Furnishing the kitchen sounds simple enough. But it is not. Everything put into the kitchen must have not only beauty and uniformity, but also utility, durability, tool shop convenience, and the maximum hygienic attributes. In one word, the furnishings must have absolute utensibility.
In the other rooms (save the bathroom) you can humorously tell your decorator to do it in early Pullman or seriously in Louis Quinze—and all will be well. Your furniture in these rooms must be passably durable, consistent, and beautiful, but it need not be unstainable, washable, non-absorbent, rigid, non-corrosive, etc., etc. Equipping a kitchen is like equipping a medical laboratory—skill must be employed.
Chief among the furnishings of the kitchen are the table and its relatives. They have to be rigid, enduring, and must be the correct size for the job and the correct kind for the work they are meant to do.
The table has been the storm center of discussion for years. The problem is this:—to find a table top that is non-absorbent, easily cleaned (not holding stains like an artist’s palette), not brittle, not cracking under changes of temperature or when utensils are dropped upon it.
Courtesy of Duparquet, Huot & Moneuse
SHOWING THE MEAT-CHOPPING TABLE, RANGE, TABLE ARRANGEMENT, RUBBER MATS, SINK, AND POT SHELF ARRANGEMENT
For if you are doing your own work, you do not want to be scraping and cleaning all day, and if you have servitors you will want them for more productive work.
This is a big order. Teachers, scientific experts, and manufacturers of laboratory conveniences (they are never called kitchen conveniences in these circles! Would this nomenclature help the servant problem?) have massed their findings and the results of the world-wide demand for a practical kitchen table top are the following:
Enamel Tops. These (and their confrères vitrolite, etc.) are excellent if you know that the manufacturer is good. They do not crack or craze (fall into multitudinous vein-like cracks) and break with ordinary usage. The enamel is baked over steel or iron and should be at least three coats thick.
Glass Tops. Not for general utility, but well adapted for the pastry table since with this top no special pastry board is needed. Glass tops are really very beautiful and have every qualification but unbreakableness. Some new patents are less brittle than old makes.
Marble Tops. Excellent for the pastry table, and if one can afford them, fine for most things. There is only the remotest chance that they may break and only when they are less than 2″ thick.
White Metal Tops. Excellent, non-corrosive, flat coverings. They are expensive but do not need any nursing to keep them in order.
Zinc Tops. Very much used, but these tops buckle and puff and are very much affected by acids and alkalis.
Wooden Tops. Far better than zinc for the householder who cannot afford the other tops. The wood can be treated with non-staining varnish, or a varnish that can stand heat without being annihilated, and you will have a fine table. If this is not possible, the ordinary wooden table, fresh from the shop, if covered with linoleum or oil cloth, is very useful and durable, especially since the linoleum can be changed inexpensively and often. There may be a metal binder around the wooden table top if desired.
Composition Tops. These need a guarantee as they are often of glass or some mixture undefined.
Tin Tops. These are not used any more, as far as we know.
The ordinary table length is from 3′ to 7′, depending upon the size of the kitchen. There are usually from one to three tables in use,—more often two. The ordinary heights are from 32″ to 28″. Get the height that fits your workers. Be sure to find this out if possible; otherwise you will have to make a later arrangement.
Maple is a satisfactory wood for strong tables; ash, and pine for the cheaper kind of top.
The marble top table is the royal pastry table, which, of course, though not a luxury, is an extra table. Fancy a seven foot marble slab 21⁄2″ thick! Isn’t it like an Alma Tadema conception! The pastry table usually has a rack of some sort beneath it, either slatted or solid. This rack may be half shelf and half electric plate warmer. In smaller homes the pastry table of 3′ length is the most convenient with a somewhat thinner marble top or glass top.
The top of the cook’s table is sometimes divided into two parts, one part made of marble or glass for pastry work and the other part of polished wood for ordinary pursuits. This effects the saving of a table if the cooks do not squabble or there is but one cook and little room!
The cook’s table is placed opposite the range and has a 7′ pot rack attached.
The legs of most of these high-grade tables are tipped with metal to keep them unspotted from the washings of the floor. The trimmings, too, are of the same metal, formerly called German silver.
It would not be a bad idea to have a metallic tip of some sort put on the legs of the less expensive tables, to keep them from wearing and to maintain a rigidity well beloved in tables. For there is no happiness in table tipping outside of the spiritual seance!
A kitchen cabinet (see also Chapter XXVII, Kitchen Cabinets) is a thing of duty and joy forever. It is the first cousin to the table and really is but the table extended and expanded into drawers and shelves and closets. It signifies the demand of the modern housewife for a shipshape tool chest with all the materials ready to her hand so that there may be no reaching, stretching, or relay races around the kitchen in the preparation of the recurring daily meals.
For the most part these cabinets are moveable. That is, they are not built into the walls of the room. At present, however, architects are planning for them as stationary and essential parts of the kitchen equipment.
Steel and wood are the materials out of which the cabinet is made. The steel ones are better in many ways than the wooden types because they are easier to clean and are more protected against vermin. However, the wooden cabinets which are built with rounded corners are a close second to the steel cabinet, since these corners cannot become a receptacle for food waste and are practically vermin proof. Wooden cabinets are finished in a hard enamel paint and can be washed with impunity.
Some kitchen cabinets are equipped with a rolling door which folds upwards; others have swinging doors. The swinging door, although it extends into the room a few inches, has the convenience of being able to hold extra little racks for extra little things, such as small bottles, market lists, and the like.
