Kitchen Furniture Components & Arrangement

Kitchen Furniture Components & Arrangement

The present day kitchen is the culmination of three generations.

Our grandmother's kitchen had a social side, it was large and friendly, a homely, interesting part of the house with its dark corners and yellow paint and red table cloths and its coal stove set into a brick fireplace.

Our mother's kitchen was sanitary, a spotless culinary laboratory where sheep and pigs were cut up according to chart. It was a place whose frigidity of spirit clearly showed its disapproval of the kitchen of the generation before.

Our own kitchens take the best from both types. We have developed a kitchen of pleasantness and sanitation, and added unto it more efficiency. Witness the white enameled metal kitchen cabinets where the ingenuity of service and space economizing amounts to a real stroke of genius.

There is no doubt that a well arranged kitchen, if attractively decorated, would arouse less antagonism to kitchen work and would tend to keep servants longer. If one's life is limited to a box of a bedroom and a dejected trinity of stove, table and sink, submission inevitably breaks its bounds and the thought of the joys unrestrained at the Annual Policemen's Ball puts the kitchen into such a combatant state that the household from grandmother down is obliged to mind its every p and q. Plan your kitchen as a pleasant place, and watch the belligerents become as passive as lambs.

The stove, table and sink should be so placed as to necessitate the fewest steps in work. If possible, place the sink under a window. This arrangement will provide ventilation and also furnish light so that one can see when the dishes are washed clean. To the right of the sink should be the stove, and beyond that the cupboard for pots and pans. At the left should be the table with the kitchen cabinet and the dish closet in close proximity. Provide a table for the center of the room, for the maids should not eat at the same table where the food is prepared. A round table of iron painted white and covered with a cloth gives a look of comfort and, if the cloth is pretty, it adds a decorative note. There should also be a stool and several chairs in the kitchen, and, where there is no servants' sitting-room, a small rocking chair for the house maid to sew in and for evening's relaxation. All cooks like to rock. This, then, is the general equipment.

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