Not a Dream but a Perfect Kitchen

The Elizabeth David guide to an ideal cookery room.

The following is an excerpt from an essay David originally wrote for a book that was reprinted in Petits Propos Culinaires, issue 41, August 1992.

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As in all grave matters, Elizabeth David had strong opinions about what a kitchen should be. To start, she dismissed the idea of the dream kitchen, going so far as to call it idiotic.

Why of all rooms in the house does the kitchen have to be a dream? Is it because in the past kitchens have mostly been so underprivileged, so dingy and inconvenient? We don’t, for example, hear much of dream drawing-rooms, dream bedrooms, dream garages, dream box-rooms…..No. It’s a dream kitchen or nothing.

The irony is that she contributed her essay to The Kitchen Book by Terence Conran (Crown Publishing 1986), which was filled with enviable dream kitchen designs.

(A pause here to personally sing the praises of Terence Conran. His many achievements included creating elegant home designs—especially kitchens. Before there was Ikea, there were his stores, Habitate and its successor, Conran, which sold his reasonably priced furnishings. His simple, well crafted furniture, decorative pieces, and kitchen equipment were durable. A four year old could bounce happily on his sofas, take dives off his coffee tables, and spin a plate across the room without breaking them or demolishing their elegance. I know this because my children tested several pieces for years. (Unfortunately, Conran’s has raised their prices beyond my reach.)

Always bracingly candid David, confesses in her essay that her kitchen was the farthest thing from a dream. “My kitchen is rather more of a nightmare than a dream, but I’m struck with it.”

I can’t find a decent photograph of her nightmare. This is too small but you get the idea.

It doesn’t look like a nightmare to me. In fact, it looks like heaven with a good scrubbed table to roll out pastry and a place to sit for awhile drinking something. I bet she could find exactly what she needed to accomplish a perfect omelet at midnight without turning on the lights.

This detail, again, may be appalling to some. But she had no problem proofing almost all her recipes on this banged up little stove.

But back to her essay. David enumerated her vision of perfection.

The room, itself:

• large, very light, very airy, calm and warm.

• French doors leading to a garden table. (Her kitchen actually had this).

• it will always be rigorously ordered

• [colors] cool silver, grey-blue, aluminum, with various browns of earthenware pots and a lot of white provided by the perfectly plain china

• [accent colors] [no] coloured tiles and beflowered surfaces and I don’t want a lot of things coloured avocado and tangerine. I’ll just settle for avocados and tangerines in a bowl on the dresser.

In other words, if the food and the cooking pots don’t provide enough visual interest and create their own changing patterns in the kitchen, then there’s something wrong.

The equipment:

• a double sink, 30 inches above ground, about 6 inches more than usual (she was tall)

• a second, quite separate oven just for bread

• a some sort of temperature-controlled cupboard for proving the dough.

• outside the kitchen is my refrigerator and there it will stay kept at the lowest temperature, about 4 C (40F).….

  • [amazing how] so called model kitchens have refrigerators next to the cooking stove….

  • this seems to me almost as mad as having a wine rack above it

  • there would be a second and fairly large refrigerator to be used for cool storage of variety of commodities such as coffee beans, spices, butter, cheese and eggs, which benefit from a constant temperature of say 10C [50 F].

The utensils:

• just a few implements in constant use—ladles, a sieve or two, whisks, tasting spoons—hanging by the cooker, essential knives accessible in a rack, and, wooden spoon in a jar. A half dozen would be enough.

I don’t covet the exotic gear dangling from hooks, the riot of clanking iron mongery [sic], the armouries [sic] of knives, or the serrried ranks of saute pans and all other carefully chosen symbols of culinary activity I see in so many photographs of chic kitchens. Pseud corners, I’m afraid, many of them.

The furnishings:

• above the sink, I envision a continuous wooden plate rack designed to hold serving dishes as well as plates, cups and other crockery in normal use.

• suspended from the ceiling, a wooden rack or slatted shelves. Here would be the parking place for papers, notebooks, magazines—all the things that usually get piled on chairs when the table has to be cleaned. (David notes that such a thing was typical in farmhouses used to store bread and dry out oatcakes. I can’t picture it, though. Does anyone know what she’s talking about? I could use one, too.]

• The table itself is, of course, crucial. It’s for writing at and for meals, as well as for kitchen tasks, so it has to have comfortable leg room.

• I’d like it to be oval, one massive piece of scrubbed wood, on a central pedestal. Like the sink, it has to be a little higher than average.

David ends her essay by acknowledging that her ideal kitchen probably reflects her professional needs. Like the dream kitchen, hers may not meet the needs of the average cook tending to their own needs along with their family and guests.

Then again, she considered all kitchens to be a place of creativity.

The perfect kitchen would really be more like a painter’s studio furnished with cooking equipment than anything conventionally accepted as a kitchen.`

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Elizabeth David’s nephew wrote a beautiful tribute that describes what it was like to cook and eat in her kitchen.

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I, like David, am stuck with my little nightmare of a kitchen. I’m not sure, though, that I would know what to do with myself in one of those gleaming Aga stove, marble, brass, dreams pitched everywhere you look.

How about you? What’s your kitchen desires?

And don’t forget to….