Kitchen
Encyclopedia
A kitchen is a room or part of a room used for cooking
and food preparation.
In the West, a modern residential kitchen is typically equipped with a stove, a sink
with hot and cold running water, a refrigerator
and kitchen cabinets
arranged according to a modular design. Many households have a microwave oven
, a dishwasher
and other electric appliances. The main function of a kitchen is cooking or preparing food but it may also be used for dining and entertaining.
and the development of water infrastructure capable of supplying water to private homes. Until the 18th century, food was cooked over an open fire
. Technical advances in heating food in the 18th and 19th centuries, changed the architecture of the kitchen. Before the advent of modern pipes, water was brought from an outdoor source such as wells
, pumps or springs.
-type: the rooms were arranged around a central courtyard for women. In many such homes, a covered but otherwise open patio served as the kitchen. Homes of the wealthy had the kitchen as a separate room, usually next to a bathroom (so that both rooms could be heated by the kitchen fire), both rooms being accessible from the court. In such houses, there was often a separate small storage room in the back of the kitchen used for storing food and kitchen utensils.
In the Roman Empire
, common folk in cities often had no kitchen of their own; they did their cooking
in large public kitchens. Some had small mobile bronze
stoves, on which a fire could be lit for cooking. Wealthy Romans
had relatively well-equipped kitchens. In a Roman villa
, the kitchen was typically integrated into the main building as a separate room, set apart for practical reasons of smoke
and sociological reasons of the kitchen being operated by slaves
. The fireplace
was typically on the floor, placed at a wall—sometimes raised a little bit—such that one had to kneel to cook. There were no chimney
s.
longhouses of North America
.
In the larger homesteads of European nobles, the kitchen was sometimes in a separate sunken floor building to keep the main building, which served social and official purposes, free from indoor smoke
.
The first known stoves in Japan
date from about the same time. The earliest findings are from the Kofun period
(3rd to 6th century). These stoves, called kamado, were typically made of clay and mortar; they were fired with wood
or charcoal
through a hole in the front and had a hole in the top, into which a pot could be hanged by its rim. This type of stove remained in use for centuries to come, with only minor modifications. Like in Europe, the wealthier homes had a separate building which served for cooking. A kind of open fire pit fired with charcoal, called irori, remained in use as the secondary stove in most homes until the Edo period
(17th to 19th century). A kamado was used to cook the staple food, for instance rice
, while irori served both to cook side dishes and as a heat source.
The kitchen remained largely unaffected by architectural advances throughout the Middle Ages; open fire remained the only method of heating food. European medieval kitchens were dark, smoky, and sooty places, whence their name "smoke kitchen". In European medieval cities around the 10th to 12th centuries, the kitchen still used an open fire hearth
in the middle of the room. In wealthy homes, the ground floor was often used as a stable while the kitchen was located on the floor above, like the bedroom and the hall. In castle
s and monasteries
, the living and working areas were separated; the kitchen was sometimes moved to a separate building, and thus could not serve anymore to heat the living rooms. In some castles the kitchen was retained in the same structure, but servants were strictly separated from nobles, by constructing separate spiral stone staircases for use of servants to bring food to upper levels. An extant example of such a medieval kitchen with servants' staircase is at Muchalls Castle
in Scotland
. In Japanese homes, the kitchen started to become a separate room within the main building at that time.
With the advent of the chimney, the hearth moved from the center of the room to one wall, and the first brick-and-mortar hearths were built. The fire was lit on top of the construction; a vault underneath served to store wood. Pots made of iron
, bronze
, or copper
started to replace the pottery
used earlier. The temperature was controlled by hanging the pot higher or lower over the fire, or placing it on a trivet
or directly on the hot ashes. Using open fire for cooking (and heating) was risky; fires devastating whole cities occurred frequently.
Leonardo da Vinci
invented an automated system for a rotating spit for spit-roasting: a propeller in the chimney made the spit turn all by itself. This kind of system was widely used in wealthier homes. Beginning in the late Middle Ages
, kitchens in Europe lost their home-heating function even more and were increasingly moved from the living area into a separate room. The living room was now heated by tiled stoves, operated from the kitchen, which offered the huge advantage of not filling the room with smoke.
Freed from smoke and dirt, the living room thus began to serve as an area for social functions and increasingly became a showcase for the owner's wealth. In the upper classes, cooking and the kitchen were the domain of the servants, and the kitchen was set apart from the living rooms, sometimes even far from the dining room. Poorer homes often did not have a separate kitchen yet; they kept the one-room arrangement where all activities took place, or at the most had the kitchen in the entrance hall.
The medieval smoke kitchen (or Farmhouse kitchen
) remained common, especially in rural farmhouses and generally in poorer homes, until much later. In a few European farmhouses, the smoke kitchen was in regular use until the middle of the 20th century. These houses often had no chimney, but only a smoke hood above the fireplace, made of wood and covered with clay, used to smoke meat. The smoke rose more or less freely, warming the upstairs rooms and protecting the woodwork from vermin.
during Colonial America
, kitchens were often built as separate rooms and were located behind the parlor and keeping room
or dining room
. One early record of a kitchen is found in the 1648 inventory of the estate of a John Porter of Windsor, Connecticut
. The inventory lists goods in the house over the kittchin and in the kittchin. The items listed in the kitchen were; silver spoon
s, pewter
, brass
, iron, arms, ammunition, hemp
, flax
and other implements about the room.
In the southern states, where the climate
and sociological
conditions differed from the north, the kitchen was often relegated to an outbuilding, separate from the big house, the mansion
, for much of the same reasons as in the feudal kitchen in medieval Europe: the kitchen was operated by slaves
, and their working place had to be separated from the living area of the masters by the social standards of the time. Separate summer kitchens were also common on large farms in the north. These were used to prepare meals for harvest workers and tasks such as canning
during the warm summer months.
Technological advances during industrialization brought major changes to the kitchen. Iron stoves, which enclosed the fire completely and were more efficient, appeared. Early models included the Franklin stove
around 1740, which was a furnace
stove intended for heating, not for cooking. Benjamin Thompson
in England designed his "Rumford stove" around 1800. This stove was much more energy efficient than earlier stoves; it used one fire to heat several pots, which were hung into holes on top of the stove and were thus heated from all sides instead of just from the bottom. However, his stove was designed for large kitchens; it was too big for domestic use. The "Oberlin stove" was a refinement of the technique that resulted in a size reduction; it was patent
ed in the U.S. in 1834 and became a commercial success with some 90,000 units sold over the next 30 years. These stoves were still fired with wood
or coal
. Although the first gas street lamps
were installed in Paris
, London
, and Berlin
at the beginning of the 1820s and the first U.S. patent on a gas stove was granted in 1825, it was not until the late 19th century that using gas for lighting and cooking became commonplace in urban areas.
The urbanization
in the second half of the 19th century induced other significant changes that would ultimately change the kitchen. Out of sheer necessity, cities began planning and building water distribution pipes into homes, and built sewers
to deal with the waste water. Gas pipes were laid; gas was used first for lighting purposes, but once the network had grown sufficiently, it also became available for heating and cooking on gas stoves. At the turn of the 20th century, electricity
had been mastered well enough to become a commercially viable alternative to gas and slowly started replacing the latter. But like the gas stove, the electrical stove had a slow start. The first electrical stove had been presented in 1893 at the World's Columbian Exposition
in Chicago
, but it was not until the 1930s that the technology was stable enough and began to take off.
Industrialization also caused social changes. The new factory
working class
in the cities was housed under generally poor conditions. Whole families lived in small one or two-room apartment
s in tenement buildings up to six stories high, badly aired and with insufficient lighting. Sometimes, they shared apartments with "night sleepers", unmarried men who paid for a bed at night. The kitchen in such an apartment was often used as a living and sleeping room, and even as a bathroom
. Water had to be fetched from wells and heated on the stove. Water pipes were laid only towards the end of the 19th century, and then often only with one tap per building or per story. Brick-and-mortar stoves fired with coal remained the norm until well into the second half of the century. Pots and kitchenware were typically stored on open shelves, and parts of the room could be separated from the rest using simple curtains.
In contrast, there were no dramatic changes for the upper classes. The kitchen, located in the basement
or the ground floor, continued to be operated by servants. In some houses, water pump
s were installed, and some even had kitchen sinks and drains (but no water on tap yet, except for some feudal kitchens in castles). The kitchen became a much cleaner space with the advent of "cooking machines", closed stoves made of iron plates and fired by wood and increasingly charcoal or coal, and that had flue pipe
s connected to the chimney. For the servants the kitchen continued to also serve as a sleeping room; they slept either on the floor, or later in narrow spaces above a lowered ceiling, for the new stoves with their smoke outlet no longer required a high ceiling in the kitchen. The kitchen floors were tiled; kitchenware was neatly stored in cupboard
s to protect them from dust and steam. A large table served as a workbench; there were at least as many chairs as there were servants, for the table in the kitchen also doubled as the eating place for the servants.
The middle class tried to imitate the luxurious dining styles of the upper class as best as it could. Living in smaller apartments, the kitchen was the main room—here, the family lived. The study or living room was saved for special occasions such as an occasional dinner invitation. Because of this, these middle-class kitchens were often more homely than those of the upper class, where the kitchen was a work-only room occupied only by the servants. Besides a cupboard to store the kitchenware
, there were a table and chairs, where the family would dine, and sometimes—if space allowed—even a fauteuil
or a couch.
