A Step Saving Kitchen 1949 United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Color
more at
http://kitchen.quickfound.net
The
USDA describes and demonstrates the results of their efforts to develop a modern "step-saving" kitchen.
Public domain film from the
US National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/
3.0/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Kitchen
A kitchen is a room or part of a room used for cooking and food preparation
. In the West, a modern residential kitchen is typically equipped with a stove, a sink with hot and cold running water, a refrigerator and kitchen cabinets arranged according to a modular design. Many households have a microwave oven, a dishwasher and other electric appliances. The main
function of a kitchen is cooking or preparing food but it may also be used for dining, food storage, entertaining, dishwashing and laundry
...
History
The evolution of the kitchen is linked to the invention of the cooking range or stove and the development of water infrastructure capable of supplying water to private homes. Until the
18th century, food was cooked over an open fire. Technical advances in heating food in the
18th and
19th centuries, changed the architecture of the kitchen. Before the advent of modern pipes, water was brought from an outdoor source such as wells, pumps or springs.
Antiquity
The houses in
Ancient Greece were commonly of the atrium-type: the rooms were arranged around a central courtyard for women. In many such homes, a covered but otherwise open patio served as the kitchen. Homes of the wealthy had the kitchen as a separate room...
In the
Roman Empire, common folk in cities often had no kitchen of their own; they did their cooking in large public kitchens. Some had small mobile bronze stoves, on which a fire could be lit for cooking. Wealthy
Romans had relatively well-equipped kitchens...
Middle Ages
Early medieval European longhouses had an open fire under the highest
point of the building. The "kitchen area" was between the entrance and the fireplace. In wealthy homes there was typically more than one kitchen...
In the larger homesteads of European nobles, the kitchen was sometimes in a separate sunken floor building to keep the main building, which served social and official purposes, free from indoor smoke.
The first known stoves in
Japan date from about the same time. The earliest findings are from the
Kofun period (3rd to
6th century). These stoves, called kamado, were typically made of clay and mortar; they were fired with wood or charcoal through a
hole in the front and had a hole in
the top, into which a pot could be hanged by its rim. This type of stove remained in use for centuries to come, with only minor modifications. Like in
Europe, the wealthier homes had a separate building which served for cooking...
Colonial America...
Technological advances during industrialization brought major changes to the kitchen.
Iron stoves, which enclosed the fire completely and were more efficient, appeared.
Early models included the
Franklin stove around 1740, which was a furnace stove intended for heating, not for cooking.
Benjamin Thompson in
England designed his "
Rumford stove" around 1800. This stove was much more energy efficient than earlier stoves; it used one fire to heat several pots, which were hung into holes on top of the stove and were thus heated from all sides instead of just from the bottom. However, his stove was designed for large kitchens; it was too big for domestic use. The "
Oberlin stove" was a refinement of the technique that resulted in a size reduction; it was patented in the
U.S. in 1834 and became a commercial success with some 90,
000 units sold over the next 30 years. These stoves were still fired with wood or coal. Although the first gas street lamps were installed in
Paris,
London, and
Berlin at the beginning of the
1820s and the first
U.S. patent on a gas stove was granted in 1825, it was not until the late
19th century that using gas for lighting and cooking became commonplace in urban areas...
The
Hoosier Manufacturing Co. of
Indiana adapted an existing furniture piece, the baker's cabinet, which had a similar structure of a table top with some cabinets above it (and frequently flour bins beneath) to solve the storage problem. By rearranging the parts and taking advantage of (then) modern metal working, they were able to produce a well-organized, compact cabinet which answered the home cook's needs for storage and working space. A distinctive feature of the
Hoosier cabinet is its accessories. As originally supplied, they were equipped with various racks and other hardware to hold and organize spices and various staples...