On kitchens

Something strange has happened to British kitchens over the past generation or so — they have, apparently, become ‘the heart of the home’.

This is a departure. Of course, there have always been homes in these isles wherein life revolved around the kitchen — but only because the kitchen was the only heated room, and hence perforce was required to play the roles of dining room, parlour, office, bathroom and boudoir. The inhabitants of such homes doubtless wished things otherwise. No one really wanted to live in a Jan Steen painting, any more than they wanted to live off roots or see their infants die of cholera. Like illiteracy or rickets, a lack of specialised living spaces indicated the absence of all the other things that make life comfortable, convenient and civilised. No one chose to live that way.

For even the moderately rich, a generation ago, the kitchen was not so much the heart of the home, as a serviceable limb. Read the rest of this entry »