Gas pipes were first laid in the late 19th century, and gas stoves started to replace the older coal-fired stoves. Gas was more expensive than coal, though, and thus the new technology was first installed in the wealthier homes. Where workers' apartments were equipped with a gas stove, gas distribution would go through a coin meter.
In rural areas, the older technology using coal or wood stoves or even brick-and-mortar open fireplaces remained common throughout. Gas and water pipes were first installed in the big cities; small villages were connected only much later.
The trend to increasing gasification and electrification continued at the turn of the 20th century. In industry, it was the phase of rationalisation, where work processes were attempted to be streamlined. Taylorism was born, and time-motion studies
were used to optimize processes. These ideas also spilled over into domestic kitchen architecture because of a growing trend that called for a professionalization of household work, started in the mid-19th century by Catharine Beecher
and amplified by Christine Frederick
's publications in the 1910s. The German kitchen brand 'Poggenpohl', established in 1892 by Friedemir Poggenpohl, introduced ergonomic work-top heights and storage chutes that were later adopted by Schütte-Lihotzky's Frankfurt Kitchen
.
Working class women frequently worked in factories to ensure the family's survival, as the men's wages often did not suffice. Social housing projects led to the next milestone: the "Frankfurt kitchen." Developed in 1926, this kitchen measured 1.9 m by 3.4 m (approximately 6 ft 2 inby 11 ft 2 in, with a standard layout. It was built for two purposes: to optimize kitchen work to reduce cooking time and lower the cost of building decently equipped kitchens. The design, created by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky
, was the result of detailed time-motion studies and interviews with future tenants to identify what they needed from their kitchens. Schütte-Lihotzky's fitted kitchen was built in some 10,000 apartments in the housing projects erected in Frankfurt
in the 1930s.
The initial reception was critical: it was so small that only one person could work in it; some storage spaces intended for raw loose food ingredients such as flour
were reachable by children. But the Frankfurt kitchen embodied a standard for the rest of the 20th century in rental apartments: the "work kitchen". It was criticized as "exiling the women in the kitchen", but post-World War II
conservatism coupled with economic reasons prevailed. The kitchen once more was seen as a work place that needed to be separated from the living areas. Practical reasons also played a role in this development: just as in the bourgeois homes of the past, one reason for separating the kitchen was to keep the steam and smells of cooking out of the living room.
Poggenpohl led innovation in the kitchen area by presenting the "reform kitchen" in 1928 with interconnecting cabinets and functional interiors. The reform kitchen was a forerunner to the later unit kitchen and fitted kitchen. Poggenpohl presented the form 1000, the world's first unit kitchen, at the imm Cologne
furniture fair in 1950.
The idea of standardized dimensions and layout developed for the Frankfurt kitchen took hold while Poggenpohl began exporting to neighboring countries which for the first time required a kitchen specifier known today as a kitchen designer. The equipment used remained a standard for years to come: hot and cold water on tap and a kitchen sink and an electrical or gas stove and oven. Not much later, the refrigerator
was added as a standard item. The concept was refined in the "Swedish kitchen" using unit furniture with wooden fronts for the kitchen cabinets. Soon the concept was amended by the use of smooth synthetic door and drawer fronts, first in white, recalling a sense of cleanliness and alluding to sterile lab or hospital settings, but soon after in more lively colors, too.
Unit construction since its introduction has defined the development of the modern kitchen, with pre-manufactured modules using mass manufacturing techniques developed during World War II
greatly bringing down the cost of a kitchen. Units which are kept on the floor are called "floor units", "floor cabinets", or "base cabinets" on which a kitchen worktop
, originally often formica
and often now made of granite
, marble
, tile or wood is placed. The units which are held on the wall for storage purposes are termed as "wall units" or "wall cabinets". In small areas of kitchen in an apartment, even a "tall storage unit" is available for effective storage. In cheaper brands, all cabinets are kept a uniform color, normally white, with interchangeable doors and accessories chosen by the customer to give a varied look. In more expensive brands, the cabinets are produced matching the doors' colors and finishes, for an older more bespoke look.
and large kitchen appliances
such as blenders
, toaster
s, and later also microwave oven
s. Following the end of World War II
, massive demand in Europe
for low-price, high-tech consumer goods led to Western European kitchens being designed to accommodate new appliances such as refrigerators and electric/gas cookers.
Parallel to this development in tenement buildings was the evolution of the kitchen in homeowner's houses. There, the kitchens usually were somewhat larger, suitable for everyday use as a dining room, but otherwise the ongoing technicalization was the same, and the use of unit furniture also became a standard in this market sector.
General technocentric enthusiasm even led some designers to take the "work kitchen" approach even further, culminating in futuristic designs like Luigi Colani
's "kitchen satellite" (1969, commissioned by the German
high-end kitchen manufacturer Poggenpohl
for an exhibit), in which the room was reduced to a ball with a chair in the middle and all appliances at arm's length, an optimal arrangement maybe for "applying heat to food", but not necessarily for actual cooking. Such extravaganzas remained outside the norm, though.
In the former Eastern bloc
countries, the official doctrine
viewed cooking as a mere necessity, and women should work "for the society" in factories, not at home. Also, housing had to be built at low costs and quickly, which led directly to the standardized apartment block using prefabricated slabs. The kitchen was reduced to its minimums and the "work kitchen" paradigm taken to its extremes: in East Germany for instance, the standard tenement block of the model "P2" had tiny 4 m² kitchens in the inside of the building (no windows), connected to the dining and living room of the 55 m² apartment and separated from the latter by a pass-through or a window.
allowed an open kitchen again, integrated more or less with the living room without causing the whole apartment or house to smell. Before that, only a few earlier experiments, typically in newly built upper middle class family homes, had open kitchens. Examples are Frank Lloyd Wright
's House Willey (1934) and House Jacobs (1936). Both had open kitchens, with high ceilings (up to the roof) and were aired by skylights. The extractor hood made it possible to build open kitchens in apartments, too, where both high ceilings and skylights were not possible.
The re-integration of the kitchen and the living area went hand in hand with a change in the perception of cooking: increasingly, cooking was seen as a creative
and sometimes social act instead of work. And there was a rejection by younger home-owners of the standard suburban model of separate kitchens and dining rooms found in most 1900-1950 houses. Many families also appreciated the trend towards open kitchens, as it made it easier for the parents to supervise the children while cooking and clear up spills. The enhanced status of cooking also made the kitchen a prestige object for showing off one's wealth or cooking professionalism. Some architect
s have capitalized on this "object" aspect of the kitchen by designing freestanding "kitchen objects". However, like their precursor, Colani's "kitchen satellite", such futuristic designs are exceptions.
Another reason for the trend back to open kitchens (and a foundation of the "kitchen object" philosophy) is changes in how food is prepared. Whereas prior to the 1950s most cooking started out with raw ingredients and a meal had to be prepared from scratch, the advent of frozen meals and pre-prepared convenience food
changed the cooking habits of many people, who consequently used the kitchen less and less. For others, who followed the "cooking as a social act" trend, the open kitchen had the advantage that they could be with their guests while cooking, and for the "creative cooks" it might even become a stage for their cooking performance.
The "Trophy Kitchen" is highly equipped with very expensive and sophisticated appliances which are used primarily to impress visitors and to project social status, rather than for actual cooking.
's A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1843, revised and republished together with her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe
as The American Woman's Home in 1869). Beecher's "model kitchen" propagated for the first time a systematic design based on early ergonomics
. The design included regular shelves on the walls, ample work space, and dedicated storage areas for various food items. Beecher even separated the functions of preparing food and cooking it altogether by moving the stove into a compartment adjacent to the kitchen.
Christine Frederick
published from 1913 a series of articles on "New Household Management" in which she analyzed the kitchen following Taylorist principles, presented detailed time-motion studies, and derived a kitchen design from them. Her ideas were taken up in the 1920s by architects in Germany and Austria
, most notably Bruno Taut
, Erna Meyer, and Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky
. A social housing project in Frankfurt (the Römerstadt of architect Ernst May
) realized in 1927/8 was the breakthrough for her Frankfurt kitchen
, which embodied this new notion of efficiency in the kitchen.
While this "work kitchen" and variants derived from it were a great success for tenement buildings, home owners had different demands and did not want to be constrained by a 6.4 m² kitchen. Nevertheless, kitchen design was mostly ad-hoc following the whims of the architect. In the U.S.
, the "Small Homes Council", since 1993 the "Building Research Council", of the School of Architecture of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
was founded in 1944 with the goal to improve the state of the art in home building, originally with an emphasis on standardization for cost reduction. It was there that the notion of the kitchen work triangle
was formalized: the three main functions in a kitchen are storage, preparation, and cooking (which Catharine Beecher had already recognized), and the places for these functions should be arranged in the kitchen in such a way that work at one place does not interfere with work at another place, the distance between these places is not unnecessarily large, and no obstacles are in the way. A natural arrangement is a triangle
, with the refrigerator, the sink, and the stove at a vertex each.
This observation led to a few common kitchen forms, commonly characterized by the arrangement of the kitchen cabinets and sink, stove, and refrigerator:
In the 1980s there was a backlash against industrial kitchen planning and cabinets with people installing a mix of work surfaces and free standing furniture, led by kitchen designer Johnny Grey
and his concept of the "Unfitted Kitchen".
