The kitchen has long been the heart of the home and, at the same time, a site of technological innovation. We've come a long way from cooking over an open hearth with the kitchens of today offering performance, technology and innovation at our fingertips. The kitchen's continuous evolution from a construct and technology home appliance standpoint will only magnify its role as the centre for family relationship and human interaction.
Liberation through Innovation
Kitchenaid Blender
For centuries, food was cooked over a fire burning in an open hearth made of stone or brick. The cooking fire also heated the room and cast light. In the early years of hamlet in Canada, the kitchen was a multi-purpose space where the housewife not only prepared the family meals, but heated water for washing, dried laundry on rainy days, and spun wool, among many other tasks. More than any other part of the house, the kitchen was the focus of family life and the food made there was requisite to the family's health and well-being. It was hard work cooking in an open hearth kitchen - from lifting heavy iron pots beside the hot fire to peeling and stringing up hundreds of apples to dry.
There was the delight of creating appetizing dishes made from seasonal garden produce and locally raised meat and game. There was an equal delight in knowing how to sustain and store food over the winter and how to make the most of puny supplies before the next harvest. Canada's early cooks were resourceful and economical. Nothing was wasted - not even leftover grease from cooking, which when boiled up with lye extracted from the ashes of the fire made homemade soap. And the housewife was seldom alone in the kitchen: every able family member participated in kitchen activities, which included carrying water in from the well and restocking the wood pile. By necessity, the kitchen was the public hub of the home.
Over the past 150 years or so, women have welcomed new laboursaving gadgets and cooking equipment, from the mid-19th century apple-paring machine to the nonstick fry pan. Whereas these and other small appliances made life easier for cooks, some inventions transformed the kitchen environment and radically changed culinary practices. The time saved also ultimately allowed women to spread their wings face the home. The iron cook stove took the place of the open hearth in the 1850s.
By the 1920s, gas and galvanic stoves were common. Today, we see induction cooktops, an extremely responsive and productive recipe of cooking that heats and cools quickly. galvanic refrigerators began to be manufactured in Canada only in 1925, and the tough economic times of the Depression slowed their adoption. It took a while for Canadian families to replace the ice-box, which required the quarterly delivery of large blocks of ice to keep the compartment cool. galvanic home refrigeration indeed also contributed to safe food storage. Today, refrigerators are created for the kitchen as a public hub, with counter-depth designs that allow for added kitchen space, and under-counter refrigerators that bring refreshments directly into the area where habitancy entertain.
The 1930s also ushered in the galvanic mixer. The most elemental task of food preparing - stirring a blend with a wooden spoon - could now be done by machine. Whereas earlier kitchens had been like "living rooms" in which the owner arranged detach pieces of furniture to her liking (free-standing sink, stove, ice-box, table, cupboard), from the mid-1930s onward kitchen construct increasingly reflected the efficiencies gained by all the new equipment. Large home appliances were positioned following ergonomic principles and built seamlessly into a run of counters and cupboards. This belief of the scientifically advanced and smoothly functioning contemporary kitchen that began to take shape in the 1930s remains the ideal today.
A few new materials for utensils (for example, indeed moulded and colourful plastic, heat-resistant silicone), new tools (such as steam dishwashers, blenders, food processors, microwaves with built-in hoods) and new technologies (convection and induction) have been added to the cook's arsenal, but otherwise the basic elements have not changed much. What we have seen are kitchen construct and utensils honed to such a peak of efficiency it is difficult to imagine rescue any more time through this route, although "smart homes" governed by computers offer the curious promise of remote control.
Elemental connect ions
For the biggest turn in culinary practices over the past ten years, one must look face the kitchen to grocery store shelves, where women (and men) can now choose from an approximately stupefying selection of ready prepared, heat-and-serve foods. Although these developments in the marketplace help families with their time-challenged lives, there has been a corresponding loss of home cooking skills, and Canadians are supplementary separated from the primary source of their food. If there is no mud to wash off the potatoes, there may be one less cooking task, but it's also difficult to see the relationship in the middle of field and table.
From a room of many functions, in rhythm with the agricultural cycle in the 19th century, the Canadian kitchen has come to be a space where families may prepare a meal without indeed "cooking." Yet, despite this breathtaking evolution in the kitchen, it continues to be the central conferrence place for family. Food - its preparing and consumption - is not only a requirement for survival, but also a superior bond. It may not be necessary, as it was in old generations, to work as hard to produce a meal, but we still enjoy cooking when we are able and we still want to share our food experiences with others - in an productive and curious space that allows every person to participate.
We don't need to be in the kitchen (or in the fields) as much as our forebears did, but it's still basic for us as public beings to interact through cooking and eating. In the 21st century, we are discovering it's important to know where our food comes from, to make salutary choices about food, and to be wary of the unintended effects of new technology. Functional and productive kitchens are taken for granted. It will be designers and manufacturers of products that riposte to the elemental human need to connect through food who will help us chart a definite policy into the culinary future. This construct will also effect in retention the kitchen at the heart of the home.
Less Haste, More Heart for the 21st Century Cook - With The Merger of New Home Appliances and house
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