Understanding the Victorian Kitchen: The Search for the "Rational" Kitchen
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The Victorians began the search for an efficient, rational kitchen.
Home economists such as Catherine Beecher, Ella E. Kellogg, and Christine Frederick developed principles of kitchen design that survive to the present day and influence how modern kitchens are organized.
Later studies by Lillian Gilbreth and other pioneer domestic ergonomists that led to the Rules of Kitchen Design that we follow in today's kitchen layouts and organization.
The study of kitchen design and organization had its genesis in the Victorian period. The twin disciplines of home economics and household management began in the mid-19th century.
Home economists formalized methods of maintaining a home that strove to remove folklore and custom from kitchen organization and replace it with planning based on rational analysis.
Schools began incorporating home economics courses into their education programs. The teaching of home economics courses in higher education blossomed and spread with the Morrill Act of 1862 that granted land to each state or territory in America for higher education programs in vocational arts including home economics.
Formal courses taught young women how to cook, sew, garden, and take care of children, but they also spurred research into the rationalization of domestic management including the Victorian kitchen.
Pionering much of this revolution in housework was Catherine Beecher who with her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe (of Uncle Tom's Cabin fame) authored The American Woman's Home, published in 1869.
At the heart of Beecher's system of domestic management was the "apportionment of time". She believed that effective time management was important, not just for productivity but to empower women to feel in control of their lives. Beecher wrote,
Cheaper by the Dozen
Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878-1972) was one of the first industrial efficiency experts to apply time and motion studies to the organization of daily activities in the home.
With her husband Frank Bunker Gilbreth (1868-1924), she was instrumental in the development of modern kitchen design, identifying the “work triangle” and linear kitchen layouts that are often used today.
She was one of the first female members of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the first woman elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the recipient of the Hoover Prize in engineering and 23 honorary degrees, and featured in Morgen Witzel's 2003 study, Fifty Key Figures in Management.
She is best known, however, as the beleaguered but unflappable mother of twelve featured in the best-selling semi-biographical novel, Cheaper by the Dozen, written by two of her children in 1948.
The book inspired two movies: one in 1950 starring Clifton Webb and Myrna Loy, and the other in 2003 with Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt.
Gilbreth died in 1972 at age 93, having survived her husband by nearly 50 years, and living long enough to see most of her "radical" notions about home efficiency and kitchen organization become basic design principles.
The book devoted an entire chapter to the development of "Habits of System and Order" and emphasized simplicity and efficiency in all housework but especially kitchen tasks to reduce the time spent preparing and cleaning up after meals.
Kitchen work was more efficient, Beecher wrote, if the kitchen is small and necessary equipment close at hand. A large kitchen, as was the convention at the time, wasted time and effort by requiring constant movement around the kitchen to get work done.
Ella Eaton Kellogg (the wife of John Harvey Kellogg founder of Kellogg's Cereals) in her 1893 book Science in the Kitchen also recommended kitchens of an appropriate size: large enough to accommodate the work being done but not so large that "unnecessary steps" were required. She wrote,
"There should be ample space for tables, chairs, range, sink, and cupboards, yet the room should not be so large as to necessitate too many steps. A very good size for the ordinary dwelling is 16 x 18 feet."
Kellogg constantly referred to the kitchen as "The Household Workshop" that should have a single function, that of preparing meals, and identified in detail the appliances, fixtures, utensils, and equipment required for that purpose.
Her goal was to equip the kitchen with everything necessary but nothing that was not necessary. She observed,
"In furnishing a kitchen, there should be everything likely to be required but not one article more than is wanted. Profusion creates little… There should be sufficiency, and no more."
Each of these writers, and others of the period, were aware of a relationship between efficiency in food preparation and the size, shape, arrangement, and equipment of a kitchen but handicapped by a lack of systematic studies of kitchen work, were unable to precisely identify what that relationship should be.
It was only after industrial ergonomists began studying kitchen work that sound principles of organization and management could be applied to the home kitchen. These studies did not begin until the very last years of the Victorian era.
Scientific Management was pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth who became three of the intellectual leaders of the Efficiency Movement that dominated industrial management theory in the late Victorian Age and well into the early part of the 20th century.
