Tangerine. She has a PhD from Ulster University on women, memory and domestic space during the Troubles and she co-edited Under My Thumb: Songs that Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them, an anthology of women’s music writing (Repeater, 2017). Her book The Spinster Cookbook: Culture, Politics and Pleasure in the Single Woman’s Kitchen will be published by the Indigo Press in June 2026.

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