Kitchen

For other uses, see Kitchen (disambiguation).

An early-20th century Art Nouveau-style kitchen in Riga

A kitchen is a room or part of a room used for cooking and food preparation in a dwelling or in a commercial establishment. A modern middle-class residential kitchen is typically equipped with a stove, a sink with hot and cold running water, a refrigerator, and worktops and kitchen cabinets arranged according to a modular design. Many households have a microwave oven, a dishwasher, and other electric appliances. The main functions of a kitchen are to store, prepare and cook food (and to complete related tasks such as dishwashing). The room or area may also be used for dining (or small meals such as breakfast), entertaining and laundry. The design and construction of kitchens is a huge market all over the world.

Commercial kitchens are found in restaurants, cafeterias, hotels, hospitals, educational and workplace facilities, army barracks, and similar establishments. These kitchens are generally larger and equipped with bigger and more heavy-duty equipment than a residential kitchen. For example, a large restaurant may have a walk-in refrigerator and a large commercial dishwashing machine. In some instances, commercial kitchen equipment such as commercial sinks are used in household settings as they offer ease of use for food preparation and high durability.

In developed countries, commercial kitchens are generally 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.

History

Middle Ages

The roasting spit in this European Renaissance kitchen was driven automatically by a propeller—the black cloverleaf-like structure in the upper left.

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.

The kitchen might be separate from the great hall due to the smoke from cooking fires and the chance the fires may get out of control. Few medieval kitchens survive as they were "notoriously ephemeral structures".

Colonial America

In Connecticut, as in other colonies of New England 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 spoons, pewter, brass, iron, arms, ammunition, hemp, flax and "other implements about the room".

Technological developments such as the Rumford roaster and the kitchen range enabled more efficient use of space and fuel.

Efficiency and the work triangle

Kitchen plan from Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe's The American Woman's Home (1869)

In the 19th century, Catharine Beecher and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe proposed a rationally planned kitchen in their household manual The American Woman's Home (1869). Their model house was organized around a central core containing the stairs, closets, toilet, kitchen and stove, together with ducts for heating and ventilation. The kitchen had a continuous countertop at a single height and separated the area for cooking at the stove from the area for food preparation; the Beechers cited the compact kitchens of steamboats as a model.

In the early 20th century, home economics became linked to the broader efficiency movement. Christine Frederick authored The New Housekeeping (1913) and Household Engineering: Scientific Management in the Home (1920), and worked as an editor for the Ladies' Home Journal. As Laurel D. Graham notes, Frederick pioneered the vocation of household engineering through this work. Applying a simplified observational methodology that relied on a clock and the naked eye, Frederick published floor plan diagrams using dotted lines. As quoted by Heidi Overhill, these diagrams showed how a "proper arrangement of equipment" transformed "confused intersecting chains of steps" into what Overhill describes as non-overlapping motion. Industrial engineers Frank and Lillian Gilbreth conducted some motion studies in the household prior to 1924. Following Frank's death, Lillian Gilbreth applied industrial psychology to domestic engineering, emphasizing fatigue reduction and personal satisfaction. In September 1929, Gilbreth's "Kitchen Practical" model, designed for the Brooklyn Borough Gas Company, was first shown at the Woman's Exposition. Across her model kitchens, she promoted an optimized arrangement she termed the "circular work place" and custom-height work surfaces—a feature of adjustability that was sacrificed when manufacturers agreed on standardized 36-inch cabinet heights by 1945. Overhill states that a prototype for the "kitchen work triangle"—a phrase she notes was coined around 1947 by the University of Illinois Building Research Council—may be seen in a diagram by Frederick. Separately, Graham writes that Gilbreth's circular work place was transformed into a work triangle.

