Our kitchen long ago came to serve for far more than just cooking. Just as the hearth or the source of heat was the centre of the household, for some years now the kitchen has been enjoying a renaissance as a multifunctional location combining activities, the snugness of the home, and high technology.
The kitchen was never just a room in the house; it means a place that involves far more than cooking, food storage, or such tiresome drudgery as washing up. In Ancient Japan, the Kamado also denoted the family, the household. In the Baroque era in Europe, the nobility had splendid show kitchens built, using these to display their priceless collections of faience. For millennia, the Chinese have worshipped their kitchen God. Until this day, he casts a searching eye over the household and the family, and is at the centre of the festive and colorful feast of “Small New Year”.
The Long Way to the Modern Kitchen
At the beginning of the kitchen’s progress into our modern era stood fire, whether as an open fire, a clay oven or a tiled stand for open-air cooking. Fire gained entry into buildings, became electricity, the oven became the stove at the heart of every kitchen. Separate elements – the stove, a water source, cupboards – came to be merged and the result was a revolution, the kitchen designed by Viennese architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky to save the modern housewife of 1926 both work and excessive moving around. Forms were further standardized, element sizes normed – and ultimately, all of a sudden today’s labor-saving kitchen was born.
The way one lives in the home, say the researchers, is a matter of expressing one’s identity, of which the kitchen forms one element, standing for a desire for community and sociability. Photos: FotoliaCustomized yet Standard
The production-line kitchen became the norm, and today this is personalized as far as possible. The fitted kitchen challenges manufacturers to act as designers. Design and home-making trends have been adopted, ensuring variety on the market and products coveted by consumers. International design is tackling the kitchen, conceiving countless different versions: kitchens resembling laboratories or workshops, or others that grandmother would recognize. Or there are other kitchens as elegant living-rooms, their stylish wooden cupboards concealing pots and pans, crockery and above all, the last word in high technology.
Showroom for High Tech
The modern kitchen lends itself to being used as a showroom for astonishing technical solutions. A cooker may combine a microwave and a grill, an oven or, if possible, a steamer. A stove can combine gas flames and induction technology, and furthermore can integrate features of global culinary traditions such as a built-in Wok trough or the Japanese Tappan Yaki, or iron griddle. The extraction hood is retractable, disappearing after use, practically invisible in the working surface. A drawer conceals storage space for food or crockery. Indirectly lit within by energy-saving LEDs, a refrigerator will offer at least three temperature zones. Mechanically propelled electric appliances gently disappear into their housings. Anti-fingerprint surfaces ensure ease of cleaning. Between the cupboards a self-adjusting lamp exudes a warm atmosphere and bathes the kitchen in mystical yet cozy light. That TV sets, radios, CD players, Internet terminals and computer screens also have a place in the kitchen is something all but taken for granted.
The Kitchen as a Place of Leisure and Luxury
The modern kitchen is something like an automobile whose special interior fittings have been assembled with pride – and should the kitchen be equipped with enough sophisticated technology, it can rapidly become equally costly, and a status symbol of the same kind as a car. Yet quite apart from what equipment is needed for cooking, today the kitchen has become more than the functional room of the kind that it became in the course of its history, one reflecting industrial and world history, in which taking food was a bare necessity, the food itself often meager or of poor quality. If today’s societies enjoy cooking as a pleasure and an end in itself, then that is a luxury conferred by prosperity.
The Heart of the Home
The way one lives in the home, say the researchers, is a matter of expressing one’s identity, of which the kitchen forms one element, standing for a desire for community and sociability. Yet quite irrespective of how large or how costly, the kitchen is being rediscovered as the heart of the living area, whether in a house or an apartment. At its best, it is also quite literally a place of good taste. An Electrolux survey indicates that a typical family spends 175 hours a month in the kitchen, but only 31 in the lounge. So families – and communities – are gathering in their kitchens in the same way as their forefathers did around the fire. While basically simply in search of a culinary golden mean in the kitchen, modern man is therefore also discovering the focus of his absolutely personal life there.