House series #13 The Kitchen

         If we think food is important, it seems we would pay attention to our kitchens. But historically that isn’t true, since kitchens of the wealthy were run by servants, and houses were designed by men of a higher class who knew nothing of kitchens – and little, perhaps, of the women who worked there.

         Since I built my old house myself, I knew well the woman who would be cooking in its kitchen, but a one-room cabin leaves little room for kitchen design. It might have looked like a kitchen from one perspective, but not from the perspective from which it shared the space with a couch and, up the ladder, a bed. It had no electricity, and the propane cook stove and sink were in one room, the pantry around the corner, and the propane refrigerator on the back porch. In winter, the pantry became the refrigerator and the wood-burning stove the cook stove. In summer the kitchen made a setting for a tea as elegant, or so I thought, as any at Monticello.

         My son, who designed the kitchen in my new house, also understood well the woman who would be cooking in it. He had enjoyed her cooking all the years of his growing-up and knew the difficulties she had had cooking in her old kitchen. He asked her what she would want in her ideal kitchen.

            The list was more indicative of the shortcomings of my old kitchen than a description of an ideal kitchen, but in the end I got pretty much my ideal kitchen: plenty of counter space, cabinets built from pine milled off my land, lazy-susan shelves in corner cabinets, shelves for cookbooks, easy communication with guests, a place for poring over recipes, which I had originally envisioned as a big easy chair next to the stove but which turned out to be a little rocking chair instead. It serves the same purpose as the easy chair – I sit in it to read recipes or to read or write while I am tending a newly built fire – but it’s better than the big overstuffed chair because I can move it with one hand to sweep the floor or to make room in the kitchen.

            My house is far from a one-room cabin, but the kitchen is not a separate, enclosed room, either. It’s a space at one end of the main part of the house with plenty of light both from its own north-facing windows and from the south-facing windows at the other end of the room. 

Because the wood burning heat stove is a part of both “rooms,” I can cook on it in the winter. I have “room to roll out pies,” “a table for eating,” and “space for cake racks, cookies cooling, etc.,” all envisioned in my ideal kitchen. 

            The cabinets were built by a friend, who used a design copied from an heirloom wardrobe that belonged to the wife of my guitar teacher that the cabinet-maker had used for their kitchen cabinets. The wood for the cabinets came from the same pine tree, milled here on this spot, as the wood for the walls in the adjoining living-room. I have an electric stove and oven, which, though not as cute as the little antique propane stove in my old house, is more reliable, easier to use, and capable of holding more than one cake pan at a time. My mother’s copper tooling plaque hangs on one wall. A printer’s drawer from my father’s shop hangs on another. The refrigerator sits in the pantry, behind a closed door, where its noise won’t bother me. 

            I spend a lot of happy hours in my beautiful kitchen, my ideal kitchen, designed by someone who understood the woman who would cook in it.