Modern kitchens often have enough informal space to allow for people to eat in it without having to use the formal dining room
. Such areas are called "breakfast areas", "breakfast nooks" or "breakfast bars" if the space is integrated into a kitchen counter. Kitchens with enough space to eat in are sometimes called "eat-in kitchens".
Restaurant
and canteen
kitchens found in hotel
s, hospital
s, educational and work place facilities, army barracks, and similar establishments are generally (in developed countries) subject to public health
laws. They are inspected periodically by public-health officials, and forced to close if they do not meet hygienic requirements mandated by law.
Canteen kitchens (and castle kitchens) were often the places where new technology was used first. For instance, Benjamin Thompson
's "energy saving stove", an early-19th century fully closed iron stove using one fire to heat several pots, was designed for large kitchens; another thirty years passed before they were adapted for domestic use.
Today's western restaurant kitchens typically have tiled walls and floors and use stainless steel for other surfaces (workbench, but also door and drawer fronts) because these materials are durable and easy to clean. Professional kitchens are often equipped with gas stoves, as these allow cooks
to regulate the heat more quickly and more finely than electrical stoves. Some special appliances are typical for professional kitchens, such as large installed deep fryers, steamers
, or a bain-marie
. ' onMouseout='HidePop("55668")' href="/topics/Pressure_cooking">pressure cooker
— are beginning to find their way into domestic households, sometimes as a combined appliance of oven and steamer.)
The fast food
and convenience food
trends have also changed the way restaurant kitchens operate. There is a trend for restaurants to only "finish" delivered convenience food or even just re-heat completely prepared meals, maybe at the utmost grilling
a hamburger
or a steak
.
The kitchens in railway dining car
s present special challenges: Space is constrained, and, nevertheless, the personnel must be able to serve a great number of meals quickly. Especially in the early history of railways this required flawless organization of processes; in modern times, the microwave oven
and prepared meals have made this task much easier. Galleys
are kitchens aboard ship
s or aircraft
(although the term galley is also often used to refer to a railroad dining car's kitchen). On yacht
s, galleys are often cramped, with one or two burners fueled by an LP gas bottle, but kitchens on cruise ship
s or large warship
s are comparable in every respect with restaurants or canteen kitchens. On passenger airliner
s, the kitchen is reduced to a mere pantry
, the only function reminiscent of a kitchen is the heating of in-flight meals delivered by a catering
company. An extreme form of the kitchen occurs in space, e.g., aboard a Space Shuttle
(where it is also called the "galley") or the International Space Station
. The astronaut
s' food is generally completely prepared, dehydrated
, and sealed in plastic pouches, and the kitchen is reduced to a rehydration and heating module.
Outdoor areas in which food is prepared are generally not considered to be kitchens, although an outdoor area set up for regular food preparation, for instance when camping
, might be called an "outdoor kitchen". Military camps and similar temporary settlements of nomad
s may have dedicated kitchen tents.
In schools where home economics (HE) or food technology
(previously known as "domestic science") are taught, there will be a series of kitchens with multiple equipment (similar in some respects to laboratories
) solely for the purpose of teaching. These will consist of six to twelve workstations, each with their own oven
, sink
and kitchen utensils.
. Until the Meiji era, a kitchen was also called kamado (かまど; lit. stove
) and there are many sayings in the Japanese language
that involve kamado as it was considered the symbol of a house and the term could even be used to mean "family" or "household" (similar to the English word "hearth"). When separating a family, it was called Kamado wo wakeru, which means "divide the stove". Kamado wo yaburu (lit. "break the stove") means that the family was bankrupt.
Cooking
Cooking is the process of preparing food by use of heat. Cooking techniques and ingredients vary widely across the world, reflecting unique environmental, economic, and cultural traditions. Cooks themselves also vary widely in skill and training...
and food preparation.
In the West, a modern residential kitchen is typically equipped with a stove, a sink
Sink
A sink is a bowl-shaped plumbing fixture used for washing hands, for dishwashing or other purposes. Sinks generally have taps that supply hot and cold water and may include a spray feature to be used for faster rinsing...
with hot and cold running water, a refrigerator
Refrigerator
A refrigerator is a common household appliance that consists of a thermally insulated compartment and a heat pump that transfers heat from the inside of the fridge to its external environment so that the inside of the fridge is cooled to a temperature below the ambient temperature of the room...
and kitchen cabinets
Cabinet (furniture)
A cabinet is usually a box-shaped piece of furniture with doors or drawers for storing miscellaneous items. Some cabinets stand alone while others are built into a wall or are attached to it like a medicine cabinet. Cabinets are typically made of wood or, now increasingly, of synthetic...
arranged according to a modular design. Many households have a microwave oven
Microwave oven
A microwave oven is a kitchen appliance that heats food by dielectric heating, using microwave radiation to heat polarized molecules within the food...
, a dishwasher
Dishwasher
A dishwasher is a mechanical device for cleaning dishes and eating utensils. Dishwashers can be found in restaurants and private homes.Unlike manual dishwashing, which relies largely on physical scrubbing to remove soiling, the mechanical dishwasher cleans by spraying hot water, typically between ...
and other electric appliances. The main function of a kitchen is cooking or preparing food but it may also be used for dining and entertaining.
History
The evolution of the kitchen is linked to the invention of the cooking range or stoveStove
A stove is an enclosed heated space. The term is commonly taken to mean an enclosed space in which fuel is burned to provide heating, either to heat the space in which the stove is situated or to heat the stove itself, and items placed on it...
and the development of water infrastructure capable of supplying water to private homes. Until the 18th century, food was cooked over an open fire
Fire
Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material in the chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction products. Slower oxidative processes like rusting or digestion are not included by this definition....
. Technical advances in heating food in the 18th and 19th centuries, changed the architecture of the kitchen. Before the advent of modern pipes, water was brought from an outdoor source such as wells
Water well
A water well is an excavation or structure created in the ground by digging, driving, boring or drilling to access groundwater in underground aquifers. The well water is drawn by an electric submersible pump, a trash pump, a vertical turbine pump, a handpump or a mechanical pump...
, pumps or springs.
Antiquity
The houses in Ancient Greece were commonly of the atriumAtrium (architecture)
In modern architecture, an atrium is a large open space, often several stories high and having a glazed roof and/or large windows, often situated within a larger multistory building and often located immediately beyond the main entrance doors...
-type: the rooms were arranged around a central courtyard for women. In many such homes, a covered but otherwise open patio served as the kitchen. Homes of the wealthy had the kitchen as a separate room, usually next to a bathroom (so that both rooms could be heated by the kitchen fire), both rooms being accessible from the court. In such houses, there was often a separate small storage room in the back of the kitchen used for storing food and kitchen utensils.
In the Roman Empire
Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....
, common folk in cities often had no kitchen of their own; they did their cooking
Cooking
Cooking is the process of preparing food by use of heat. Cooking techniques and ingredients vary widely across the world, reflecting unique environmental, economic, and cultural traditions. Cooks themselves also vary widely in skill and training...
in large public kitchens. Some had small mobile bronze
Bronze
Bronze is a metal alloy consisting primarily of copper, usually with tin as the main additive. It is hard and brittle, and it was particularly significant in antiquity, so much so that the Bronze Age was named after the metal...
stoves, on which a fire could be lit for cooking. Wealthy Romans
Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
had relatively well-equipped kitchens. In a Roman villa
Villa
A villa was originally an ancient Roman upper-class country house. Since its origins in the Roman villa, the idea and function of a villa have evolved considerably. After the fall of the Roman Republic, villas became small farming compounds, which were increasingly fortified in Late Antiquity,...
, the kitchen was typically integrated into the main building as a separate room, set apart for practical reasons of smoke
Smoke
Smoke is a collection of airborne solid and liquid particulates and gases emitted when a material undergoes combustion or pyrolysis, together with the quantity of air that is entrained or otherwise mixed into the mass. It is commonly an unwanted by-product of fires , but may also be used for pest...
and sociological reasons of the kitchen being operated by slaves
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
. The fireplace
Fireplace
A fireplace is an architectural structure to contain a fire for heating and, especially historically, for cooking. A fire is contained in a firebox or firepit; a chimney or other flue allows gas and particulate exhaust to escape...
was typically on the floor, placed at a wall—sometimes raised a little bit—such that one had to kneel to cook. There were no chimney
Chimney
A chimney is a structure for venting hot flue gases or smoke from a boiler, stove, furnace or fireplace to the outside atmosphere. Chimneys are typically vertical, or as near as possible to vertical, to ensure that the gases flow smoothly, drawing air into the combustion in what is known as the...
s.
Middle Ages
Early medieval European longhouses had an open fire under the highest point of the building. The "kitchen area" was between the entrance and the fireplace. In wealthy homes there was typically more than one kitchen. In some homes there were upwards of three kitchens. The kitchens were divided based on the types of food prepared in them. In place of a chimney, these early buildings had a hole in the roof through which some of the smoke could escape. Besides cooking, the fire also served as a source of heat and light to the single-room building. A similar design can be found in the IroquoisIroquois
The Iroquois , also known as the Haudenosaunee or the "People of the Longhouse", are an association of several tribes of indigenous people of North America...
longhouses of North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
.
