This is our kitchen as regards its ground plan and its exterior aspect. But the student of history always looks behind the external surface and studies the record; hence our kitchen records a belief in a few principles that seem fundamental in a household.
The first principle is that a kitchen should be absolutely sanitary in all its appointments. This means not only filtered cistern water, a still for distilling water, a porcelain-lined sink, and an abundance of hot water, but it means an absence of cubby-holes and cupboards where articles may be tucked away and accumulate dirt. Everything is in the open, every part of the kitchen is kept spotlessly clean, and we have never seen a rat or a water-bug about the house.
A second belief recorded by our kitchen is that of unity of plan. If the artist places before all else in importance the composition of his picture, if the author believes that his book should be the elaboration of a single idea, if the engineer knows that every part of his engine fits by design into every other part, it would seem clear that the application of the same principle is essential in the household. If the kitchen is to sustain an organic relationship to the other parts of the house it must represent in the arrangement of all its details the same idea of unity of composition that is expressed in a painting, of unity of development that gives life to a book, of unity of design that makes the perfect engine.
A third idea represented in our kitchen is that it must be equipped with every labor-saving device and with every convenience for work, if satisfactory results are to be secured. The first thought of the manufacturer is for the equipment of his manufacturing plant with every modern appliance. Can a perfect product come from imperfect, inadequate means of work in the household? The application of this principle has of necessity involved many experiments,—inventions will not work, or good ones are superseded by better ones, or a new need arises and must be met. Every week sees some article discarded because an improvement on it has been found. In the city of twenty-two thousand inhabitants in which we live automobiles have been used six years and approximately three hundred are now owned there and in the vicinity, but not one can be found of a pattern prior to that of three years ago. If an automobile must be disposed of because it is not of the most recent model, does it seem unreasonable to cast aside a twenty-five cent eggbeater that chafes the hands, a pineapple-snipper that wastes the fruit, an unsightly broken sauce-pan, and a patent water-cooler that will not cool the water?
But man does not live by bread alone, and a kitchen may be sanitary in all its arrangements, it may represent unity of plan, it may have every modern convenience, and yet it may lack the essential of attractiveness. The arts and crafts movement has not yet reached the kitchen, and it is thus almost impossible to secure cooking-utensils of good artistic design and color. But the second-hand store will often furnish a piece of good pottery, brass, or copper that may be utilized in the kitchen and serve the added purpose of increasing its attractiveness.
Yet a kitchen may illustrate all of these principles and still lack those subtle features that establish, unconsciously, some connection between it and its predecessors in other times and in other places. If the theory of evolution has taught us not only in science but in art and in politics and in everything connected with our daily life to look behind the surface and to seek the origins of things, if it has taught us ever to look for the relationship between the present and the past, surely the kitchen must not be excluded from this process of thought. Apparently the work performed there each day has neither connection with the past nor outlook into the future, yet this is but a superficial aspect of the situation. The kitchen of to-day with gas-range and instantaneous water-heater is the direct heir of the kitchen of yesterday with coal-range and copper boiler, and of that of the day-before-yesterday, with open fire and cauldron. An attempt to maintain this connection with the past is sought through the photographs on the walls. Two views of early colonial kitchens give historic continuity with the past, a photograph of the interior of a Dutch kitchen gives a touch of that cosmopolitanism that makes the whole world akin, while that of a famous hotel in New York City places us by prophetic fiction in the class of millionaires.
Such is our kitchen. “Does it pay?” It has paid us.