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How important is your kitchen to your daily life? To the lives of your family members and friends? Do your childhood memories include times in the kitchen? It is amazing what this one room – at times a harried workspace and at others the sentimental heart of the home – has meant to people over the course of more than three centuries.
America’s Kitchens, a multi-faceted project currently in development at Historic New England, including an engaging publication, lively public programs, and an interactive website, all designed to tell the story of kitchens in America from the early colonial period to the present day.
Life in the colonial kitchen
In the early days when people cooked over an open hearth, the kitchen was more than a room for cooking. Except in the wealthiest households, it was likely to be a multi-purpose space where family members gathered, sometimes with hired or enslaved workers, to eat, work, and maybe even to sleep. The hearth was a hub of activity where people warmed themselves, got hot water for washing, and cooked their meals.
Women’s lives in particular were tied to the hearth where they quite literally kept the home fires burning. Hearth cooking and preserving enough food to provide for a family throughout the year were skilled work, which a young girl learned at her mother’s knee.
Technology and change
One of the most important changes that took place in America’s kitchens was the technological revolution that brought with it the cast iron cookstove. What is now seen as a quaint relic of the nineteenth century was once on the cutting edge of kitchen technology. The Industrial Revolution that brought the cookstove also brought new jobs. While women figured out how to cook with their new contraptions, men increasingly left farms and home workshops to work in factories and shops. With more cash from wages, middle class families hired servants to work in the kitchen. Many immigrant and African American women found jobs working as domestic cooks during this period.
The twentieth century kitchen
In the twentieth century, kitchens were updated with electric appliances and redesigned for greater efficiency. Refrigerators and freezers replaced drippy iceboxes. U- and L-shaped kitchen floor plans optimized the use of space. Built-in cabinets and continuous countertops became standard features. These conveniences were designed to relieve some of the drudgery of housework, still widely assumed to be women’s responsibility. Twentieth-century kitchens often opened onto living rooms or informal dining areas, so that mothers could be close to the family and guests even while working in the kitchen.
Our own kitchens and their stories
Although most of us have come to expect certain features in today’s kitchens, such as refrigerators, stoves, sinks, cabinets, and even microwaves, there is a great variety of kitchens across America. From apartment kitchenettes to great rooms with expensive fixtures and appliances, we each have our own ideas about kitchens, and our own kitchen stories.
Check back with us as we continue to prepare for sharing with the story of America’s Kitchens.
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