The Two Saddest Kitchens: A Comics Conversation

Roz Chast and Jason Adam Katzenstein, two thoroughly New York cartoonists from The New Yorker, have made a book of cartoons about kitchens that reproach them, challenge them, and expose them to literary horrors. It offers no practical help but real catharsis for anyone who has ever felt outmatched by their own kitchen.

In these pages, literature’s great anxieties come home to the kitchen. Gregor Samsa, newly transformed into a cockroach, decides to settle in by Katzenstein's sink. Prufrock, who once wondered whether he dared to eat a peach, now can’t enjoy one for worrying about where it was sourced.

The kitchen reproaches its owners directly, too. When Katzenstein calls a plumber, he’s told the sink is fine and “the problem is you.” In one of Chast’s panels, a tombstone sums up a life of virtuous eating: “I can’t believe I ate all that kale for nothing.”

That shared misery is the book’s comfort. If you own too many boxes of tea, fear the patina on cast iron, or have texture issues no one else understands, you are in good company.

Chast has been a New Yorker fixture for decades, and Katzenstein comes from a younger generation, but their humor is a natural match. Some cartoons are by one of them, others by both on the same page, in color and in black and white. A trip to an appliance store is told in photographs with drawings laid over them.

There are a few recipes. Believe us, you won’t want to make them.

Hardcover. Color images throughout.