Often when I'm taking a freshly-baked fruit pie out of the oven as I did this morning my mind delves into memory and takes me back almost 60 years to the very first kitchen of my own as a young housewife. We had rented a flat in a house in a downtown Toronto neighbourhood. Not quite a flat, but most of the second floor in the modest house. We had a large bedroom of our own, and a neat little kitchen, a corridor reaching from one to the other at opposite ends of the second floor. In between there was another bedroom and a bathroom. We shared the bathroom with all the house residents, the man and woman who owned the house, and the renter of that second bedroom whom we might see occasionally but who seemed to us ghostlike, not quite there in actual presence.

We were just twenty then, had been married for two years, and finally had a place of our own. Before then we had lived temporarily with my husband's father and mother and then with mine. Neither gave us much pleasure, and both came with their complications and interferences and discomforts. With a place of our own we could do as we wished, even use the laundry machine of our landlady who never complained as my mother-in-law had that I was abusing her washing machine by washing jeans in it.

Because we both were employed we devised a home work schedule for ourselves to keep our home neat and tidy, dividing up the duties. My husband cleaned our bedroom weekly and I assigned myself the kitchen clean-up. We were proud of that little kitchen for which we had bought a refrigerator, stove and table-and-chair set, the latter reflecting the fashion of that time of wrought-iron legs and formica top. I was determined to keep it all spotlessly clean.

I was also determined to fill in my meal-preparation how-to gaps, and that was a big, empty space. I had never been interested in what my mother concocted in the kitchen because I was never enamoured of her cooking. Unlike her older sister who was a master hand at cooking and baking my mother never succeeded in producing much that was truly edibly good-tasting, and not for lack of trying. She simply hadn't the innate talent, despite her remarkable efforts.

To say I was clueless in the kitchen would be to understate the matter. My husband had a solution; he went out and splurged on a tome of a cookbook, the American-Jewish Cookbook. I consulted it feverishly and set about preparing decent meals with great effort and little reward. I never convinced myself however, that I was a kitchen knock-off of my mother. And gradually I began to produce passable fare. I had developed an unfortunate habit of propping the cookbook up at the backsplash of the gas stove. Predictably, the book once caught on fire and became scorched. To the present day I use that tired old reference guide to food preparation, its blighted bottom burnt brown, but rescued by the usual swift response of my husband.

One weekend afternoon after I had scrubbed the kitchen floor and produced a shining-clean kitchen, I was withdrawing a cherry pie from the oven, and somehow it slipped from my grip. My dismay was released in an anguished cry of despair that brought my husband running to the kitchen to observe the result of a hot cherry pie filling covering in bright red splotches every surface of the little floor, all the loops in the kitchen table's ironwork, transforming the stove from pristine white to gory red. I sat down and cried. As much for the ruination of our dinner dessert as for the besmirching of all my morning clean-up efforts; I felt I could never restore the kitchen to its pre-disaster state.

My husband comforted me, made an effort to restrain himself from laughing, led me into the bedroom, told me to read a book and set about cleaning up the mess with a pail of soapy water. But the memory of that little kitchen disaster has remained firmly lodged in memory, popping up like an unwelcome guest whenever the fragrance of a fruit pie invades our kitchen.