The Gilbreths added psychology to Taylor's purely mechanical measurement methods and studied the work habits and environments of manufacturing and clerical employees in all kinds of industries to find ways to increase their output and make their work easier, faster, and more efficient.
Lillian Gilbreth moved Scientific Management into the home.
She was one of the first of the industrial efficiency experts to apply time and motion studies to the organization and daily activities of the home and was instrumental in the development of modern kitchen design, conceiving the "work triangle" and linear kitchen layouts that are still used today.
Gilbreth's contemporary, Christine Frederick began a series of articles in the Ladies Home Journal which explained the application of scientific management in the home.
Later published as a book, The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management, the chapter on kitchen organization and layout established a basic kitchen organizing principles still in nearly universal use:
"The first step toward the efficiency any kitchen is to have the kitchen small, compact and without long narrow pantries and closets… A good-sized kitchen for a small house is 10 x 12; the ideal is nearly square…
[T]he next step… is to place the principal equipment of stove, sink, tables and closets in right relation to each other…
In planning for any kitchen, I have found, after close study, that there are just two main processes in all kitchen work… those processes which prepare the meal [and] those which clear away the meal. Each of these processes covers distinct equipment".
Her observations were not limited to the kitchen. Chapters of the book covered the efficient scheduling of household tasks, the housewife-as-purchasing-agent, how to manage household finances, record keeping, efficient cooking, and the development of efficient habits, to name just a few.
To test and prove her ideas, she created the "Applecroft Kitchen" as a study center in which appliances, devices, and processes could be tested. Her description of the kitchen is instruction for what an "ideal" Victorian kitchen should look like.
"…It measures only 12 by 14 feet, a space small enough that no waste motion occurs between tasks. Double casement windows at the south and west let in a quantity of light upon the working spaces, and give the “long view” of outdoors so necessary to relieve the eye strain of the worker."
"The kitchen itself is finished in light cream with white woodwork in a “flat” washable paint, which insures sanitary handling, and which is most cheery, light and cool. The floor is covered with a new pressed cork material impervious to grease and very soft to the foot of the worker. The arrangement of the chief equipment is after the manner of the efficient kitchen described in chapter three …"
"The refrigerator, kitchen cabinet, stove, and table are in one group, placed so that food from the icebox is placed on the cabinet table next to it, in preparation for cooking on the stove next to it, and lifted when finished from the stove to the metal-topped table next to it. From icebox all the way to the dining room is in one direction."
"On the other side of the kitchen entirely, and moving in the opposite direction, is the clearing-away-process group. The sink, drain-boards, garbage disposal [by which is meant garbage "can", not the electric device under the sink. Ed.], and china closet are close together."
Katharine A. Fisher [1] expanded Frederick's "two main process centers" into the concept of a rational, task-centric kitchen workspace.
A director of the Good Housekeeping Institute, author, and columnist for Good Housekeeping Magazine, Fisher wrote a series of widely read columns about kitchen efficiency beginning in 1924.
She proposed grouping kitchen tasks factory-style according to purpose and materials, and assignings each task to its own workstation.
The basic workstations, food preparation, cooking, and clean-up would each have cabinets within easy reach that would hold all the implements and ingredients required to complete the task.
Fisher's notion of task-based workspaces has become a cornerstone of modern kitchen design. But, while most kitchen designers use the concept daily in planning modern kitchens, not one in a hundred knows that it originated over 100 years ago with Katherine Fisher.
Reproducing a Victorian Kitchen
Go into your kitchen and remove all the prepared and processed foods in your cabinets, pack them in boxes and move them to the dining room. Now, pack up and remove all the small appliances.
You can keep any staples (flour, sugar, salt, dried beans and legumes, coffee, pasta, tea, and baking powder), and spices.
If you have potatoes or onions in your root cellar, you can keep those as well as any fresh produce or meat in the fridge (for this experiment, rechristened the "icebox").
Now consolidate those in as few cabinets as possible. How many did you need? One? Two? Not many.
This illustrates one of the principal problems in reproducing a Victorian kitchen. We have to store many more foodstuffs than the Victorians even imagined could exist … (Continues)
Footnotes:
Rev. 04/24/21