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By Marion Nestle

January 30 2026

Weekend Reading: The Heart-Shaped Tin

Bee Wilson. The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss, and Kitchen Objects. Norton, 2025. 312 pages.

I loved this book. It was an unexpected pleasure from start to finish, and it completely changed the way I view the objects in my kitchen.

Bee Wilson uses commonplace kitchen tools to tell stories about love and loss. She used the titular tin to bake her wedding cake. The book is about her grief about and recovery from the not-her-choice ending of that marriage.

The chapters use kitchen gadgets to tell her stories and those of others, in sections titled Mementos, Junk, Tools, Gifts, and other such headings. The chapters come with pictures of the objects that frame the stories.

A few excerpts.

From The Best China:

So many of us spend our whole lives denying ourselves the best things because the time is not right or we feel we haven’t earned them yet, or we feat that someone–probably our parents–will disapprove if we drop them. This attitude to objects sometimes goes along with a wider impulse of self-denial. This may be the legacy of hunger and rationing, or a religious childhoold…or simply of the social attitudes of earlier generations in which visitors were treated like royalty whereas closae family members were unworthy of the ‘good china’ except in company…If you don’t use the best china now, you may never use it. p. 15

From The Paper Cup:

Like any utensil, a paper cup can change its significance. It can go from lovable to unlovable in a second. And it needs to. p. 99

From The Mushroom Cannister:

When the Merry Mushroom kitchen sets were first launched, the bosses at Sears had no idea how popular this would be. The design was dreamed up by Jack Buchanan, the firm’s housewares buyer. His boss told him to devise a new ceramic pattern to ring the changes from the usual fruit and flowers. According to Buchanan himself in a talk he gave to a local library when he was in his nineties, he went into his backyard, where he suddenly pictured a mushroom talking to him. p. 202

From A Red Washing-Up Bowl:

A friend came round with a bunch of tulips. She knew that when I was married we could never have flowers in the house becausae they gave him instant hay fever. Her bouquet inspired me to start planting roses in the garden…Thanks to the red washing-up bowl, I could recycle some of the dishwater by giving it to the roses. The next time I met my ex, to discuss the children over a tense cup of coffee, I told him about my new interest in gardening. ‘You have given me the gift of flowers,’ I said, and I wasn’t being sarcastic. p. 246

There is much history, sociology, humor, and resilience here. I really enjoyed reading it.

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