The Sunday Kitchen Ghost

There is a specific silence that settles in a kitchen on a Tuesday afternoon, long after the Sunday guests have departed and the last of the laughter has been washed away. I am thinking of the wooden spoon my mother used to stir the batter, the one with the handle worn thin and smooth by her thumb, a tool that no longer exists in my drawer. It is the absence of that particular rhythm—the scraping of wood against ceramic—that makes the room feel hollow. We often believe that comfort is something we consume, a warmth we take into ourselves to stave off the cold. But comfort is actually a haunting. It is the lingering scent of cinnamon and scalded milk that refuses to leave the curtains, a phantom weight in the air that reminds us of a table once crowded with people who are now elsewhere. If we listen closely to the quiet, does it sound like a feast, or does it sound like the memory of one?

Larisa Sferle has captured this exact ache in her image titled Sweet Bread Pudding with Creamy Vanilla Sauce. She has managed to plate the very feeling of a Sunday afternoon that has already slipped through our fingers. Does this image remind you of a kitchen you can no longer return to?