In the larger homesteads of European nobles, the kitchen was sometimes in a separate sunken floor building to keep the main building, which served social and official purposes, free from indoor smoke
Indoor air quality
Indoor air quality is a term referring to the air quality within and around buildings and structures, especially as it relates to the health and comfort of building occupants....
.
The first known stoves in Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
date from about the same time. The earliest findings are from the Kofun period
Kofun period
The is an era in the history of Japan from around 250 to 538. It follows the Yayoi period. The word kofun is Japanese for the type of burial mounds dating from this era. The Kofun and the subsequent Asuka periods are sometimes referred to collectively as the Yamato period...
(3rd to 6th century). These stoves, called kamado, were typically made of clay and mortar; they were fired with wood
Wood
Wood is a hard, fibrous tissue found in many trees. It has been used for hundreds of thousands of years for both fuel and as a construction material. It is an organic material, a natural composite of cellulose fibers embedded in a matrix of lignin which resists compression...
or charcoal
Charcoal
Charcoal is the dark grey residue consisting of carbon, and any remaining ash, obtained by removing water and other volatile constituents from animal and vegetation substances. Charcoal is usually produced by slow pyrolysis, the heating of wood or other substances in the absence of oxygen...
through a hole in the front and had a hole in the top, into which a pot could be hanged by its rim. This type of stove remained in use for centuries to come, with only minor modifications. Like in Europe, the wealthier homes had a separate building which served for cooking. A kind of open fire pit fired with charcoal, called irori, remained in use as the secondary stove in most homes until the Edo period
Edo period
The , or , is a division of Japanese history which was ruled by the shoguns of the Tokugawa family, running from 1603 to 1868. The political entity of this period was the Tokugawa shogunate....
(17th to 19th century). A kamado was used to cook the staple food, for instance rice
Rice
Rice is the seed of the monocot plants Oryza sativa or Oryza glaberrima . As a cereal grain, it is the most important staple food for a large part of the world's human population, especially in East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and the West Indies...
, while irori served both to cook side dishes and as a heat source.
The kitchen remained largely unaffected by architectural advances throughout the Middle Ages; open fire remained the only method of heating food. European medieval kitchens were dark, smoky, and sooty places, whence their name "smoke kitchen". In European medieval cities around the 10th to 12th centuries, the kitchen still used an open fire hearth
Hearth
In common historic and modern usage, a hearth is a brick- or stone-lined fireplace or oven often used for cooking and/or heating. For centuries, the hearth was considered an integral part of a home, often its central or most important feature...
in the middle of the room. In wealthy homes, the ground floor was often used as a stable while the kitchen was located on the floor above, like the bedroom and the hall. In castle
Castle
A castle is a type of fortified structure built in Europe and the Middle East during the Middle Ages by European nobility. Scholars debate the scope of the word castle, but usually consider it to be the private fortified residence of a lord or noble...
s and monasteries
Monastery
Monastery denotes the building, or complex of buildings, that houses a room reserved for prayer as well as the domestic quarters and workplace of monastics, whether monks or nuns, and whether living in community or alone .Monasteries may vary greatly in size – a small dwelling accommodating only...
, the living and working areas were separated; the kitchen was sometimes moved to a separate building, and thus could not serve anymore to heat the living rooms. In some castles the kitchen was retained in the same structure, but servants were strictly separated from nobles, by constructing separate spiral stone staircases for use of servants to bring food to upper levels. An extant example of such a medieval kitchen with servants' staircase is at Muchalls Castle
Muchalls Castle
Muchalls Castle stands overlooking the North Sea in the countryside of Kincardine and Mearns, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. The lower course is a well preserved double groined 13th century towerhouse structure, built by the Frasers of Muchalls. Upon this structure, the 17th century castle was begun by...
in Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
. In Japanese homes, the kitchen started to become a separate room within the main building at that time.
With the advent of the chimney, the hearth moved from the center of the room to one wall, and the first brick-and-mortar hearths were built. The fire was lit on top of the construction; a vault underneath served to store wood. Pots made of iron
Iron
Iron is a chemical element with the symbol Fe and atomic number 26. It is a metal in the first transition series. It is the most common element forming the planet Earth as a whole, forming much of Earth's outer and inner core. It is the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust...
, bronze
Bronze
Bronze is a metal alloy consisting primarily of copper, usually with tin as the main additive. It is hard and brittle, and it was particularly significant in antiquity, so much so that the Bronze Age was named after the metal...
, or copper
Copper
Copper is a chemical element with the symbol Cu and atomic number 29. It is a ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. Pure copper is soft and malleable; an exposed surface has a reddish-orange tarnish...
started to replace the pottery
Pottery
Pottery is the material from which the potteryware is made, of which major types include earthenware, stoneware and porcelain. The place where such wares are made is also called a pottery . Pottery also refers to the art or craft of the potter or the manufacture of pottery...
used earlier. The temperature was controlled by hanging the pot higher or lower over the fire, or placing it on a trivet
Trivet
A trivet is an object placed between a serving dish or bowl, and a dining table, usually to protect the table from heat damage.Trivet also refers to a tripod used to elevate pots from the coals of an open fire...
or directly on the hot ashes. Using open fire for cooking (and heating) was risky; fires devastating whole cities occurred frequently.
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...
invented an automated system for a rotating spit for spit-roasting: a propeller in the chimney made the spit turn all by itself. This kind of system was widely used in wealthier homes. Beginning in the late Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
, kitchens in Europe lost their home-heating function even more and were increasingly moved from the living area into a separate room. The living room was now heated by tiled stoves, operated from the kitchen, which offered the huge advantage of not filling the room with smoke.
Freed from smoke and dirt, the living room thus began to serve as an area for social functions and increasingly became a showcase for the owner's wealth. In the upper classes, cooking and the kitchen were the domain of the servants, and the kitchen was set apart from the living rooms, sometimes even far from the dining room. Poorer homes often did not have a separate kitchen yet; they kept the one-room arrangement where all activities took place, or at the most had the kitchen in the entrance hall.
The medieval smoke kitchen (or Farmhouse kitchen
Farmhouse kitchen
A farmhouse kitchen is a kitchen room designed for food preparation, dining and a sociable space. Typical of poorer farmhouses throughout the Middle Ages where rooms were limited, wealthier households would separate the smoke of the kitchen from the dining and entertaining areas, farmhouse...
) remained common, especially in rural farmhouses and generally in poorer homes, until much later. In a few European farmhouses, the smoke kitchen was in regular use until the middle of the 20th century. These houses often had no chimney, but only a smoke hood above the fireplace, made of wood and covered with clay, used to smoke meat. The smoke rose more or less freely, warming the upstairs rooms and protecting the woodwork from vermin.
Colonial America
In the Colony of Connecticut, as in other states of New EnglandNew England
New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United States consisting of the six states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut...
during Colonial America
Colonial America
The colonial history of the United States covers the history from the start of European settlement and especially the history of the thirteen colonies of Britain until they declared independence in 1776. In the late 16th century, England, France, Spain and the Netherlands launched major...
, kitchens were often built as separate rooms and were located behind the parlor and keeping room
Hall
In architecture, a hall is fundamentally a relatively large space enclosed by a roof and walls. In the Iron Age, a mead hall was such a simple building and was the residence of a lord and his retainers...
or dining room
Dining room
A dining room is a room for consuming food. In modern times it is usually adjacent to the kitchen for convenience in serving, although in medieval times it was often on an entirely different floor level...
. One early record of a kitchen is found in the 1648 inventory of the estate of a John Porter of Windsor, Connecticut
Windsor, Connecticut
Windsor is a town in Hartford County, Connecticut, United States, and was the first English settlement in the state. It lies on the northern border of Connecticut's capital, Hartford. The population was estimated at 28,778 in 2005....
. The inventory lists goods in the house over the kittchin and in the kittchin. The items listed in the kitchen were; silver spoon
Silver spoon
The English language expression silver spoon is synonymous with wealth, especially inherited wealth; someone born into a wealthy family is said to have "been born with a silver spoon in his mouth". As an adjective, "silver-spoon" describes someone who has a prosperous background or is of a...
s, pewter
Pewter
Pewter is a malleable metal alloy, traditionally 85–99% tin, with the remainder consisting of copper, antimony, bismuth and lead. Copper and antimony act as hardeners while lead is common in the lower grades of pewter, which have a bluish tint. It has a low melting point, around 170–230 °C ,...
, brass
Brass
Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc; the proportions of zinc and copper can be varied to create a range of brasses with varying properties.In comparison, bronze is principally an alloy of copper and tin...
, iron, arms, ammunition, hemp
Hemp
Hemp is mostly used as a name for low tetrahydrocannabinol strains of the plant Cannabis sativa, of fiber and/or oilseed varieties. In modern times, hemp has been used for industrial purposes including paper, textiles, biodegradable plastics, construction, health food and fuel with modest...
, flax
Flax
Flax is a member of the genus Linum in the family Linaceae. It is native to the region extending from the eastern Mediterranean to India and was probably first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent...
and other implements about the room.
In the southern states, where the climate
Climate
Climate encompasses the statistics of temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, rainfall, atmospheric particle count and other meteorological elemental measurements in a given region over long periods...
and sociological
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...
conditions differed from the north, the kitchen was often relegated to an outbuilding, separate from the big house, the mansion
Mansion
A mansion is a very large dwelling house. U.S. real estate brokers define a mansion as a dwelling of over . A traditional European mansion was defined as a house which contained a ballroom and tens of bedrooms...
