The Most Essential Kitchen Item

July 28th, 2010 Posted in Kitchen Improvements

The very first kitchens must have included only the bare essentials for food preparation. What items make a kitchen a special place just for cooking and not just another room?

What do you think you simply cannot live without in your kitchen? Your stove probably is the first thing to pop into your mind. It cannot be denied. A kitchen is for cooking and you can’t cook without a heat source. However, the first kitchens did not have electricity or gas and it’s not likely that they had more than just one small fire.

You are on the right track, though. While a kitchen does not need a 4 burner stove, it needs some sort of stove. You probably would panic if someone took your refrigerator away, but do you really need it? You would learn to adapt by buying fresh food every day, so having a fridge is not a kitchen priority.

You can live without a dishwasher, but what about the kitchen sink? That’s got to be a necessity, hasn’t it? If you suddenly found yourself without water in the kitchen, you could get by if you went outside and fetched water and washed your dishes elsewhere.

Now that we have stripped our kitchen down, you can see that an essential kitchen does not need many inclusions. As a place set aside for cooking, the kitchen needs a heat source, some vessels for holding food and cooking it and at least one knife. That’s about all that is necessary. It would be nice to have a knife set, but it’s not necessary.

The first kitchens were probably little more than lean-tos. They had to be open, because of the amount of smoke created and for protection from the rain. In these tiny cooking areas, having a knife block set of some sort was probably the first non-essential kitchen item, simply because knives make food preparation so much easier.

As kitchens grew in importance and more time was spent in them, they probably first expanded to include an elevated table for preparing meals. Then perhaps a large pot for water was added for convenience. It was only much later that the walls were enclosed. Iceboxes were probably the last on the scene.

We must have some sort of collective memory of what the original kitchen was like, because even today, one’s collection of knives is a sign of a well-equipped kitchen. A good Wusthof knife set gets pride of place in the modern kitchen. Having one says that this kitchen prepares fine food.