The Frankfurt kitchen and the fitted kitchen

Reconstruction of a Frankfurt kitchen at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna

Frederick's first household manual was translated into French in 1920 and into German in 1921, as Die rationelle Haushaltführung. Her ideas were taken up by German architects and housing reformers: Bruno Taut discussed The New Housekeeping and its kitchen circulation diagrams at the start of his book Die neue Wohnung (1924), and Erna Meyer's manual Der neue Haushalt (The New Household, 1926) was based on The New Housekeeping. An early modernist fitted kitchen, with integrated units and flush countertops, was shown by Benita Otte in the Haus am Horn, the experimental house built for the first Bauhaus exhibition in 1923.

The best-known result of this movement is the Frankfurt kitchen, designed in 1926–27 by the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky for Ernst May's "New Frankfurt" social housing program. Drawing on time-and-motion studies and interviews with future tenants, Schütte-Lihotzky planned the position of every element to save the housewife labor and movement, while keeping costs low through prefabricated components and cabinets built without backs. The kitchen was made in three sizes; the 1926 design measured about 1.9 by 3.4 m (6 ft 3 in by 11 ft 2 in). It was not the first fitted kitchen, but it was the first to be mass-produced: around 10,000 were installed in Frankfurt housing estates in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and it has been described as the most influential kitchen of its period, shaping kitchen design ever since. Features included a hinged, fold-down ironing board, aluminum storage containers for staples such as flour, rice and sugar, a waste bin that could be emptied from the hall, and blue-painted woodwork, reflecting contemporary findings that flies avoided the color.

Fitted kitchen (Germany, 1980s)

A block kitchen

Other types

A canteen kitchen

A food technology training kitchen of Marling School in the United Kingdom

The fast food and convenience food trends have changed the manner in which restaurant kitchens operate. Some of these type restaurants may only "finish" convenience food that is delivered to them or just reheat completely prepared meals. At the most they may grill a hamburger or a steak. But in the early 21st century, c-stores (convenience stores) are attracting greater market share by performing more food preparation on-site and better customer service than some fast food outlets.

By region

A traditional 1920s Shanghainese shikumen style kitchen, Shikumen Open House Museum

Reconstruction of a 1832 Japanese kitchen in Dejima, Nagasaki, Japan

India

Preparation of bread in the kitchen of Gurudwara Bangla Sahib in New Delhi, India

While many kitchens belonging to poor families continue to use clay stoves and the older forms of fuel, the urban middle and upper classes usually have gas stoves with cylinders or piped gas attached. Electric cooktops are rarer since they consume a great deal of electricity, but microwave ovens are gaining popularity in urban households and commercial enterprises. Indian kitchens are also supported by biogas and solar energy as fuel. World's largest solar energy kitchen is built in India. In association with government bodies, India is encouraging domestic biogas plants to support the kitchen system.

Outdoor kitchen in Takoradi, Ghana

See also

• Cooking techniques
• Cuisine
• Dirty kitchen
• Hearth
• Hoosier cabinet
• Kitchen island
• Kitchen utensil
• Kitchen ventilation
• Universal design

Further reading

• Beecher, C. E. and Beecher Stowe, H.: The American Woman's Home, 1869. The American Woman's Home
• Cahill, Nicolas. Household and City Organization at Olynthus ISBN 0-300-08495-1
• Cromley, Elizabeth Collins. The Food Axis: Cooking, Eating, and the Architecture of American Houses (University of Virginia Press; 2011); 288 pages; Explores the history of American houses through a focus on spaces for food preparation, cooking, consumption, and disposal.
• Harrison, M.: The Kitchen in History, Osprey; 1972; ISBN 0-85045-068-3
• Kinchin, Juliet and Aidan O'Connor, Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen (MoMA: New York, 2011)
• Lupton, E. and Miller, J. A.: The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste, Princeton Architectural Press; 1996; ISBN 1-56898-096-5. The Bathroom, the Kitchen and the Aesthetics of Waste
• Snodgrass, M. E.: Encyclopedia of Kitchen History; Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers; (November 2004); ISBN 1-57958-380-6

External links

Media related to Kitchens at Wikimedia Commons

• Photo History of the Kitchen 1860–1960