, for much of the same reasons as in the feudal kitchen in medieval Europe: the kitchen was operated by slaves
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
, and their working place had to be separated from the living area of the masters by the social standards of the time. Separate summer kitchens were also common on large farms in the north. These were used to prepare meals for harvest workers and tasks such as canning
Canning
Canning is a method of preserving food in which the food contents are processed and sealed in an airtight container. Canning provides a typical shelf life ranging from one to five years, although under specific circumstances a freeze-dried canned product, such as canned, dried lentils, can last as...
during the warm summer months.
Industrialization
Franklin stove
The Franklin stove is a metal-lined fireplace named after its inventor, Benjamin Franklin. It was invented in 1741.L.W. Labaree, W. Bell, W.B. Willcox, et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin , vol. 2, page 419...
around 1740, which was a furnace
Furnace
A furnace is a device used for heating. The name derives from Latin fornax, oven.In American English and Canadian English, the term furnace on its own is generally used to describe household heating systems based on a central furnace , and sometimes as a synonym for kiln, a device used in the...
stove intended for heating, not for cooking. Benjamin Thompson
Benjamin Thompson
Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford , FRS was an American-born British physicist and inventor whose challenges to established physical theory were part of the 19th century revolution in thermodynamics. He also served as a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Loyalist forces in America during the American...
in England designed his "Rumford stove" around 1800. This stove was much more energy efficient than earlier stoves; it used one fire to heat several pots, which were hung into holes on top of the stove and were thus heated from all sides instead of just from the bottom. However, his stove was designed for large kitchens; it was too big for domestic use. The "Oberlin stove" was a refinement of the technique that resulted in a size reduction; it was patent
Patent
A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....
ed in the U.S. in 1834 and became a commercial success with some 90,000 units sold over the next 30 years. These stoves were still fired with wood
Wood
Wood is a hard, fibrous tissue found in many trees. It has been used for hundreds of thousands of years for both fuel and as a construction material. It is an organic material, a natural composite of cellulose fibers embedded in a matrix of lignin which resists compression...
or coal
Coal
Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock usually occurring in rock strata in layers or veins called coal beds or coal seams. The harder forms, such as anthracite coal, can be regarded as metamorphic rock because of later exposure to elevated temperature and pressure...
. Although the first gas street lamps
Gas lighting
Gas lighting is production of artificial light from combustion of a gaseous fuel, including hydrogen, methane, carbon monoxide, propane, butane, acetylene, ethylene, or natural gas. Before electricity became sufficiently widespread and economical to allow for general public use, gas was the most...
were installed in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, and Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
at the beginning of the 1820s and the first U.S. patent on a gas stove was granted in 1825, it was not until the late 19th century that using gas for lighting and cooking became commonplace in urban areas.
The urbanization
Urbanization
Urbanization, urbanisation or urban drift is the physical growth of urban areas as a result of global change. The United Nations projected that half of the world's population would live in urban areas at the end of 2008....
in the second half of the 19th century induced other significant changes that would ultimately change the kitchen. Out of sheer necessity, cities began planning and building water distribution pipes into homes, and built sewers
Sanitary sewer
A sanitary sewer is a separate underground carriage system specifically for transporting sewage from houses and commercial buildings to treatment or disposal. Sanitary sewers serving industrial areas also carry industrial wastewater...
to deal with the waste water. Gas pipes were laid; gas was used first for lighting purposes, but once the network had grown sufficiently, it also became available for heating and cooking on gas stoves. At the turn of the 20th century, electricity
Electricity
Electricity is a general term encompassing a variety of phenomena resulting from the presence and flow of electric charge. These include many easily recognizable phenomena, such as lightning, static electricity, and the flow of electrical current in an electrical wire...
had been mastered well enough to become a commercially viable alternative to gas and slowly started replacing the latter. But like the gas stove, the electrical stove had a slow start. The first electrical stove had been presented in 1893 at the World's Columbian Exposition
World's Columbian Exposition
The World's Columbian Exposition was a World's Fair held in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World in 1492. Chicago bested New York City; Washington, D.C.; and St...
in Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, but it was not until the 1930s that the technology was stable enough and began to take off.
Industrialization also caused social changes. The new factory
Factory
A factory or manufacturing plant is an industrial building where laborers manufacture goods or supervise machines processing one product into another. Most modern factories have large warehouses or warehouse-like facilities that contain heavy equipment used for assembly line production...
working class
Working class
Working class is a term used in the social sciences and in ordinary conversation to describe those employed in lower tier jobs , often extending to those in unemployment or otherwise possessing below-average incomes...
in the cities was housed under generally poor conditions. Whole families lived in small one or two-room apartment
Apartment
An apartment or flat is a self-contained housing unit that occupies only part of a building...
s in tenement buildings up to six stories high, badly aired and with insufficient lighting. Sometimes, they shared apartments with "night sleepers", unmarried men who paid for a bed at night. The kitchen in such an apartment was often used as a living and sleeping room, and even as a bathroom
Bathroom
A bathroom is a room for bathing in containing a bathtub and/or a shower and optionally a toilet, a sink/hand basin/wash basin and possibly also a bidet....
. Water had to be fetched from wells and heated on the stove. Water pipes were laid only towards the end of the 19th century, and then often only with one tap per building or per story. Brick-and-mortar stoves fired with coal remained the norm until well into the second half of the century. Pots and kitchenware were typically stored on open shelves, and parts of the room could be separated from the rest using simple curtains.
In contrast, there were no dramatic changes for the upper classes. The kitchen, located in the basement
Basement
__FORCETOC__A basement is one or more floors of a building that are either completely or partially below the ground floor. Basements are typically used as a utility space for a building where such items as the furnace, water heater, breaker panel or fuse box, car park, and air-conditioning system...
or the ground floor, continued to be operated by servants. In some houses, water pump
Pump
A pump is a device used to move fluids, such as liquids, gases or slurries.A pump displaces a volume by physical or mechanical action. Pumps fall into three major groups: direct lift, displacement, and gravity pumps...
s were installed, and some even had kitchen sinks and drains (but no water on tap yet, except for some feudal kitchens in castles). The kitchen became a much cleaner space with the advent of "cooking machines", closed stoves made of iron plates and fired by wood and increasingly charcoal or coal, and that had flue pipe
Flue pipe
A flue pipe is an organ pipe that produces sound through the vibration of air molecules, in the same manner as a recorder or a whistle. Air under pressure is driven down a flue and against a sharp lip called a Labium, causing the column of air in the pipe to resonate at a frequency determined by...
s connected to the chimney. For the servants the kitchen continued to also serve as a sleeping room; they slept either on the floor, or later in narrow spaces above a lowered ceiling, for the new stoves with their smoke outlet no longer required a high ceiling in the kitchen. The kitchen floors were tiled; kitchenware was neatly stored in cupboard
Cupboard
A cupboard or press is a type of cabinet, often made of wood, used indoors to store household objects such as food, crockery, textiles and liquor, and protect them from dust,vermin and dirt....
s to protect them from dust and steam. A large table served as a workbench; there were at least as many chairs as there were servants, for the table in the kitchen also doubled as the eating place for the servants.
The middle class tried to imitate the luxurious dining styles of the upper class as best as it could. Living in smaller apartments, the kitchen was the main room—here, the family lived. The study or living room was saved for special occasions such as an occasional dinner invitation. Because of this, these middle-class kitchens were often more homely than those of the upper class, where the kitchen was a work-only room occupied only by the servants. Besides a cupboard to store the kitchenware
Kitchenware
Kitchenware include utensils, appliances, dishes, cookware, and so on for use in the kitchen.-See also:*Cookware and bakeware*Dishware*Drinkware*List of eating utensils*List of food preparation utensils*List of Japanese cooking utensils...
, there were a table and chairs, where the family would dine, and sometimes—if space allowed—even a fauteuil
Fauteuil
A fauteuil is a style of open-arm chair with a primarily exposed wooden frame originating in France in the early 18th century. A fauteuil is made of wood, and frequently with carved relief ornament. It is typically upholstered on the seat, the seat back and on the arms . Some fauteuils have a...
or a couch.
Gas pipes were first laid in the late 19th century, and gas stoves started to replace the older coal-fired stoves. Gas was more expensive than coal, though, and thus the new technology was first installed in the wealthier homes. Where workers' apartments were equipped with a gas stove, gas distribution would go through a coin meter.
In rural areas, the older technology using coal or wood stoves or even brick-and-mortar open fireplaces remained common throughout. Gas and water pipes were first installed in the big cities; small villages were connected only much later.
Rationalization
Time and motion study
A time and motion study is a business efficiency technique combining the Time Study work of Frederick Winslow Taylor with the Motion Study work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth . It is a major part of scientific management...
were used to optimize processes. These ideas also spilled over into domestic kitchen architecture because of a growing trend that called for a professionalization of household work, started in the mid-19th century by Catharine Beecher
Catharine Beecher
Catharine Esther Beecher was an American educator known for her forthright opinions on women's education as well as her vehement support of the many benefits of the incorporation of kindergarten into children's education....
and amplified by Christine Frederick
Christine Frederick
Christine Isobel McGaffey Frederick was an American home economist and early 20th century exponent of Taylorism as applied to the domestic sphere. She conducted experiments aimed at improving household efficiency, as well as arguing for women's vital role as consumers in a mass-production economy...
