Hi guys! How have you been? Hope you all do well.
What comes to mind when you think of a kitchen? Eating, sitting, chatting, socializing… In this series of blog posts, I will talk about our kitchens. Would you like to accompany me?
The concept kitchen
In general terms, although eating and drinking is one of the human needs, it has moved to another dimension over time with the development of the food and beverage industry and people’s gaining different perspectives on the phenomenon of eating and drinking. Eating and drinking has become an area where people socialize throughout history, a phenomenon they use to spend their free time, an excuse they offer to get together and have a good time. In other words, eating and drinking is an activity that aims at the feeling of pleasure and satisfaction, which makes people feel various emotions, and provides the scenery, decor and other conditions to provide a pleasant atmosphere to them, rather than just to fill their stomachs, while making them feel various emotions.
In other words, kitchens have undergone a series of changes due to their position in history. To make the most general definition of the kitchen, it can be expressed as the area where the food needs of the households are met and the cooking is done. However, this definition has been changed and developed with the changing kitchen perception. To express the concept of the current kitchen, it would be correct to update it as the part of the house where people do their cooking activities and spend a pleasant and good time as a household. For all these reasons, the kitchen becomes one of the most important parts of a house for people.
Human is a social being, it would not be wrong to say that one of the 2 most social rooms of a house is the kitchen. The only other area where households come together and spend time together, apart from the living room, is the kitchen. With the developing decoration styles and kitchen types, living areas, TV areas, working and reading areas have been added to most of the kitchens. Even in American kitchen styles, kitchens are combined with living rooms. This shows how important the kitchen is in people’s psychology and daily life.
Historical development of the kitchen
The use of cooking and heating fire, believed to date back about 100,000 years, has always been the cornerstone of living spaces. Since ancient or medieval times, the kitchen has played a rallying role, right up to the speculation of interiors.
The evolution of prosperous dwellings is faster, and in England, after the 16th century, the hall or large living space was regularly subdivided into sub-areas. The change almost never happened to the kitchen, which was a part of the house for many years. At the same time, kitchens may have had a few minor amenities at that time (in the form of rocking chairs or colorful dressing on windows), but in general it was clear that large kitchens were used by middle- or upper-class people.
With the explosion of the industrial revolution, there was a change in the abolition of slavery in the kitchen. Immigrants and citizens preferred factory and milling employment. As the 1870s approached, women began to feel more useful, especially in the kitchen. The development of technology and its application to kitchen design enabled the stove, which is one of the first appliances known as the heart of the kitchen, to be developed and changed.
The emergence of cook stoves assists users in removing heavy pots and pans that have been used for a long time in the kitchen, facilitating their work in positive ways. The cook stove brought technology to the kitchen, changed American cuisine and meal planning. Since hob stoves are so popular, kitchen appliances have been the focus of kitchen design. In towns where a sufficiently affluent, pragmatic, well-organized household was needed, it had become a place that could be considered a luxury for basic comforts, but where families actively used their kitchens and no longer relied on the servants’ team. This was showing us a result that is equivalent to today, that now the servants were replaced by machines.
I’ll continue this “era of machines” in my next blog post. The story of the development and change of the kitchen is very exciting, don’t you think? ☺
To tell you all about more in the next post, bye for now ☺
Anil Uzun