Kitchen: If you can't stand the heat, maybe you left the stove on
But at least you have a stove to leave on
We’re about to move house, my wife and I. Living on what is euphemistically called a lifestyle block, we’ve divided the big tasks into “house” and “outside”. My wife is in charge of both, but she’s been kind enough to let me pretend that I’m in charge of outside.
That doesn’t mean I’m free of inside tasks, of which there are many. The other day, I was charged with not just emptying the kitchen drawer, but sorting it out at the same time.
This is, as you’ll know, a daunting project. Among the rubber bands, thumb tacks, Blu-Tack, picture hooks, depleted batteries, keys to unknown locks, and receipts for things neither of us remembers buying are a universe of objects whose origin and purpose are a mystery. Deciding whether to throw them out and risk later discovering one of them was the key to saving Middle Earth, or to keep them and having to explain myself when my wife later unpacks the kitchen boxes provokes an existential dread worthy of a Camus novel.
Not to worry. When struck by such moments I have a go-to strategy that has never failed me: I let my mind wander. And that led me to a profound insight. “Every kitchen,” I mused, “has many drawers. Yet every kitchen also has just one kitchen drawer.”
Once I’d rested sufficiently from this exertion, I then wondered about the origin of this word kitchen. Unlike helpful words like car, breakfast and never, kitchen doesn’t suggest it may be related to other words that might shed light on where it came from.
In fact, the word is something of an only child. It’s descended from the Old English cycene (kitchen), which may have come from Proto-Germanic, which likely borrowed it from Vulgar Latin. Other languages have similar words for the same thing: Croatian has kuhinja, Danish has køkken, Dutch keuken, Spanish cocina habitación and French cuisine.
It’s thought the word can be traced back to PIE *pekw, “to cook or ripen”. (If you’re wondering what the asterisk is for, it indicates a reconstructed word; that is, one whose existence is inferred from indirect evidence, which is true of every PIE word.) Besides kitchen, *pekw has given us a generous helping of food-related words including apricot, biscuit, charcuterie, concoct, cook, cuisine, culinary, decoction, drupe, dyspepsia, kiln, peptide, precocious, pumpkin, ricotta and terracotta. Note how unlike kitchen each of these words is and spare a thought for poor me trying to think of other words it might be related to.
On a less self-pitying note, did you do a double take at precocious? I sure did. It’s from the Latin praecox, which means “maturing early”, and originally related to fruits and flowers. So a single take it is.
Many histories of the kitchen have been written, and with good reason. From the time humans discovered fire, where cooking took place was not only a place of food, but also warmth, safety, light and company.
Once cooking was taken indoors, it was also a place of danger and discomfort. In England at least, chimneys weren’t common until the 16th century. Delicious as your evening coq au vin may have been, it was inevitably accompanied by masses of choking soot and smoke which must surely have attenuated the joy you got from your chilled riesling. That is, if you didn’t stumble blindly into the open fire before dinner was served, a fate that befell a distressingly large number of children.
In fact, cooking over open fires remains a serious health hazard in many countries. In 2013, the US National Science Foundation reported that three billion people around the world rely on wood, charcoal, agricultural waste, animal dung and coal for cooking, which often takes place indoors in poorly ventilated conditions. Pollution levels can reach 50 times the WHO guidelines for clean air, putting people - including children - at increased risk of heart and lung disease as well as meningitis. By one estimate, the result is 3.8 million premature deaths annually.
As you’d hope, a search for cheap, clean burning stoves has been under way for years. The Berkeley Darfur Stove project is behind a $20 model that uses half the wood of a typical open fire. Other projects have championed cleaner fuels like gas, but the ready availability of traditional alternatives coupled with uncertain supply of cleaner fuels has seen most of them come to little. If you want to track a country’s progression out of poverty, you could do worse than track its movement away from traditional cooking fuels.
On reflection, I believe I’ll stop faux complaining about the work required to maintain a lifestyle block or my wife’s unarguably superior organisational skills. For the next few minutes at least, I’m going to appreciate the privileged life I lead and humbly do as I am asked.
Then, like any self-respecting first-world citizen, I shall revert, once again, to type.
Bits and specious
Do certain small sounds drive you crazy? You may have misophonia.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (which I’ve always been sceptical of) is making a comeback.
Architect Ana Lopes Ramos wrote this brief, breezy and informative history of the kitchen that has been most useful in preparing this newsletter.
If you’re interested in a deeper dive on how PIE words get (got?) reconstructed, check this Wikipedia article. Just looking at it is guaranteed to make you smarter.
Quote of the week
My cooking is so bad my kids thought Thanksgiving was to commemorate Pearl Harbor.
Phyllis Diller