's publications in the 1910s. The German kitchen brand 'Poggenpohl', established in 1892 by Friedemir Poggenpohl, introduced ergonomic work-top heights and storage chutes that were later adopted by Schütte-Lihotzky's Frankfurt Kitchen
Frankfurt kitchen
The Frankfurt kitchen was a milestone in domestic architecture, considered the fore-runner of modern fitted kitchens, for it realised for the first time a kitchen built after a unified concept, designed to enable efficient work and to be built at low cost...
.
Working class women frequently worked in factories to ensure the family's survival, as the men's wages often did not suffice. Social housing projects led to the next milestone: the "Frankfurt kitchen." Developed in 1926, this kitchen measured 1.9 m by 3.4 m (approximately 6 ft 2 inby 11 ft 2 in, with a standard layout. It was built for two purposes: to optimize kitchen work to reduce cooking time and lower the cost of building decently equipped kitchens. The design, created by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was the first female Austrian architect and an activist in the Nazi resistance movement. She is mostly remembered today for designing the so-called Frankfurt Kitchen.-Training:...
, was the result of detailed time-motion studies and interviews with future tenants to identify what they needed from their kitchens. Schütte-Lihotzky's fitted kitchen was built in some 10,000 apartments in the housing projects erected in Frankfurt
Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...
in the 1930s.
The initial reception was critical: it was so small that only one person could work in it; some storage spaces intended for raw loose food ingredients such as flour
Flour
Flour is a powder which is made by grinding cereal grains, other seeds or roots . It is the main ingredient of bread, which is a staple food for many cultures, making the availability of adequate supplies of flour a major economic and political issue at various times throughout history...
were reachable by children. But the Frankfurt kitchen embodied a standard for the rest of the 20th century in rental apartments: the "work kitchen". It was criticized as "exiling the women in the kitchen", but post-World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
conservatism coupled with economic reasons prevailed. The kitchen once more was seen as a work place that needed to be separated from the living areas. Practical reasons also played a role in this development: just as in the bourgeois homes of the past, one reason for separating the kitchen was to keep the steam and smells of cooking out of the living room.
Unit/fitted
Imm Cologne
The imm Cologne is an international, public open furniture trade show held at koelnmesse exhibition centre Cologne, Germany - every year in January....
furniture fair in 1950.
The idea of standardized dimensions and layout developed for the Frankfurt kitchen took hold while Poggenpohl began exporting to neighboring countries which for the first time required a kitchen specifier known today as a kitchen designer. The equipment used remained a standard for years to come: hot and cold water on tap and a kitchen sink and an electrical or gas stove and oven. Not much later, the refrigerator
Refrigerator
A refrigerator is a common household appliance that consists of a thermally insulated compartment and a heat pump that transfers heat from the inside of the fridge to its external environment so that the inside of the fridge is cooled to a temperature below the ambient temperature of the room...
was added as a standard item. The concept was refined in the "Swedish kitchen" using unit furniture with wooden fronts for the kitchen cabinets. Soon the concept was amended by the use of smooth synthetic door and drawer fronts, first in white, recalling a sense of cleanliness and alluding to sterile lab or hospital settings, but soon after in more lively colors, too.
Unit construction since its introduction has defined the development of the modern kitchen, with pre-manufactured modules using mass manufacturing techniques developed during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
greatly bringing down the cost of a kitchen. Units which are kept on the floor are called "floor units", "floor cabinets", or "base cabinets" on which a kitchen worktop
Countertop
Countertop usually refers to a horizontal worksurface in kitchens or other food preparation areas, bathrooms or lavatories, and workrooms in general. It is frequently installed upon and supported by cabinets...
, originally often formica
Formica
Formica is a genus of ants of the family Formicidae, commonly known as wood ants, mound ants, or field ants. Formica is the type genus of the Formicidae, and of the subfamily Formicinae...
and often now made of granite
Granite
Granite is a common and widely occurring type of intrusive, felsic, igneous rock. Granite usually has a medium- to coarse-grained texture. Occasionally some individual crystals are larger than the groundmass, in which case the texture is known as porphyritic. A granitic rock with a porphyritic...
, marble
Marble
Marble is a metamorphic rock composed of recrystallized carbonate minerals, most commonly calcite or dolomite.Geologists use the term "marble" to refer to metamorphosed limestone; however stonemasons use the term more broadly to encompass unmetamorphosed limestone.Marble is commonly used for...
, tile or wood is placed. The units which are held on the wall for storage purposes are termed as "wall units" or "wall cabinets". In small areas of kitchen in an apartment, even a "tall storage unit" is available for effective storage. In cheaper brands, all cabinets are kept a uniform color, normally white, with interchangeable doors and accessories chosen by the customer to give a varied look. In more expensive brands, the cabinets are produced matching the doors' colors and finishes, for an older more bespoke look.
Technicalization
A trend began in the 1940s in the United States to equip the kitchen with electrified smallSmall appliance
Small appliance refers to a class of home appliances that are portable or semi-portable or which are used on tabletops, countertops, or other platforms in the United States of America...
and large kitchen appliances
Major appliance
A major appliance, or domestic appliance, is usually defined as a large machine which accomplishes some routine housekeeping task, which includes purposes such as cooking, or food preservation, whether in a household, institutional, commercial or industrial setting...
such as blenders
Blender (device)
A blender is a kitchen and laboratory appliance used to mix, puree, or emulsify food and other substances. A stationary blender consists of a blender jar with blade at the bottom, rotated by a motor in the base...
, toaster
Toaster
The toaster is typically a small electric kitchen appliance designed to toast multiple types of bread products. A typical modern two-slice toaster draws anywhere between 600 and 1200 W and makes toast in 1 to 3 minutes...
s, and later also microwave oven
Microwave oven
A microwave oven is a kitchen appliance that heats food by dielectric heating, using microwave radiation to heat polarized molecules within the food...
s. Following the end of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, massive demand in Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
for low-price, high-tech consumer goods led to Western European kitchens being designed to accommodate new appliances such as refrigerators and electric/gas cookers.
Parallel to this development in tenement buildings was the evolution of the kitchen in homeowner's houses. There, the kitchens usually were somewhat larger, suitable for everyday use as a dining room, but otherwise the ongoing technicalization was the same, and the use of unit furniture also became a standard in this market sector.
General technocentric enthusiasm even led some designers to take the "work kitchen" approach even further, culminating in futuristic designs like Luigi Colani
Luigi Colani
Luigi Colani, , is a German industrial designer whose father came from Madulain near St. Moritz in Switzerland....
's "kitchen satellite" (1969, commissioned by the German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
high-end kitchen manufacturer Poggenpohl
Poggenpohl
Poggenpohl Möbelwerke is a cabinet manufacturer based in Herford, Germany, specializing in luxury kitchen cabinets. Poggenpohl is recognized as the oldest kitchen brand in the world and one of the leading international brand names in kitchen design, known in more than 70 countries worldwide...
for an exhibit), in which the room was reduced to a ball with a chair in the middle and all appliances at arm's length, an optimal arrangement maybe for "applying heat to food", but not necessarily for actual cooking. Such extravaganzas remained outside the norm, though.
In the former Eastern bloc
Eastern bloc
The term Eastern Bloc or Communist Bloc refers to the former communist states of Eastern and Central Europe, generally the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact...
countries, the official doctrine
Doctrine
Doctrine is a codification of beliefs or a body of teachings or instructions, taught principles or positions, as the body of teachings in a branch of knowledge or belief system...
viewed cooking as a mere necessity, and women should work "for the society" in factories, not at home. Also, housing had to be built at low costs and quickly, which led directly to the standardized apartment block using prefabricated slabs. The kitchen was reduced to its minimums and the "work kitchen" paradigm taken to its extremes: in East Germany for instance, the standard tenement block of the model "P2" had tiny 4 m² kitchens in the inside of the building (no windows), connected to the dining and living room of the 55 m² apartment and separated from the latter by a pass-through or a window.
Open kitchens
Starting in the 1980s, the perfection of the extractor hoodExtractor hood
An extractor hood is a device containing a mechanical fan that hangs above the stove or cooktop in the kitchen. It removes airborne grease, combustion products, smoke, odors, heat, and steam from the air by a combination of filtration and evacuation of the air.-Name:The device is known as an...
allowed an open kitchen again, integrated more or less with the living room without causing the whole apartment or house to smell. Before that, only a few earlier experiments, typically in newly built upper middle class family homes, had open kitchens. Examples are Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect, interior designer, writer and educator, who designed more than 1,000 structures and completed 500 works. Wright believed in designing structures which were in harmony with humanity and its environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture...
's House Willey (1934) and House Jacobs (1936). Both had open kitchens, with high ceilings (up to the roof) and were aired by skylights. The extractor hood made it possible to build open kitchens in apartments, too, where both high ceilings and skylights were not possible.
The re-integration of the kitchen and the living area went hand in hand with a change in the perception of cooking: increasingly, cooking was seen as a creative
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
and sometimes social act instead of work. And there was a rejection by younger home-owners of the standard suburban model of separate kitchens and dining rooms found in most 1900-1950 houses. Many families also appreciated the trend towards open kitchens, as it made it easier for the parents to supervise the children while cooking and clear up spills. The enhanced status of cooking also made the kitchen a prestige object for showing off one's wealth or cooking professionalism. Some architect
Architect
An architect is a person trained in the planning, design and oversight of the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to offer or render services in connection with the design and construction of a building, or group of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the...
s have capitalized on this "object" aspect of the kitchen by designing freestanding "kitchen objects". However, like their precursor, Colani's "kitchen satellite", such futuristic designs are exceptions.
