Kitchen settings in Makerere University

Abstract

A kitchen is a room used for cooking and food preparation with other related tasks. The evolution of the kitchen is linked to the invention of the cooking range or stove and the development of water infrastructure. Food was cooked on open fire, a technic of heating food in the early centuries. The fire place was typically on the floor, placed at a wall, sometimes raised a little bit, such that one had to kneel in order to cook. Among the Europeans, the kitchen was placed between the entrance and fireplace while sometimes; they were put in a separate sunken floor building to keep the main building. The romans did there cooking in large public kitchens. The ancient Greece, the kitchen rooms were arranged around a central courtyard for women; however, the open patio served as the kitchen. In the middle ages, the kitchens were divided based on the types of food preparation. These early buildings had a hole in the roof through which smoke could escape, which acted as a chimney. The first known stoves in Japan found in the Kofun period, called Komado, typically made out of clay, mortar and fired with wood or charcoal through the hole in front and the hole in the top. The kitchen remained largely unaffected by architectural advances throughout the middle age; open fire remained the only method of heating food (smoke kitchen). However, the smoke kitchen remained common especially in the rural farm houses, as they didn’t have a separate kitchen from the living room thus begun to serve as an area for social functions, and increasingly became a showcase for the owners’ wealth. Technology advances brought major changes in the kitchen. Iron stoves, which enclosed the fire completely and were more efficiently developed than the earlier stoves designed around 1800.