Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (41 page)

Yet for all these supposed labor savers, the main source of energy in most early twentieth-century kitchens continued to be that expended by a single woman. Ideal kitchens were the product of a new servantless way of life for middle-class households. A succession of
architects and home economics experts tried to devise a kitchen that would reduce the strain on women’s bodies. In 1912, Christine Frederick, a writer for the
Ladies’ Home Journal,
laid out plans through which the kitchen itself could become a labor- and time-saving device. Frederick became interested in the ideas of “scientific management” then in vogue in business. Efficiency engineers went into factories and advised on ways the workers could do the same work in less time. Why couldn’t the same principles be applied in the kitchen? Frederick asked in her book,
The New Housekeeping.

After a series of “home motion” studies made using real women of different heights, Frederick came up with an ideal kitchen design, arranged such that the worker using it performed the minimal number of steps, without ever stooping. Efficient cooking meant having the right tools grouped together before the task began, at the optimum level, and all utensils arranged with “proper regard to each other, and to other tasks.” By arranging the kitchen in the most rational way possible, Frederick suggested, women could improve their efficiency by around 50 percent, freeing up time for other activities, whether reading, working, or “personal grooming.” The right kitchen, Frederick argued, could buy women a little “individuality” and “higher life,” though she does not suggest that men of the household might enjoy taking a turn at the stove; in 1912, that was a step too far.

Another rational kitchen of the early twentieth century was the Frankfurt Kitchen, created by the great Margarete Schütte-Lihotsky, the first female architecture student at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts. Between 1926 and 1930, every apartment in the city of Frankfurt’s public housing program was fitted with an identical kitchen built to Schütte-Lihotsky’s specifications. Over a short space of time, more than 10,000 kitchens, all virtually indistinguishable, were built. These kitchens all had the same work surfaces and dish-drying racks, the same blue storage cabinets, the same waste disposal bin.

The Frankfurt Kitchen may have been small—though no smaller than many kitchens in modern-day New York City, where competitive
complaining takes place over who has the tiniest galley kitchen—but it had a remarkable characteristic. It was based on how women actually moved around a kitchen, rather than on how a designer wanted them to behave.

In the 1920s kitchens of Britain and America, the all-purpose kitchen cabinet was promoted as a system for improving women’s lives. These were forerunners of the built-in kitchen: systems of cupboards, shelves, and drawers, with swing-out work surfaces and containers for flour and sugar. Some even came equipped with built-in iceboxes. The biggest manufacturer was Hoosier, of Indiana. “Hoosiers,” as they were called, took on the role of the kitchen dresser, the larder, and the kitchen table, all in one. “The Hoosier will help me to stay young,” trumpeted an ad of 1919, showing a radiant newlywed bride.

The admen conjured up dream women to use these cabinets, but Hoosiers showed a lack of imagination about what real women needed in a kitchen. These cabinets were like toys for women to play in rather than serious work tools. By cramming everything into a single confined space, these isolated units made it much harder for anyone else in the family—children or husband—to help a woman with cooking or dish washing. They also prevented the cook from making full use of the room.

Compare this with the Frankfurt Kitchen, which came equipped with a swivel chair (height adjustable, a rare acknowledgment from an architect that humans come in different sizes) so that women could easily glide from the plain wooden work surface by the window to the cupboards and back again. Architects now speak of five basic arrangements for kitchens: L-shaped, U-shaped, island, one-wall, and galley. The toniest kitchens today are almost always laid out L-shaped or U-shaped, or around an island. But Schütte-Lihotsky showed what potential there is in the simple galley.

The kitchen’s crowning glory was its storage system, resembling a filing cabinet in an office. There were fifteen aluminum drawers,
arranged in three neat rows of five. Each one came inscribed with the name of a dry ingredient: flour, sugar, rice, dried peas, and so on. The drawers had sturdy handles, making them easy to lift out, one at a time, single-handed. The best part of the Frankfurt Kitchen was this: on the end of each drawer was a tapered scoop, so that whoever was cooking could lift out the drawer of rice, say, and pour the required amount—without spillage—straight onto the scales or into the pot. I have never seen such an ergonomically perfect solution to the storage of food as this one. It is beautiful, practical, time-saving, and systematic. It is all the more remarkable to find such a high quality of design in democratic kitchens made for working-class tenants.

