Creative kitchen

If you look in the dictionaries, they tell you that for over 1,000 years, such English terms as cycene, kycchen, and ketching have meant “the place in a house where cooking is done.” For most of this long stretch of time it was not necessarily a separate room, but simply the cooking fire itself – an unstructured area without provision for smoke. With no special venting, the fire’s vapors found their own paths through the thatch roof or open eaves, contributing to a dim, dingy atmosphere. For the vast majority the “kitchen” was a designated spot on the floor (often of tamped-earth), usually smack-dab in the middle of a one-room dwelling. It not only produced meals, but it also kept the house warm, heated water, provided limited lighting, and served a dozen other tasks. It was far from the specialized food space developed by the wealthy





Historical look at kitchens

 On the other hand aristocratic kitchens maintained distinctly dedicated cooking areas. They produced larger quantities of food and in considerably greater variety. The owners considered it highly desirable that the work, noise, odors, heat, and danger be removed from their spaces, both private or public, so that their senses would not be “offended.” Great American mansions were influenced by appropriate British arrangements, among them the designs of noted architect William Auld (England, 1778), whose kitchen “ells” were placed in distant wings of the main house. Sometimes they adapted the large cellar-kitchen complexes that may be seen today in the early 17th-century Ham House restoration (Surrey, England). These were staffed by professionally-trained chefs and a hierarchy of assistants and were appropriately outfitted with equipment not usually found in modest home kitchens. “Hot kitchens” with great fireplaces contained wind-up clock jacks (mechanical spit-turners like early rotisseries) that turned the spitted and skewered meats on the hearth, but produced a great deal of heat in the room. They were consequently supplemented with “cool kitchens,” separate rooms that maintained the lower temperatures necessary for popular puff pastry delicacies, gelled puddings and jellies, and ice cream. Such professional kitchens were served by adjacent skulleries where the cleaning-up was done, and by storage areas for wine and spirits, fruits and vegetables, dairy products, and quantities of staples by the barrel. The cook or housekeeper usually had an adjacent private room and the keys for locked “closets” or pantries to safeguard the most valuable equipment, accessories, and ingredients. It is helpful to examine these elaborate kitchens as they were often well preserved and therefore most written about and visited, but not to be confused with those of average means. It is helpful to make distinctions between the two economic situations.