Never fill your cabinet too full of things, as they are prone to fall down and jangle the nerves of the worker, thus really defeating the purpose for which the cabinet is built, which is maximum convenience.
Besides the table top, which is used as a molding board, there are places for the flour bin, sugar container, bread, cake, pots, pans, rolling pin, cutlery, jars, dishes, marketing slips, and even the favorite cook book.
The kitchen cabinet is a boon to the small housekeeper and is becoming so appreciated for its concentration of work and saving of steps that even the owners of large homes insist on installing it. That is why architects are including the kitchen cabinet in their plans. It means a saving of 75% of toil and thus becomes a factor in making servants willing to stay with you.
Where there are no servants employed you, Mrs. Wife, get the benefit!
There are many smaller cabinets on the market. The sink closet, which contains all the sink soap, swabs and brushes, a real convenience indeed, as is the long and narrow broom closet, for brooms and cleaning materials. Until you have your brooms properly garaged your nerves never will be entirely rested.
Dealers and manufacturers are ready, in fact, to make any sort of a cabinet for you if they are not in stock. Don’t be bashful, get what you need for your kitchen—but never get more than you can use.
Small neat white cabinets are made, to fit corners as well as flat spaces, and give the kitchen the efficient, clean look of the laboratory.
Steel shelving and built-in kitchen cabinets are growing more and more popular. Stationary shelves, built once and for all, can be installed, or you can begin with a few units and as you require more they can be bolted on to what you have, just like sectional bookcases.
These shelves are covered with three coats of enamel baked on steel and very durable, having the same qualities as the good table:—rigidity, non-absorption, and ease in cleaning.
They are the parallel of the steel filing case in the office—and that is another sign that the kitchen is becoming as systematic as the business sanctum. Just as soon as the home approximates the efficiency and standardization of the office, just so soon will the servant problem cease to be. But we are not discussing the millennium in this chapter.
The shelves can be made with or without doors. Of course doors are a little help in the fight against dust, yet even they are not infallible enemies of this household nuisance.
Very often under the shelves the plate warmer and the refrigerator are placed. Their close proximity shows that the refrigerator is insulated against the heat and the plate warmer is insulated against the cold. This is really an object lesson in the possible self-identification of good apparatus.
This arrangement will work well both in the pantry and in the kitchen.
Wooden shelves are less expensive than the steel ones, but require careful attention, frequent cleaning, and new coverings at intervals.
Plate glass shelves are being used of late.
In speaking about the above luxurious pastry and cook’s tables, we touched on the matter of plate warmers.
In small homes plate warming is accomplished by ovens, oven tops, or warming plates arranged above the ovens or stove. In larger homes, however, where guests are many and often and plates and dishes multitudinous, the electric plate warmer has come to do the work.
It may be under a table, as you have seen above or it may be a separate entity.
The doors of the plate warmer are generally of the sliding variety and are of a special make of iron, trimmed with steel or white metal. The interior of the warmer is perfectly insulated with asbestos and other materials. It does not warm the kitchen. This is proved by the possibility of its being placed next to a refrigerator without any bad results to the ice.
There is a little ruby pilot light which tells you if the electricity is on or off, thus obviating the chance of unnecessary heat getting out when you wish to find out whether the warmer is functioning or not.
The electric warmer usually stands a little higher than a table, but does not alter the size of the table when built underneath it.
Since the kitchen is in no way a lounge, the chair in the kitchen is really only another tool to assist in the work or possibly to permit a few moments of relaxation. Of course, it is quite obvious that in some kitchens which are a combination sitting room, living room and dining room, the chair and even the couch are real comfort factors. However, this type of room is not being considered here.
In the kind of kitchen we are furnishing the ordinary modified Windsor chair is as good a model as any we know, and can and should be finished to match the rest of the kitchen.
The stool is most convenient and should be about 24″ in height, because a worker can work efficiently while sitting on this.
The chair step-ladder is convenient in rooms in which you have had to build high shelves for sufficient storage room, lack of space being the only excuse for such unreachable shelves.
There is, too, the ladder-stool, which serves the same purpose as this chair step-ladder combination.
The little wooden step is a convenience if perchance your kitchen maid is not an Amazon and needs a few more inches added to her, or if your cook happens, too, not to be of heroic mold.
In small kitchens the settle-table is a convenience. For when a bench is needed it can be used as a bench, and presto! when a table is needed, it is quickly changed into a table—the two things taking but the space of one.
Stone, composition, tile, and even wood floors are often very trying to the feet and back of your kitchen denizen. A strip or two of linoleum or cork is a great relief as it adds to the unrelenting floor a little elasticity and resiliency which takes the strain off the feet and makes for comfort and ease. These materials are the best, for they are washable and non-absorbent, and they add rather than detract from the beauty of the surroundings. If the strips are not usable, mats can be bought or made for the space to be filled.
It is quite as possible to have uniformity in your kitchen as well as in your other rooms. Even if the kitchen must be fixed up after the architect has done his worst, you can at least have the same color scheme throughout.
There are on the market to-day kitchen furnishings to suit every pocket, so there is really little excuse for a kitchen to look heterogeneous and messy. Furnishing a kitchen is a most tempting problem, especially with not too full a purse. The trouble is mostly that people who know nothing about a kitchen always furnish it, because it is considered easy. It isn’t easy. Even after furnishings are bought if they are not placed well they are of as little value as if they did not exist.
In getting household apparatus the first and great demand is: Know your manufacturer. And the second is as important: Buy the best you can afford after the most careful thought, and be very sure where it is going to be placed when you get it.