Home, paint the Kitchen and speak our minds. --Innocence Mission

Life in the kitchen centred around cooking. Cast-iron stoves were first available shortly after 1800, but few houses had one until the 1870's so food was cooked as it had been for centuries before on open fires. Pots and kettles hung from adjustable hooks in the chimney and meat was roasted on a spit in front of the fire. The fuel was wood or coal, and would be banked high against the back wall and contained in a fire basket. Large kitchens would have a range of this type wide enough to roast a whole ox, though the heat given out would be enough to roast the cook too. --David de Haan, Antique Household Gadgets and Appliances The hostel-keeper must own a cauldron large enough to boil a pig and a cow at the same time. Before taking the meat out of the boiling cauldron the attendant must warn, ``stand back -- here goes the fleshfork into the cauldron!" --Mary Dowling Daley, Irish Laws Then she was sent into the kitchen, and there she carried wood and water, swept the hearth, plucked the fowls, picked the vegetables, raked the ashes, and did all the dirty work. --Brothers Grimm, Allerleirauh The kitchen in which Allerleirauh must do the dirty work is closely related to the den. The raw unconscious energies from outside -- turkeys, cows, vegetables -- are brought inside. The ego works hard to clean them, civilize them, put them into the fire where they can be transformed and made accessible to human consciousness. --Marion Woodman, Leaving My Father's House

Kitchen Dreams

His grandmother was making biscuits, and she had just finished pulling a pan of them out of the oven on the stove when she saw him.

The smell from the biscuits seemed to fill the room, fill the world, and when she wiped them with a small cloth smeared with butter so the hot biscuits shone, the smell grew even more powerful. He swallowed again and again, and she smiled and handed him a biscuit split that she'd filled with honey, so hot he almost couldn't hold it, but he ate it and could think of nothing else.
--Gary Paulsen, The Cookcamp

Francoise's kitchen is by no means fancy, yet it exudes all the warmth and well being one dreams of in a kitchen. I suppose it's really no mystery, for her family ran the bistro in their small village of Saint-Julien and she and her four sisters grew up at the center table. Now, as it was in her childhood in France, Francoise's kitchen is the heart and soul of her household.
--Steve Thomas, This Old House: Kitchens

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