Another reason for the trend back to open kitchens (and a foundation of the "kitchen object" philosophy) is changes in how food is prepared. Whereas prior to the 1950s most cooking started out with raw ingredients and a meal had to be prepared from scratch, the advent of frozen meals and pre-prepared convenience food
Convenience food
Convenience food, or tertiary processed food, is commercially prepared food designed for ease of consumption. Products designated as convenience foods are often prepared food stuffs that can be sold as hot, ready-to-eat dishes; as room-temperature, shelf-stable products; or as refrigerated or...
changed the cooking habits of many people, who consequently used the kitchen less and less. For others, who followed the "cooking as a social act" trend, the open kitchen had the advantage that they could be with their guests while cooking, and for the "creative cooks" it might even become a stage for their cooking performance.
The "Trophy Kitchen" is highly equipped with very expensive and sophisticated appliances which are used primarily to impress visitors and to project social status, rather than for actual cooking.
Domestic kitchen planning
Domestic (or residential) kitchen design per se is a relatively recent discipline. The first ideas to optimize the work in the kitchen go back to Catharine BeecherCatharine Beecher
Catharine Esther Beecher was an American educator known for her forthright opinions on women's education as well as her vehement support of the many benefits of the incorporation of kindergarten into children's education....
's A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1843, revised and republished together with her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American abolitionist and author. Her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was a depiction of life for African-Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and United Kingdom...
as The American Woman's Home in 1869). Beecher's "model kitchen" propagated for the first time a systematic design based on early ergonomics
Ergonomics
Ergonomics is the study of designing equipment and devices that fit the human body, its movements, and its cognitive abilities.The International Ergonomics Association defines ergonomics as follows:...
. The design included regular shelves on the walls, ample work space, and dedicated storage areas for various food items. Beecher even separated the functions of preparing food and cooking it altogether by moving the stove into a compartment adjacent to the kitchen.
Christine Frederick
Christine Frederick
Christine Isobel McGaffey Frederick was an American home economist and early 20th century exponent of Taylorism as applied to the domestic sphere. She conducted experiments aimed at improving household efficiency, as well as arguing for women's vital role as consumers in a mass-production economy...
published from 1913 a series of articles on "New Household Management" in which she analyzed the kitchen following Taylorist principles, presented detailed time-motion studies, and derived a kitchen design from them. Her ideas were taken up in the 1920s by architects in Germany and Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
, most notably Bruno Taut
Bruno Taut
Bruno Julius Florian Taut , was a prolific German architect, urban planner and author active during the Weimar period....
, Erna Meyer, and Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was the first female Austrian architect and an activist in the Nazi resistance movement. She is mostly remembered today for designing the so-called Frankfurt Kitchen.-Training:...
. A social housing project in Frankfurt (the Römerstadt of architect Ernst May
Ernst May
Ernst May was a German architect and city planner.May successfully applied urban design techniques to the city of Frankfurt am Main during Germany's Weimar period, and in 1930 less successfully exported those ideas to Soviet Union cities, newly created under Stalinist rule...
) realized in 1927/8 was the breakthrough for her Frankfurt kitchen
Frankfurt kitchen
The Frankfurt kitchen was a milestone in domestic architecture, considered the fore-runner of modern fitted kitchens, for it realised for the first time a kitchen built after a unified concept, designed to enable efficient work and to be built at low cost...
, which embodied this new notion of efficiency in the kitchen.
While this "work kitchen" and variants derived from it were a great success for tenement buildings, home owners had different demands and did not want to be constrained by a 6.4 m² kitchen. Nevertheless, kitchen design was mostly ad-hoc following the whims of the architect. In the U.S.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, the "Small Homes Council", since 1993 the "Building Research Council", of the School of Architecture of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...
was founded in 1944 with the goal to improve the state of the art in home building, originally with an emphasis on standardization for cost reduction. It was there that the notion of the kitchen work triangle
Kitchen Work Triangle
The main working functions in a home kitchen are carried out between the cooktop, the sink and the refrigerator. These three points and the imaginary line between them, make up what kitchen experts call the "work triangle"...
was formalized: the three main functions in a kitchen are storage, preparation, and cooking (which Catharine Beecher had already recognized), and the places for these functions should be arranged in the kitchen in such a way that work at one place does not interfere with work at another place, the distance between these places is not unnecessarily large, and no obstacles are in the way. A natural arrangement is a triangle
Triangle
A triangle is one of the basic shapes of geometry: a polygon with three corners or vertices and three sides or edges which are line segments. A triangle with vertices A, B, and C is denoted ....
, with the refrigerator, the sink, and the stove at a vertex each.
This observation led to a few common kitchen forms, commonly characterized by the arrangement of the kitchen cabinets and sink, stove, and refrigerator:
- A single-file kitchen (or one-way galley) has all of these along one wall; the work triangle degenerates to a line. This is not optimal, but often the only solution if space is restricted. This may be common in an attic space that is being converted into a living space, or a studio apartment.
- The double-file kitchen (or two-way galley) has two rows of cabinets at opposite walls, one containing the stove and the sink, the other the refrigerator. This is the classical work kitchen.
- In the L-kitchen, the cabinets occupy two adjacent walls. Again, the work triangle is preserved, and there may even be space for an additional table at a third wall, provided it does not intersect the triangle.
- A U-kitchen has cabinets along three walls, typically with the sink at the base of the "U". This is a typical work kitchen, too, unless the two other cabinet rows are short enough to place a table at the fourth wall.
- The block kitchen (or island) is a more recent development, typically found in open kitchens. Here, the stove or both the stove and the sink are placed where an L or U kitchen would have a table, in a freestanding "island", separated from the other cabinets. In a closed room, this does not make much sense, but in an open kitchen, it makes the stove accessible from all sides such that two persons can cook together, and allows for contact with guests or the rest of the family, since the cook does not face the wall anymore. Additionally, the kitchen island's countertop can function as an overflow-surface for serving buffet style meals or sitting down to eat breakfast and snacks.
In the 1980s there was a backlash against industrial kitchen planning and cabinets with people installing a mix of work surfaces and free standing furniture, led by kitchen designer Johnny Grey
Johnny Grey
Johnny Grey is an architect, designer and author.-Background:Grey trained as an architect at the London Architectural Association School of Architecture. After graduating in 1977, he set up a design studio and furniture workshop...
and his concept of the "Unfitted Kitchen".
Modern kitchens often have enough informal space to allow for people to eat in it without having to use the formal dining room
Dining room
A dining room is a room for consuming food. In modern times it is usually adjacent to the kitchen for convenience in serving, although in medieval times it was often on an entirely different floor level...
. Such areas are called "breakfast areas", "breakfast nooks" or "breakfast bars" if the space is integrated into a kitchen counter. Kitchens with enough space to eat in are sometimes called "eat-in kitchens".
Other kitchen types
Restaurant
A restaurant is an establishment which prepares and serves food and drink to customers in return for money. Meals are generally served and eaten on premises, but many restaurants also offer take-out and food delivery services...
and canteen
Cafeteria
A cafeteria is a type of food service location in which there is little or no waiting staff table service, whether a restaurant or within an institution such as a large office building or school; a school dining location is also referred to as a dining hall or canteen...
kitchens found in hotel
Hotel
A hotel is an establishment that provides paid lodging on a short-term basis. The provision of basic accommodation, in times past, consisting only of a room with a bed, a cupboard, a small table and a washstand has largely been replaced by rooms with modern facilities, including en-suite bathrooms...
s, hospital
Hospital
A hospital is a health care institution providing patient treatment by specialized staff and equipment. Hospitals often, but not always, provide for inpatient care or longer-term patient stays....
s, educational and work place facilities, army barracks, and similar establishments are generally (in developed countries) subject to public health
Public health
Public health is "the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations, public and private, communities and individuals" . It is concerned with threats to health based on population health...
laws. They are inspected periodically by public-health officials, and forced to close if they do not meet hygienic requirements mandated by law.
Canteen kitchens (and castle kitchens) were often the places where new technology was used first. For instance, Benjamin Thompson
Benjamin Thompson
Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford , FRS was an American-born British physicist and inventor whose challenges to established physical theory were part of the 19th century revolution in thermodynamics. He also served as a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Loyalist forces in America during the American...
's "energy saving stove", an early-19th century fully closed iron stove using one fire to heat several pots, was designed for large kitchens; another thirty years passed before they were adapted for domestic use.
Today's western restaurant kitchens typically have tiled walls and floors and use stainless steel for other surfaces (workbench, but also door and drawer fronts) because these materials are durable and easy to clean. Professional kitchens are often equipped with gas stoves, as these allow cooks
Cook (profession)
A cook is a person who prepares food for consumption. In Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Canada this profession requires government approval ....
to regulate the heat more quickly and more finely than electrical stoves. Some special appliances are typical for professional kitchens, such as large installed deep fryers, steamers
Steaming
Steaming is a method of cooking using steam. Steaming is considered a healthy cooking technique and capable of cooking almost all kinds of food.-Method:...
