ABSTRACT
This chapter explains architectural treatises and exemplary pictures of kitchens in manuscript illuminations, painting and book illustration. Writing down recipes was one thing, but picturing the site of work, the kitchen, and the tools to be used was another. Kitchen blocks often included a variety of service rooms, with variations determined by economic levels and social customs. Surviving medieval structures, even when inevitably stripped of furniture and altered over time, often reveal their functions through the remains of telltale features such as chimneys or hearths. As Pier Nicola Pagliara has established through study of a large number of architectural drawings and plans, kitchen placement in Roman palaces of varying size and economic status from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries demonstrates a variety of strategies. Through the studies of medieval archaeologists, as well as architectural and culinary historians, the complex physical organization of the kitchen block has been reconstructed for a number of sites.
