Understanding the Victorian Kitchen
The Victorian kitchen cannot be easily understood apart from the technologies and the cultural and social trends of the day.
Technologies such as indoor plumbing, the kitchen stove, and the icebox had an enormous influence on kitchen work and on how kitchens were outfitted and organized.
Social and cultural trends also had an enormous impact.
The demand for improved hygiene and sanitation influenced the materials and fixtures deemed suitable for the kitchen, and the push for better organization and time management sparked the beginnings of the science of home economics that helped homemakers make more efficient use of their kitchens.
The Victorian Series: Where Are You Now?
The nearly 80 years of the Victorian/Edwardian Age from 1837 to 1914 were a period of unceasing innovation. There were major breakthroughs in manufacturing, chemistry, medicine, and epidemiology.
The Victorians, virtually unstoppable tinkerers and inventors, introduced enhancements that we take for granted in today's kitchen: cookstoves, refrigeration, running water, and sanitary drainage — all substantial improvements over what had gone before.
The most impactful was plumbing.
Indoor plumbing was the miracle of the age. It allowed the sink to be brought into the house, banishing the laborious process of hauling water in buckets for cooking and washing up.
Almost as important was the kitchen cookstove, which replaced the iron kettle in an open hearth for cooking.
Heated by wood or coal, early stoves were large, complex, and dangerous, but a huge improvement over the Colonial fireplace. Natural gas in the latter part of the 19th century made possible cookstoves that were safer and simpler to use, requiring much less maintenance.
Lastly, the icebox made it possible to store foods safely for longer periods, a capability that dramatically improved the American diet.
More indirect but just as game-changing were commercial and industrial technologies for preserving, storing, and transporting food.
For the whole of man's history up to the mid-1800s, food had been consumed within a few miles of where it was produced. There were few ways of effectively preserving food for long periods and almost no way to transport it long distances.
The Victorian period began to change that.
It saw the beginning of the food industry, the national and even international distribution system that moves perishable food from coast to coast, and preserves food not just for a season or two but for years and, sometimes, decades.
Kitchen Orientation
The modern kitchen is organized so that movement inside the room is along interior lines. Today, most kitchen work is done standing; standing over the range, standing at the sink, standing to chop, pare, slice, and peel.
Due to modern prepared foods with heat-and-eat simplicity, owever, the modern cook spends just 4 hours on average per week in meal preparation compared to 44 hours in the Victorian years.
In a Victorian kitchen, movement was on exteriior lines centered around a central table where the ladies of the household did most of the work of preparing a meal while sitting.
These innovations paved the way for the modern kitchen. But the Victorian kitchen was not itself a modern kitchen. It did not, for example, have electricity until very late in the period, and then, only in a few major cities.
The Inwardly Oriented Victorian Sitting Kitchen
Far more importantly, however, its basic organizing principle was entirely different, which is why it really is not possible to recreate a Victorian kitchen just by installing some Victorian-looking cabinets and a few accessories. It takes an entirely new (or rather entirely old) approach to kitchen design.
The orientation of Victorian kitchens was just the opposite.
The primary work surface was in the center of the kitchen — usually a large, heavy, and sturdy table. The perimeter of the room held storage furniture, the cooking stove, and the sink.
A wide work aisle allowed access to the central work table from all sides.
The advantage of the arrangement was that multiple cooks could work at the same time without getting in each other's way and they could work for hours without fatigue.
The Victorian kitchen was almost inevitably a multi-cook kitchen.
Preparing and cleaning up after meals was an "all hands" operation — or, at least, all female hands. Meals were the responsibility of the wife and daughters of the household.
It took, on average, 44 hours a week to prepare, serve, and clean up after meals. Forty-four hours! (Add to that the average 27 hours per week spent in house cleaning and laundry, and it is clear that a Victorian homemaker was a very busy person indeed).
Kitchen in a Box
The Hoosier Cabinet
Around 1899, J. S. McGuinn of Indiana got an idea for a self-contained food preparation center by taking a baker's cabinet and compacting it into a practical work center.
He founded the Hoosier Manufacturing Company to make them, and by 1920, his Hoosier cabinets were in millions of American homes.
Sold as time- and step-savers for mom, but also, more importantly, sold on an early form of an installment payment plan: $1.00 down and $1.00 a week, they were the kitchen revolution of a time when few homes had cabinets.
