There’s a lot of interesting information about today’s kitchen that many people may not fully be aware of. For one, the kitchen as we know it today owes its direct development to the first efforts undertaken to move the open campfire from outdoors into a room in the home. For another, kitchen design can be partly attributed to the efforts undertaken to improve industrial work processes.
For most of the history of humans, the room that we look at today and where food is kept, prepared and sometimes eaten, consisted of nothing more than a spot outside the home where an open campfire was kept and food was cooked on. Generally speaking, it was only the wealthy classes in most societies like the Greeks and Romans where a separate room in the home was devoted to food preparation.
Most of the other classes of people in the societies spent more of their effort in earning enough to procure cooking utensils such as pots and pans rather than in trying to build a separate cooking room. It was the Romans, however, who began to look at the problem and built a number of large kitchens for the public where they could bring their food and prepare it.
This lack of a separate room in a home was pretty much a fact of life for much of society outside of the wealthy classes throughout most of human history. Colonial Americans living in log cabins out on the frontier first began to look at their cabins with an eye towards marking off a separate area where food could be prepared. It was usually an area next to the fireplace.
Improvement in cook stoves and ranges from those days is just as responsible for the design and eventual form of the kitchen as we know it today, for along with the creation of improved stoves came the ability to bring those stoves into the home. Additionally, the development of modern-day plumbing that brought running water into the home meant a kitchen could be made for most of the common classes.
Like much of everything that has developed over the last few centuries, improvement in mass production as a result of the Industrial Revolution, led to the increasing ubiquity and low cost of stoves and refrigerators and other kitchen appliances. This made it possible for even the middle and lower classes to devote an entire room to the task of preparing of foods.
Subsequently, engineers working in factories began to look at improving kitchen design in order to enable women to spend less time in their kitchens and more time in the factories. Much of the design concepts in a kitchen today owe their ancestry to these early efforts at streamlining workflow and processes in these very small but highly efficient kitchen workspaces.
Along with the growth of indoor plumbing and the electrification of even rural areas in the early to mid-20th century, came the improvement and sophistication of the kitchen in the home. Today, while one might not look like one from just a half-century ago, just about every room intended for the heating and cooking of food for the family owes its history to those early kitchens.
Matthew Kerridge is an expert in kitchen design. If you would like more information about types of kitchen or are searching for a reputable kitchen online retailer please visit http://www.wrenkitchens.com
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