egluttony: The High-End Kitchen

Friday, February 24, 2006

The High-End Kitchen

Are We Worthy of Our Kitchens is the title of an interesting article in The New Atlantis  by Christine Rosen about the seemingly-endless striving for the perfect kitchen by a population which increasingly spends very little time eating at home en famille.    She points to the vast outlays that some affluent people will make our their kitchen appliances, which aim to place the kind of equipment normally reserved for restaurants at the service of the middle-class household.   The sums involved are indeed impressive.   Some families will happily drop $100,000 on appliances alone.   Mind you for this you get quite a fancy set-up: six burner stovetops that can boil gallons of water is a minute or hold the most delicate sauce at a faint simmer.   Multiple electric ovens, dishwashers and refrigerators, exotic and expensive coffee makers – there is no apparent limit.   Is this is all quite pointless?  If, as Rosen suggests, the highest culinary peaks scaled in many expensive kitchens is the heating of TV dinners, then this might seem a little overboard.  However, I do think that there is something positive going on in general trend both in appliance design and in architecture but also is sociological terms.

Visiting a house of the 1960s, the role of the kitchen and its presumably female occupant, was quite clear.   The room was small, ill-appointed, and inconvenient, often very poorly lit.   In more modern or redesigned houses the kitchen itself tends to have a central place, where at the very least the statement is made that what goes on here is not a furtive process away from the eyes of family or guests.   Light has been shed on cooking, the preparation of food and the place that these activities hold in our social arrangements.   This has been accompanied by an interest in ingredients, preparation and authenticity in cooking.   People may eat out more than they did, but they tend, on the whole, to be much more discriminating about what they eat.

From a selfish point of view, this trend towards high-end kitchen consumption is not to be sneered at.  If appliance makers were truly to depend for their market on those people who can justify spending tens of thousands on their kitchens by the amount of time they spend cooking in them excellent food, then we would all be cooking over two-burner gas grills.

I should declare that we have a Francis Francis! coffee maker that cost the equivalent of hundreds of cups of Starbucks.   It does, however, make excellent coffee and gets used daily.   I would like to upgrade my Jenn-Aire cooktop though.   Christine Rosen has got me thinking about about a La Cornue, now there is a serious piece of equipment.