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Kitchen Class
| Article
# : |
11162 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1986 |
1,271 Words |
| Author
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Alexandra Greeley
Alexandra Greeley was food editor of the South China Morning
Post, Hong Kong, and staff writer for the Time-Life cooking
series "Great Meals in Minutes." |
Culinary history shows us that kitchens are the hub of domestic life. The kitchen has provided warmth and cheer to all who pause there, and, in more informal modern times, has even become an entertaining center too. In the past it was the sole domain of servants and trained cooks, but today's kitchen can easily be manned and mastered by every man, woman, and child. Surely, historians would agree that, whatever the era, a man's home may be his private castle but a man's kitchen, and the food prepared there, mark his place in society.
Primitive kitchens--consisting of probably nothing more than a dirt floor, an open wood fire, and a few rawhide or clay pots--may have also been the house. And cave meals may not have amounted to much more than wild grains and freshly slaughtered animals boiled together for hours.
As man and technology advanced, so did kitchenware and cuisine. By Greek and Roman times, flourishing trade routes had introduced novel foodstuffs and cooking techniques, kitchens in remote areas, replacing austere diets, and clay or iron cauldrons. Prosperous European merchants of the Renaissance could indulge themselves not only with the finest from their own lands, but also with the luxury foods--chocolate, spices, sugars, exotic fruits--imported from the strange New World. In many baronial or middle class homes, the kitchen became a veritable factory, serving as dairy, brewery, bakery, and slaughterhouse, as well as cook place. In the New World itself, often kitchens were all-purpose areas: living room, dining room, and workroom. Middle and upper-class kitchens were staffed with a small army of servants who could be counted on the keep the fires burning and the pots
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