Incl. the Kitchen Sink: A History of Kitchens
Words by Sally Ward | She/Her
The kitchen is made of stainless steel and oiled wood. The stove runs on gas next to an inbuilt oven, the perfect height for peering into. Pots hang above overgrown herbs and ceramics filled with wooden spoons, soup ladles and a whisk sit on the bench. The pantry is stocked with jars of preserved lemons, jams and buckets of flour. There are serving platters for every kind of meal. The kitchen island is a workbench, smooth from kneading dough, with stools to sit at for drinking coffee and writing recipes. Piles of cookbooks lay splattered with creativity.
The toaster, kettle and cake mixer are used too often to be put away. In the morning it sounds and smells like sugar syrup crackling over freshly baked cinnamon buns. At night it sounds and smells like onions and garlic sauteing. The tap doesn’t drip and the dishes are done, unless it’s a roasting tray soaking from the night before. The rubbish bin is outside and the fridge is clean.
I think about this with my eyes closed.
The kitchen I learnt to cook in was at our house in Waiwhare—a small space, with a respectable oven, overlooking a paddock. The chipped grey paint on the cabinets revealed a shocking 1970s lime green underneath.
I have worked in commercial kitchens, most recently in Wadestown with a baker’s oven so big I could stand in it. I have lived in numerous flats with kitchens ranging from outright shit to functional. On Cuba Street the tap knob fell off and the cabinets were bubbled because the MDF had expanded after being exposed to moisture. My current place houses 7 of us with two fridges and a modest, reliable oven. Our kitchen has a little island, which is how I know we’ve made it, although we can’t keep the floor clean.
There’s the kitchen at your school hall with brown glass mugs and the water boiler attached to the wall above the sink. It smells like must, milo and community. There’s the cosy apartment kitchen with baby blue tones in
Julie and Julia. There’s Kim K’s monolithic, minimalist marble monster which looks too big and clean to be used. These places have stories.
Kitchens are the centre of any house, where the snacks are. In tracking their evolution across the last 100 years, I learnt a lot about who we are. The development of the kitchen could be boiled down to technological advances (honourable mentions to ovens and fridges), gender roles, unit standardisation, mass production, and capitalism.
The Katherine Mansfield House on Tinakori Road was established in 1877. The kitchen comprises two rooms at the back of the house, where guests are not supposed to go. The finishes are much less ornate and grand than in the rest of the house. Being well-to-do, the Mansfield kitchen was run by a housekeeper. There’s a room displaying preserves and a separate space for the coal range. This place is pre war and pre electric oven, frozen like it’s the turn of the 20th C.
Aotearoa’s first oven is the umu, for cooking a hāngi. Rocks are heated up by fire in a dug out pit. Once the embers have been removed, food is layered on top. It’s covered with damp cloths or leaves before sealing it over with earth.
The ovens I am most familiar with are colonial. When British colonists and immigrants arrived, they used cooking methods from 17th C Europe because cast iron ranges were not available. They cooked on open fires, it was sooty, grubby and probably carcinogenic. By the 1850s, British and American ranges were appearing in wealthy homes. They were powered by bituminous coal or lignite coal, releasing smoke and drop soot.
In 1873 Henry Shadlock designed the Orion Coal Range, manufacturing on Princess St in Dunedin until the 1940s—you can see an Orion at the Mansfield house. Electricity and gas began replacing coal in the 1920s and we got temperature gauges. They were a game changer, cooking was no longer about how close your pot was to the flame. These flasher, more convenient amenities were not widely available until the 1960s.
The next big thing was the fridge. Fridges were added to the New Zealand Consumer Price Index (CPI) in 1955. A fridge cost £98 ($4,770 NZD today) and about half of the country had access to one. Others had a food safe—a glorified metal box with vents on the side to let air circulate. (Note: dishwashers were added to the CPI basket in 1980).
The relationship between gender and kitchens is unseverable. It’s no coincidence that traditional domestic aprons are pink and frilly while chefs' aprons are utilitarian. Home cooking was women’s work. In 1848, a dude named Edward from the New Zealand Company advised men to learn how to make bread and slaughter animals. This was not to share domestic tasks, but to ensure men could feed themselves while setting up farms without a wife or hired cook. This explains a lot about BBQs.
