Kitchen.

Absent the bedroom—a source of great comedy and tragedy—what room in the house conjures more emotion than the kitchen?

(In bad times, or merely chaotic ones, the rooms can be one in the same. David Schearl, the child narrator of Henry Roth’s monumental Call It Sleep, often slept on a cot in the kitchen of his tenement apartment.)

The kitchen can be a difficult place, particularly for picky-eater kids who must clean their plate before being excused.

SHRIMP CREOLE AGAIN?

The kitchen is often the site of profound discussions—scenes of breakups and bankruptcy—and silent glances between parents across a bowl of potatoes that speak loud enough to echo across decades.

I have often wondered which of the following scenarios would be preferable: lousy food regularly eaten by a happy family or especially good food eaten under a sad roof.

(There’s a fabulous scene in Stanley Tucci’s 1996 movie Big Night in which a woman—having eaten herself into a near coma at an Italian feast—lies across the table and cries, “My mother was such a terrible cook…”)

Mine is not—in fact, she is world class—and perhaps that grounds my presumption of the kitchen as a magical place.

Mom (or Grandmom or Uncle Charley in a multi-generational family) stirs something at the stove that perfumes the house; a kid does his homework at the table with a ballgame on the radio and the dishwasher running; curtains hang over the sink; in spring or early fall, the window is open and a breeze wafts in.

Too romantic?

Keep reading.

Since Mother’s Day, Bruce Goldfarb and I have been collecting pictures of kitchens from people across Maryland, each day posting the photo from the day before at welcometobaltimorehon.com. It’s called the Baltimore Kitchen: a different photo of a different kitchen from a different person every day until Mother’s Day 2012.

The project is sponsored by DiPasquale Marketplace of Highlandtown and Raven lager, a Maryland microbrew launched in 1998 by Stephen Demczuk, who has plans to re-open the fabled Haussner’s as a brewpub.

There is no method to how the photographers are chosen. I ask just about everyone who comes along if they want in and thus have gotten kitchen pix from family, friends, friends of friends, and strangers, along with point-and-shoot superstars like Jennifer Bishop, George Hagegeorge, and Philip Edward Laubner.

 Add to the mix kids from the St. Francis of Assisi school photo club in the Mayfield neighborhood of Baltimore and archived shots of old Baltimore kitchens when someone forgets their assignment and you have a nine-course meal worthy of Terrence Malick.

The images that come back confirm my sense of the kitchen as a place where memories are made more indelibly than in a mere living room or stupid man cave.

July 14: Vicki Contie’s vintage B&O Railroad china in Ellicott City.

July 4: An old farmhouse sink—deep and porcelain, the kind for canning peaches—at Cecilia Stackna’s house in Lansdowne.

On any day when a photographer has not been found before midnight: My grandparents’ basement kitchen in Highlandtown, where I ate Sunday dinner just about every week of my life while they were still with us.

I love the beauty of it and I love the W. Eugene Smith obsessiveness of it.

A kitchen a day every day for 365 consecutive days (and maybe longer if I can talk Goldfarb into it). In time, we will select the best of the best—like Anna Santana’s shot of a kitchen-table crab feast near Eastpoint Mall—and exhibit them at Ikaros Restaurant in Greektown.

Want in?

Email me at orlo.leini@gmail.com and we’ll assign you a date.