Four to five feet wide, with built-in sugar and flour bins (including a shifter at the bottom), numerous drawers and shelves, spice jars, racks for pots, pans, and bowls, a condiment tray, rolling pin rack, cookbook holder, and a zinc-lined bread box, the Hoosier cabinet was virtually a kitchen in a box in which all of the clutter could be hidden behind attractive cabinet doors.
It captured the trend current at the time for a well-organized life ("a place for everything, and everything in its place") that also gave rise to the self-contained office, the Wooten Patented Cabinet Office Secretary.
With that much work required, being able to sit down while working was not just a convenience; it was a necessity.
Only a few Victorian families had hired cooks. Our modern perception (based apparently on old British movies) that anyone well-off enough to own a house was probably able to afford a cook is far from reality. In actual fact, according to the census records of the period, barely 25% of Victorian middle-class households had servants of any kind, and most of these were part-time.
Obviously, creating an inwardly oriented Victorian kitchen requires a lot of space. We calculate that the minimum size for a Victorian kitchen is 11' x 16', and larger is better. Luckily, most Victorian homes either have the space or can create the space with a little wall rearranging.
An inward-oriented kitchen fits a modern lifestyle. In many ways, the inward orientation makes kitchen tasks easier by having most functions centrally located. Those who have inward kitchen rave about them and how functional they truly are.
Which, of course, begs the question: if kitchens oriented inward are so useful, why did we ever change to outward-oriented kitchens?
The answer is simple: houses got smaller, as did kitchens, culminating in the shoebox-size Post-War kitchen.
The advent of inexpensive fitted cabinetry made small outward kitchens functional for the smaller families of the modern era, and home builders, ever eager to save on building costs, opted for the smaller kitchen over the inward kitchen that required more space.
That may be changing, however. Since the 1980s, the kitchen has gotten larger, then larger, and larger still until it has reached the point of becoming too big to be functional as an outward-oriented kitchen.
Fitted cabinets along the perimeter walls do not actually work very well in large outward-oriented kitchens.
Sarah Susanka, of Not So Big House fame, estimates that the largest practical size for a fitted kitchen is 12" x 15".
For a larger space, the kitchen design is more functional if its orientation is inward toward a central workstation that today is more likely to be an island rather than a sturdy table.
The Unfitted Kitchen
A second major difference between the Victorian kitchen and kitchens of today is the absence of built-in storage.
Today's kitchen is a fitted kitchen. Storage is built into fixtures: cabinets firmly attach to every wall, surrounding the kitchen with repositories that pull out, swing out, tip out, and rotate for the ultimate in stowage convenience.
Victorian kitchens were furnished, not fitted,
Fitted cabinets form the work surfaces with storage conveniently located above and below concealed behind decorative doors and drawer fronts.
In a Victorian kitchen, cabinets were furniture, free-standing and movable. Work surfaces and storage were usually separate.
Work surfaces were tables. Storage was in cupboards, dressers, larders, sculleries, and safes. supplemented by hooks on walls (and sometimes ceilings) for pots and pans, as needed.
Stacks of everyday dishes, mixing bowls, jelly moulds, and pudding basins shared open shelves small appliances: the meat mincer, stovetop waffle iron, a coffee mill, butter churn, sieves and sifters, cake makers, and possibly a Starrett Hasher (the food processor of its day).
Storage was basic because there was not all that much to store.
Only a very few staples were kept for more than a few days: flour, sugar, salt, lard, and baking soda in bags and tins; and Mason jars of home-canned pickles, produce, and preserves.
Add to these the very few factory-processed canned goods and bottled sauces and condiments, and we have all of the food likely to be kept for more than a day or two in a Victorian kitchen.
Fitted cabinets in a Victorian kitchen were just not needed. Were they needed, the Victorians would certainly have invented them.
In a modern Victorian kitchen reproduction, however, some fitted cabinetry is almost inevitable — if only to provide a place to mount a dishwasher.
Cabinets will seem more at home, however, if they look very much like furniture. (See the "Kennebec Victorian Kitchen above.)
Victorian Kitchen Plumbing
The effortless luxury of turning on a faucet to bring fresh, clean, safe water into the kitchen is so new that it does not yet even qualify as a blip on the timeline of human history.
So are sanitary sewer systems to carry away household waste, treat it, and return it safely to the environment. One hundred years ago, they barely existed. Today they are nearly universal.
All of these civilizing improvements began during the Victorian years. … (Continues)
Rev. 06/20/26