Bonnie Benwick on downsizing a kitchen

There are many reasons that people downsize their homes, the most obvious being retirement or divorce. If you have a kitchen filled with gadgets and cookware (not to mention a study stuffed with cookbooks), the thought of moving to a much smaller place might give you cold chills. But getting rid of things isn’t always bad, as food writer Bonnie Benwick relates. She recently had to downsize, and that meant losing a lot of stuff – including hundreds of cookbooks. 

Benwick needed to downsize following a divorce, and had to make do with a rental kitchen that was not very spacious. She culled items ruthlessly – no duplicates in the size of pans, for example. She hunted high and low until she found the perfect compartmentalized trays to hold her spices. The result is a kitchen that is more organized. 

Parting with cookbooks was another story. As Benwick explained, “Downsizing my cookbooks was the hardest hurdle.” She had to get rid of hundreds of volumes. “They represented periods of my life, a self-taught cooking education, food luminaries I had spent time with, memories I wasn’t ready to dismiss,” she said. She made a deal with herself to start with the books she hadn’t used in the last couple of years. This meant giving away some books that had been handed down to her by her mother. I’m not sure I’m strong enough to be so bold.