Cooking eventually came to be known as ‘home science.’ It was formally taught at Otago University in 1911, and was compulsory for girls at school by 1917, a programme which mirrored global trends. Catherine Beecher’s A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1843) argued that women’s work in the domestic sphere influenced the world at large, and advocated for the “education of women in earnest.” She promoted modesty and virtue, but wanted the women’s role to be recognised as powerful and taught as a skill.
Christine Friedrick took these ideas a little further by applying ‘Tayorlism’ in the domestic sphere. Taylorism is a theory that “analyses and synthesises workflows” in the interest of improving economic efficiency. This was primarily used in the context of factory work, until Friedrick started conducting experiments in her New York kitchen, later publishing Household Engineering in 1919. She is credited for standardising the height of kitchen work surfaces.
There’s that strange feeling of being in someone else’s kitchen and knowing you’ll be able to find things in the same place as at home. This could be to do with the Frankfurt Kitchen, an architectural wonder. It was designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in Germany as part of a social housing project in 1926. It was the first time kitchens were built using standardised, low-cost units for efficient work-flow. Schütt-Lihotzky was heavily influenced by Taylorism.
Mass production techniques developed during WW2 have set the current standard. Everything from kitset imports to matching coloured drawers. By the 1980s, microwaves were everywhere as well as other robots like food processors. These products became cheaper and more accessible. I wondered if this is a good thing.
I call my aunty when I need answers to big questions. I asked her if I owe my ability to access a fridge to capitalism. Could capitalism be beneficial in this sense? Her answer was no. She thinks we need to separate ‘human progress’ from capitalism. Capitalism has conflated needs with wants.
The fridge can be seen as a natural technological development in food preservation. However, we might desire a bigger shinier fridge than we need to store our food. My aunty went on to say that previously, you would have been able to repair your fridge. Today, companies count on you getting a new one. I thought this was a fair assessment of fridges under capitalism.
Comparing the Mansfield House kitchen to what we have today, there has been a shift from separated rooms to open plan situations. Frank Lloyd Wright advocated open plan living, taking down the walls of the kitchen so that the ‘housewife’ could act as a hostess. The introduction of the extractor fan was integral to contain cooking smells.
Contemporary kitchens also represent changes in food preparation. We no longer rely on sculleries full of preserved lemons, because we have ‘convenience foods’ which can be kept in the freezer. Before fridges we relied on jams, pickles and the local canning factory. Alcohol was a significant ingredient for meat preservation alongside curing, smoking and drying things like fish and bacon.
I am perplexed as to what Kim K does in her kitchen, besides show off her wealth. Kitchens are about status, especially since they became integrated into the living area. People love to show off their soda water tap and cabinets that close gently no matter how hard you slam them. The quality and size of a kitchen, like most things under capitalism, has a lot to do with money. The venn diagram of owning a ‘flash kitchen’ and ‘money’ is basically a circle. An NZ Kitchen Cost Calculator estimates a mid range set up, with an engineered stone benchtop, MDF cabinets and mid range fittings to be $17,640. At the lower end, Mitre 10 sells kitchenettes for $2k, boasting locally made cabinetry. I couldn’t find a price listed for independent bespoke kitchens because, as the maxim goes, if you have to ask you probably can’t afford it.
Everyone deserves a decent place to cook. Cheap, obsolete kitchens are not practical or sustainable. These are work spaces exposed to steam and grease. My Cuba St flat was built in 2012, and by 2019 most of the knobs had fallen off—on the stove, on the tap and the cupboards. There are lower cost alternatives that rely on sturdiness and intelligent design, like the Frankfurt Kitchen. Landlords and government housing initiatives should not be permitted to build things that rely on the cheapest fittings available.
I love cooking and I love being in the kitchen. I fought against it because I didn’t want to adhere to stereotypical gender roles. Home cooking is less gendered, it was my Dad who taught me to cook and turn on the BBQ. Kitchens are a place of creativity and nourishment. I am annoyed that we have to put up with something that is badly designed and barely fit for purpose to eat. I hate cheap ovens, because no matter how much you ‘get to know it’ you can’t make do with a broken heat seal.
Sometimes I make brioche dough, letting it stick to my fingers before it comes together and gets blessed in the fridge overnight. I get the rolling pin out in the morning, slather the dough in butter and sprinkle over cinnamon sugar. Coffee brews on the stove while the bread bakes. I eat in the sun with my friends and think about the possibilities contained in the kitchen.