, or a bain-marie
Bain-marie
A bain-marie is a French term for a piece of equipment used in science, industry, and cooking to heat materials gently and gradually to fixed temperatures, or to keep materials warm over a period of time.- Description :...
. ' onMouseout='HidePop("55668")' href="/topics/Pressure_cooking">pressure cooker
Pressure cooking
Pressure cooking is a method of cooking in a sealed vessel that does not permit air or liquids to escape below a preset pressure. Because the boiling point of water increases as the pressure increases, the pressure built up inside the cooker allows the liquid in the pot to rise to a higher...
— are beginning to find their way into domestic households, sometimes as a combined appliance of oven and steamer.)
Fast food
Fast food is the term given to food that can be prepared and served very quickly. While any meal with low preparation time can be considered to be fast food, typically the term refers to food sold in a restaurant or store with preheated or precooked ingredients, and served to the customer in a...
and convenience food
Convenience food
Convenience food, or tertiary processed food, is commercially prepared food designed for ease of consumption. Products designated as convenience foods are often prepared food stuffs that can be sold as hot, ready-to-eat dishes; as room-temperature, shelf-stable products; or as refrigerated or...
trends have also changed the way restaurant kitchens operate. There is a trend for restaurants to only "finish" delivered convenience food or even just re-heat completely prepared meals, maybe at the utmost grilling
Grilling
Grilling is a form of cooking that involves dry heat applied to the surface of food, commonly from above or below.Grilling usually involves a significant amount of direct, radiant heat, and tends to be used for cooking meat quickly and meat that has already been cut into slices...
a hamburger
Hamburger
A hamburger is a sandwich consisting of a cooked patty of ground meat usually placed inside a sliced bread roll...
or a steak
Steak
A steak is a cut of meat . Most are cut perpendicular to the muscle fibers, improving the perceived tenderness of the meat. In North America, steaks are typically served grilled, pan-fried, or broiled. The more tender cuts from the loin and rib are cooked quickly, using dry heat, and served whole...
.
The kitchens in railway dining car
Dining car
A dining car or restaurant carriage , also diner, is a railroad passenger car that serves meals in the manner of a full-service, sit-down restaurant....
s present special challenges: Space is constrained, and, nevertheless, the personnel must be able to serve a great number of meals quickly. Especially in the early history of railways this required flawless organization of processes; in modern times, the microwave oven
Microwave oven
A microwave oven is a kitchen appliance that heats food by dielectric heating, using microwave radiation to heat polarized molecules within the food...
and prepared meals have made this task much easier. Galleys
Galley (kitchen)
The galley is the compartment of a ship, train or aircraft where food is cooked and prepared. It can also refer to a land based kitchen on a naval base or a particular formed household kitchen.-Ship's kitchen:...
are kitchens aboard ship
Ship
Since the end of the age of sail a ship has been any large buoyant marine vessel. Ships are generally distinguished from boats based on size and cargo or passenger capacity. Ships are used on lakes, seas, and rivers for a variety of activities, such as the transport of people or goods, fishing,...
s or aircraft
Aircraft
An aircraft is a vehicle that is able to fly by gaining support from the air, or, in general, the atmosphere of a planet. An aircraft counters the force of gravity by using either static lift or by using the dynamic lift of an airfoil, or in a few cases the downward thrust from jet engines.Although...
(although the term galley is also often used to refer to a railroad dining car's kitchen). On yacht
Yacht
A yacht is a recreational boat or ship. The term originated from the Dutch Jacht meaning "hunt". It was originally defined as a light fast sailing vessel used by the Dutch navy to pursue pirates and other transgressors around and into the shallow waters of the Low Countries...
s, galleys are often cramped, with one or two burners fueled by an LP gas bottle, but kitchens on cruise ship
Cruise ship
A cruise ship or cruise liner is a passenger ship used for pleasure voyages, where the voyage itself and the ship's amenities are part of the experience, as well as the different destinations along the way...
s or large warship
Warship
A warship is a ship that is built and primarily intended for combat. Warships are usually built in a completely different way from merchant ships. As well as being armed, warships are designed to withstand damage and are usually faster and more maneuvrable than merchant ships...
s are comparable in every respect with restaurants or canteen kitchens. On passenger airliner
Airliner
An airliner is a large fixed-wing aircraft for transporting passengers and cargo. Such aircraft are operated by airlines. Although the definition of an airliner can vary from country to country, an airliner is typically defined as an aircraft intended for carrying multiple passengers in commercial...
s, the kitchen is reduced to a mere pantry
Pantry
A pantry is a room where food, provisions or dishes are stored and served in an ancillary capacity to the kitchen. The derivation of the word is from the same source as the Old French term paneterie; that is from pain, the French form of the Latin panis for bread.In a late medieval hall, there were...
, the only function reminiscent of a kitchen is the heating of in-flight meals delivered by a catering
Catering
Catering is the business of providing foodservice at a remote site or a site such as a hotel, public house , or other location.-Mobile catering:A mobile caterer serves food directly from a vehicle or cart that is designed for the purpose...
company. An extreme form of the kitchen occurs in space, e.g., aboard a Space Shuttle
Space Shuttle
The Space Shuttle was a manned orbital rocket and spacecraft system operated by NASA on 135 missions from 1981 to 2011. The system combined rocket launch, orbital spacecraft, and re-entry spaceplane with modular add-ons...
(where it is also called the "galley") or the International Space Station
International Space Station
The International Space Station is a habitable, artificial satellite in low Earth orbit. The ISS follows the Salyut, Almaz, Cosmos, Skylab, and Mir space stations, as the 11th space station launched, not including the Genesis I and II prototypes...
. The astronaut
Astronaut
An astronaut or cosmonaut is a person trained by a human spaceflight program to command, pilot, or serve as a crew member of a spacecraft....
s' food is generally completely prepared, dehydrated
Dehydration
In physiology and medicine, dehydration is defined as the excessive loss of body fluid. It is literally the removal of water from an object; however, in physiological terms, it entails a deficiency of fluid within an organism...
, and sealed in plastic pouches, and the kitchen is reduced to a rehydration and heating module.
Outdoor areas in which food is prepared are generally not considered to be kitchens, although an outdoor area set up for regular food preparation, for instance when camping
Camping
Camping is an outdoor recreational activity. The participants leave urban areas, their home region, or civilization and enjoy nature while spending one or several nights outdoors, usually at a campsite. Camping may involve the use of a tent, caravan, motorhome, cabin, a primitive structure, or no...
, might be called an "outdoor kitchen". Military camps and similar temporary settlements of nomad
Nomad
Nomadic people , commonly known as itinerants in modern-day contexts, are communities of people who move from one place to another, rather than settling permanently in one location. There are an estimated 30-40 million nomads in the world. Many cultures have traditionally been nomadic, but...
s may have dedicated kitchen tents.
In schools where home economics (HE) or food technology
Food technology
Food technology, is a branch of food science which deals with the actual production processes to make foods.-Early history of food technology:...
(previously known as "domestic science") are taught, there will be a series of kitchens with multiple equipment (similar in some respects to laboratories
Laboratory
A laboratory is a facility that provides controlled conditions in which scientific research, experiments, and measurement may be performed. The title of laboratory is also used for certain other facilities where the processes or equipment used are similar to those in scientific laboratories...
) solely for the purpose of teaching. These will consist of six to twelve workstations, each with their own oven
Oven
An oven is a thermally insulated chamber used for the heating, baking or drying of a substance. It is most commonly used for cooking. Kilns, and furnaces are special-purpose ovens...
, sink
Sink
A sink is a bowl-shaped plumbing fixture used for washing hands, for dishwashing or other purposes. Sinks generally have taps that supply hot and cold water and may include a spray feature to be used for faster rinsing...
and kitchen utensils.
Japan
Kitchens in Japan are called Daidoro (台所;lit. "kitchen"). Daidokoro is the place where food is prepared in a Japanese houseHousing in Japan
Housing in Japan includes modern and traditional styles. Two patterns of residences are predominant in contemporary Japan: the single-family detached house and the multiple-unit building, either owned by an individual or corporation and rented as apartments to tenants, or owned by occupants...
. Until the Meiji era, a kitchen was also called kamado (かまど; lit. stove
Stove
A stove is an enclosed heated space. The term is commonly taken to mean an enclosed space in which fuel is burned to provide heating, either to heat the space in which the stove is situated or to heat the stove itself, and items placed on it...
) and there are many sayings in the Japanese language
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
that involve kamado as it was considered the symbol of a house and the term could even be used to mean "family" or "household" (similar to the English word "hearth"). When separating a family, it was called Kamado wo wakeru, which means "divide the stove". Kamado wo yaburu (lit. "break the stove") means that the family was bankrupt.
See also
- Cooking techniquesCookingCooking is the process of preparing food by use of heat. Cooking techniques and ingredients vary widely across the world, reflecting unique environmental, economic, and cultural traditions. Cooks themselves also vary widely in skill and training...
- CuisineCuisineCuisine is a characteristic style of cooking practices and traditions, often associated with a specific culture. Cuisines are often named after the geographic areas or regions that they originate from...
- Kitchen utensil
- Universal designUniversal designUniversal design refers to broad-spectrum ideas meant to produce buildings, products and environments that are inherently accessible to both people without disabilities and people with disabilities....