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Article: If you can't stand the heat ...(Features)(A Thousand Years Of Food)
- Article from:
- The Christian Science Monitor
- Article date:
- April 5, 2000
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 The Christian Science Publishing Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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If necessity is the mother of invention, the kitchen is surely one of the great arenas of technological change. The pace was slow through the first two-thirds of the millennium, but the impetus behind 1,000 years of kitchen developments has remained the same: to move food from larder to table efficiently.
From the large, open fireplace of a medieval shopkeeper's house, to the grandiose layout of a 15th-century nobleman's kitchen, these rooms were indicators of wealth - and often a virtual slave quarters for the women and servants who worked in such torrid environments. Not until the stove appeared in the 17th century did the kitchen as we know it begin to take ...