Schutte-Lihotsky was a social revolutionary—the Nazis imprisoned her for four years for belonging to a Communist resistance group—and her kitchen had a feminist agenda. Schutte-Lihotsky was hopeful that the right kitchen design could help liberate women from their role as housewives, freeing up enough time so they could increasingly work outside the home. The Frankfurt tenants themselves, however, did not always feel liberated by their kitchens. Some disliked being forced to use electricity, complaining that an electric kitchen was expensive to run. Beyond that, they rebelled against the functional modernist aesthetic, and yearned for the clutter and mess of their old kitchens.

It took time for the brilliance of the Frankfurt Kitchen to be acknowledged. Schutte-Lihotsky’s Communist beliefs meant that she did not get many commissions in her native Austria, even after the fall of Hitler. Finally, aged eighty-three, Schutte-Lihotsky was given the architecture prize of the city of Vienna. The Frankfurt Kitchen is now adored by architecture students, and it formed the centerpiece of an exhibition on kitchen technology at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in 2011. Walking around the exhibit, I saw New Yorkers, some of the most demanding consumers in the world, stop and stare admiringly at Schutte-Lihotsky’s humble aluminum storage
drawers. This was something that the postwar American kitchen, for all its plenty, did not have.

The Frankfurt Kitchen was a tiny galley, just a touch under 6.5 feet wide and almost 10 feet long. But the rational designers of the prewar years did not think that the ideal kitchen needed to be particularly spacious. Christine Frederick favored a room 10 by 12 feet, a little wider than the Frankfurt Kitchen but not much longer. Frederick knew that more space was a mixed blessing because it meant further for the person cooking to walk. The critical design factor was having tasks and equipment clustered together, encouraging a “chain of steps” around the room. Frederick identified six distinct stages in cooking a meal: preparing, cooking, serving, removing, washing, putting away. Each stage needed its own tools. At each stage, the tools should be at the right height and in the right position for the worker:

Why indeed? Yet a hundred years later, it is striking how few of us manage to move around our kitchens with any real efficiency.

The problem is partly that Frederick’s rational kitchen was not the only way to come up with an ideal kitchen. By the 1940s, this pragmatic approach to kitchen design had been supplanted by something much more elaborate: fancy cabinets, curvy ovens. Many ideal kitchens were—and are—less about introducing greater efficiency into the life you already live and more about pretending to lead another life altogether. We have chosen this room above all others as the one in which we will project a perfect vision of ourselves. For Frederick, the aim of the kitchen was “to see how few utensils, pots and pans are necessary.” For most commercial kitchen designers, however, the aim has been to sell us as many lovely kitchen objects as possible; to replicate that sensation of mild, hyperventilating envy
that we often feel on wandering around a kitchen showroom. How can life be complete without a built-in fuchsia pink bean-to-cup espresso machine?

From the 1940s onward, ideal kitchens were dangled above women’s noses as a treat: a compensation for a life of drudgery or part of a sleight of hand that told them how lucky they were to be unpaid “homemakers.” Christine Frederick’s rational kitchen had been driven by efficiency: the fewest steps, the fewest utensils. The new ideal kitchens were far more opulent. These were dollhouses for grown women, packed with the maximum number of trinkets. The aim was not to save labor but to make the laborers forget they were working. As Betty Friedan wrote in
The Feminine Mystique,
the midcentury suburban kitchen started to take over the rest of the house. It was beautified with mosaics and vast purring fridges. Women were being encouraged—by advertisers, especially—to find emotional fulfillment in housework, to compensate for their lack of outside work. In 1930, 50 percent of American women were in paid work; by 1950 this had dropped to 34 percent (as against 60 percent in 2000).

