The Ghost in the Kitchen: Household Technology at the Brattleboro Museum, Vermont

Abstract

Any home's kitchen is an exceedingly complex social artifact. Historically speaking, it is a relatively recently specialized room for food preparation within a family's dwelling and a descendant of the space around the cave dwellers' hearth and the medieval fireplace. The kitchen stove itself has gradually lost the task of household heating, which, in modern homes, is banished to the furnace room (belying the admonition, If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen). But the kitchen remains a node of powerful cultural associations with emotional warmth and nurture. After all, it is where Mom still produces apple pie for the family, whether she deploys apples, flour, and shortening to do so, or merely shifts Sara Lee's product from freezer to microwave oven.