Bee Wilson | Love, Loss and Kitchen Objects
Recorded: Sun 23 Nov 2025
Duration: 1 hour 15 mins
Bee Wilson | Love, Loss and Kitchen Objects
Winter 2025
Look around your kitchen. Which objects keep the past alive – a chipped bowl, a battered pan, a salt shaker that once sat on a parent’s table? Which implements hold hidden stories of the people you love?
In her deeply personal and moving new book The Heart-Shaped Tin, home cook, journalist and writer Bee Wilson begins with her own story: when the tin in which she baked her wedding cake fell to the ground on the day her marriage ended. From this starting point she embarks on a journey across continents, cultures and civilisations, uncovering how everyday kitchen objects can embody memory, identity and even survival.
From an inherited china dinner service to a refugee’s rescued vegetable corer, Wilson explores the powerful meanings we attach to the tools we use to cook and eat. Blending her own experiences with the stories of others, she invites us to reconsider what is junk, what is treasure, and how the most ordinary objects can hold extraordinary power.
In conversation with Gurdeep Loyal.
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