The luxury of the midcentury kitchen was also a way of compensating for—or forgetting—the hardship of war. In 1944, the last year of war, the Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass Company created a “Kitchen of Tomorrow” that was seen by an estimated 1.6 million consumers across America.

Like most model kitchens, this prototype kitchen with glass Tufflex cupboards was intended to create jealousy—and therefore generate sales.
The Washington Post
noted that it offered a “bright” vision of a postwar future, which made it worth putting up with the present; the homemaker would “use what she has now cheerfully if she can aspire to such a kitchen after the war.” America had it easy foodwise compared to any other country in the world during the war. But the perception within the country was still one of deprivation. To American women dealing with food rationing—notably of sugar and red meat—the sight of such a kitchen was a heady foretaste of the plenty to come.

Nearly seventy years later, this 1944 “Kitchen of Tomorrow” still looks remarkably high-tech in many ways; that is to say, it looks desirable. The floor paneling is dark and sleek, and there are cool glass backsplashes. The thing you notice most is that the designer—H. Albert Creston Doner—decided to do away with traditional pots and pans. In their place are a series of glass-topped vessels heated by electricity—a little like sous-vide baths—hidden under pedal-operated sliding panels. When not in use, the entire unit can be covered up to become a “study bench for the children or a bar for Dad.” A spick-and-span 1940s model housewife sits at her pop-out sink conveniently located next to her pull-out vegetable drawer. She is peeling potatoes.

But here is where the high-tech vision collapses. The object with which this elegant woman peels her potatoes in this kitchen of tomorrow is just a plain old paring knife. This is not such a utopia after all. It may be a kitchen beyond pots and pans. But it lacks a decent peeler.

 

I
t’s a small thing, but good vegetable peelers are a very recent development. They have been in our lives only since 1990. I count them among the most important technologies in the modern kitchen because these humble little tools have quietly made preparing a meal easier as well as subtly changing what and how we eat.

As I remember from growing up, peeling vegetables used to be one of the most annoying jobs in the kitchen. For centuries, the default method was to use a small paring knife with a tiny, pointy blade. In the right hands—those of a trained chef—the paring knife is an excellent tool, but it required immense concentration to remove every scrap of peel without also gouging your own thumb. If you weren’t very adept with a paring knife, tough luck—there were no other options. The Sears Roebuck catalog for 1906—for many Americans the source from which all kitchen tools were bought—listed an apple corer and a wooden-handled paring knife, but no peeler.

By the mid-twentieth century, peelers were available, but they were bothersome to use in various ways. In Britain, the standard
peeler was the Lancashire (named after one of the great potato-loving counties), with a handle tied around with string. The crude fixed blade was an extension of the handle. It was difficult to get any purchase on a potato or an apple without removing wasteful chunks of the flesh at the same time.

Far better were the swivel-action peelers of America and France, but these had drawbacks, too. The standard swivel peeler came with a handle of waffled chrome steel and a blade of carbon steel with a strip cut out of it. These sharp peelers were highly effective gadgets, because the blade contoured itself to the curve of the vegetables. But they hurt to use. As you put pressure on the vegetables, the sharp steel handle would correspondingly stab into the palm of your hand. Preparing mashed potatoes for a large family gathering could leave you with peeler-related blisters. Another option was the “Rex” style swivel peeler, whose curved metal handle was slightly more comfortable to hold, but it was—to my mind—even more difficult to use, because the shape of the handle forced you to pull clumsily away from yourself, instead of using the natural shucking motion of the standard swivel peeler.

In the late 1980s, Sam Farber’s wife, Betsey, was finding it even harder than normal to peel vegetables, because of slight arthritis in her hand. A groundbreaking thought occurred to Farber, who had recently retired from the housewares business: why did peelers have to hurt? In designing a peeler that Betsey wouldn’t find difficult to grip, Farber realized he could also make a tool that would be easy for everyone to hold. He approached the design firm Smart Design with his idea, and in 1990, after many prototypes were tried and rejected, the OXO vegetable peeler was unveiled at a gourmet show in San Francisco.