How the Kitchen Evolved

It's a thoroughly modern conceit, this notion that we've finally achieved domestic nirvana. And, in fact, evidence of the kitchen's breathtaking change over the past few decades is everywhere, from the microwave and the Cuisinart to the computerized washing machine and the whisper-quiet dishwasher, from pre-packaged salads and frozen waffles to the pre-shreaded Monterrey jack on your pre-folded tacos.

Yet for all their time-saving, step-saving, back-saving wonder, these are mere buzzers and whistles compared to the kitchen revolution at the last turn of the century. Credit the post-Civil War exodus of servants from the home to the factory that left millions of housewives demanding new culinary helpers. Credit the electric power lines threading their way through city and suburb. Whatever the reason, appliances flooded gadget-hungry households between the late 1800s and the 1920s at a pace never before seen, creating the first truly mechanized kitchen and forever loosening the washing-ironing-baking ties that, for generations, bound women to their housework.

This was the dawn of mass-produced egg beaters, ice-cream makers and juicers. The advent of Pyrex and enamelware. The explosion in electric everything - irons, toasters, percolators, carpet sweepers, waffle irons and refrigerators.

``It was a period of enormous change,'' says Ellen Plante, author of the 1995 book, ``The American Kitchen, 1700 to the Present.'' ``The Victorians loved anything innovative - they wanted the latest, the newest, the most modern. Anything that would improve the household, they would embrace.''

But to understand the enormity of this revolution -- of kitchen as workspace, gathering place and barometer of domestic life -- it's necessary to reach back even further, to the first kitchens. It's a circuitous path from the 17th Century to the 21st, but along the way the kitchen has not only transformed itself from spare to sumptuous, it has also roamed from outside the house to inside, from first floor to basement and back up, from rear of the house to front, to back again. At the same time, it has redefined the role of women just as surely as the cookstove reshaped dinner.

Of course, to call the early kitchen a kitchen is a misnomer. ``The kitchen wasn't just the center of the house, it was the house,'' says Long Island food historian Alice Ross. Indeed, for all but the wealthiest colonists, home was a one-room structure where they cooked, slept and ate. ``There often wasn't even enough seating for everyone,'' Ross says. ``One man might sit down on a chair and eat at a barrel-head, another might sit on the floor.''

Even in post-Revolutionary Long Island, when separate bedrooms and kitchen wings were added, the hub of the house remained the hearth, where women labored from early morning until the candles flickered out. The fireplace, which could measure 10 feet by 6 feet, typically was made of brick -- whitewashed at first, painted blue or green or brown after 1700 -- and trimmed with a wooden mantle. Nearby sat a small table for food preparation and a simple array of iron pots, pans and utensils that were handed down from generation to generation.

In those days, chores -- even for a woman with servants -- were aimed at survival, not self-fulfillment. She cooked, mended and washed, fashioned candles, made her own soap and even her own scouring tools. And in farm kitchens, even the most basic tasks were dictated by the cycle of planting and reaping. ``I read a diary from the 1700s where the woman hadn't slept in three days because the cherries were ripe,'' says Gail Lucien, domestic arts supervisor at Old Bethpage Village Restoration. ``She had to get to them before the birds did; she didn't have the choice to just put them in the freezer.''

It was not until the Victorian era that technology began to ease the burden. By 1850, the first cast-iron cookstove -- small, portable and fired by coal or wood - hit the market, followed by stoves on a grander scale. There was no overstating their impact. As Plante writes in her kitchen history, the stove ``altered American cookery methods and meal planning, while at the same time relieving the housewife or cook of multiple backbreaking chores such as lifting and moving heavy iron cookware.''

Not surprisingly, this new technology reached urban kitchens first, but rural families refused to be left behind. ``If you lived near the Long Island Rail Road and had enough cash, you could easily keep up with the city,'' says Ross. ``People hauled out everything on the railroad, or had it sent on a coastal ship.''

From here, the technological tide would not be stemmed. Even as post-Civil War kitchens were downsized to reflect the newly servantless household, every shelf and cupboard overflowed with gadgets -- appliances large and small that increasingly savvy manufacturers were rushing to produce for these suddenly solo housewives. Depending on the course of electric service, a woman could, by the 1920s, buy any number of ``helpmates'' -- an ice box, a vacuum cleaner, a washing machine and an electric iron. There was linoleum on her floor, a hot-water tank near her sink and store-bought foods in her pantry. And if she were really modern, as every housewife clamored to be, there was a Hoosier cabinet front and center.

A descendant of the baker's cupboard, the 6-foot pine work station boasted pull-out bins, utensil drawers and a wooden preparation surface. The wildly popular design - the Hoosier Manufacturing Co. turned out 600 a day - was perhaps the first recognition that a kitchen was not just a batch of unrelated parts. ``The kitchen started out as a great big room with a huge fireplace and minimal appliances,'' says Roslyn architect and preservationist Guy Ladd Frost, ``but as appliances were invented, we started to build kitchens around them.''

Indeed, by the 1930s, with the electric stove and electric refrigerator in place, the kitchen became the ``darling'' of the house, planned and decorated as carefully as any other room. Walls of new houses came equipped with built-in kitchen cabinets. Gadgets were marketed in a variety of styles. And the appliances that were available only in white during the hypersanitized early 1900s were now colored splashy reds or greens or blues.

But if urban centers dominated American kitchen trends for generations, the suburbs took the lead after World War II. Some of the most radical ideas were played out in Levittown, where Abraham Levitt & Sons, in its zeal to build houses that were both different and cheap, applied assembly line technology and Frank Lloyd Wright form-follows-esthetics theory to the home. Alfred Levitt switched the kitchen from the back of the house to the front, boasting in an ad for the 1949 ranch that, ``It's just a step for your wife to answer the door,'' and insisting that a front kitchen could better serve as domestic ``control center.'' And what a center! William Levitt, the financial force behind Levittown, installed mass-produced state-of-the-art wares - white metal Tracy cabinets (even the White House had them), Bendix washer, General Electric refrigerator and stove.

And the Levitts weren't the only ones rethinking domestic life. ``In the late '40s, people like [dinnerware designer] Russel Wright brought modernism into the kitchen,'' says Amy Kraker, owner of Village Green, a Port Washington shop devoted to vintage American dinnerware. ``Russel and Mary Wright also wrote a guide to `easier living' that told housewives, step by step, how to entertain.''

Ironically, though modern conveniences were supposed to unleash the housewife from the banalities of housework, modern culture bound her to the kitchen more firmly than at any time since Colonial days. Though the form of the kitchen changed only by inches during the first few postwar decades - the pink and turquoise appliances of the '50s gave way to the avocado greens and harvest golds of the '60s and '70s and the neutrals of the '80s, the trash bin gave way to the garbage disposal, the oven to the microwave - the woman of the house was locked in an inalterable, and often unfulfilling, role as doyenne of domesticity.

It was not until the '80s, when women marched into the workforce en masse, that the walls of the kitchen came tumbling down. Literally. ``As women started going to work, kitchen space opened up, walls were removed, pass-throughs were created, and the concept of the open floor plan became popular,'' says Plante. ``Because women were not home as much, they wanted to spend more time with their family when they were home. So the kitchen became a main part of the house instead of a separate room.''

And if that has an oddly familiar ring, it's not surprising. After 300 years, says Plante, ``the kitchen-as-hearth has come full circle.''