ABSTRACT
Eighteenth-century kitchens were important facilitators of domestic life, from the provision of food to the enjoyment of sociability and conviviality. Like all rooms, they needed the appropriate furniture and tools to function in the way they were designated to perform, but unlike most other rooms in the early-modern house, kitchens were workrooms. As such, they were quite different in their contribution to the efforts of homemaking, particularly if the definition of ‘home’ centres on the notion that homes were places where work was not performed. The busiest, hottest and messiest activities took place in and around the kitchen, seconded by the scullery and the washhouse. Despite the focus on functionality, and therefore stripped of most opportunities for taste and fancy, eighteenth-century kitchens were not set pieces but spaces that had to be adapted and customized.2 Only the hearth, the source of heat, can be taken as a given at the centre of all activity.
