the kitchen

The kitchen in the Commander's house is a space of daily labor, muted conflict, and the only arena where Offred can briefly experience something resembling ordinary human exchange. It is the domain of the Marthas, Rita and Cora, who prepare the household's meals and enforce the social distance between themselves and the Handmaid. The kitchen's chipped white enamel table, the smell of yeast from freshly baked bread, and the sharp knife Rita uses to slice carrots all mark it as a place of both sustenance and exclusion.

Layout and Atmosphere

The kitchen is located at the end of the hall, past the sitting room and dining room, and is entered through a door from the back of the house. It has a top of chipped white enamel, a sink, and a cupboard over the sink where matches are kept locked in summer. The room smells of yeast, a nostalgic scent that reminds Offred of her own former kitchens and of being a mother. The kitchen also contains a pantry at the back where mops and brooms are stored. The atmosphere is one of controlled resentment: Rita, in her dull green Martha's dress with a bib apron, frowns at Offred not personally but at the red dress and what it stands for, treating the Handmaid as a household chore among many.

Daily Routines and Token Exchange

Each shopping day, Offred enters the kitchen to receive her tokens from Rita. Rita tears three tokens from the token book and hands them over with a frown, her face kindly only if she would smile. The tokens have pictures of the items they can be exchanged for: twelve eggs, a piece of cheese, a brown thing supposed to be a steak. Offred places them in the zippered pocket in her sleeve, where she also keeps her pass. When she returns from shopping, she sets her basket down on the kitchen table, and Rita unpacks the parcels almost eagerly, though she always frowns while opening them, thinking she could have done better herself. The kitchen is also where Offred reports the availability of oranges at Milk and Honey, an offering she holds out to ingratiate herself with Rita.

Gossip and Information Exchange

The kitchen is a conduit for unofficial news. The Marthas know things and talk among themselves, passing information from house to house. Offred has heard them at it, catching whiffs of their private conversations about stillbirths, jealousies, and suicides. Once, through an almost-closed door, she heard Rita say she wouldn't debase herself like that, and Cora reply that nobody was asking her, and that the Handmaids were doing it for them all. The kitchen is also where Offred learned of the Martha who was shot at the checkpoint, with Cora defending the Guardians and Rita angrily insisting that everything is meant.

The Butter Ritual

After dinner on Ceremony nights, Offred hides a pat of butter in the toe of her right shoe, having torn off a corner of the paper napkin to wrap it in. Later, in her room, she rubs the butter over her face and works it into the skin of her hands. This is a trick she learned at the Rachel and Leah Re-education Center, the Red Center, and she knows her predecessor in the room must have done it too. The butter is greasy and will go rancid, making her smell like old cheese, but it is a private ceremony that allows her to believe she will some day be touched again in love or desire.

The Match

When Serena Joy gives Offred a cigarette, Offred goes to the kitchen to ask Rita for a match. Rita, sitting at the table cutting radishes into flowers, is grudging and suspicious. She unlocks the cupboard over the sink, peers into the cardboard sliding-top box of wooden matches, and hands one over with a warning not to set fire to the curtains. Offred transfers the match carefully to her zippered sleeve where the cigarette is, and takes an ice cube from the bowl Rita offers. This small transaction marks a shift in status: Rita, who usually treats Offred as a chore, makes her own small gesture of appeasement.

Narrative Significance

The kitchen is the only space in the Commander's house where Offred can momentarily imagine a different kind of life. She longs to stay there, to sit at the table with Rita and Cora, to talk about aches and pains, to exchange remedies, to help make bread and sink her hands into the soft resistant warmth of the dough. But the Marthas are not supposed to fraternize with Handmaids, and Rita would be too afraid to allow it. The kitchen thus represents the ordinary human connection that the regime has systematically denied Offred, a reminder of the life she has lost and the impossibility of genuine fellowship within the household.