[2007.12.22][Christmas Specials]Downstairs Upstairs

Christmas Specials

Kitchens

Downstairs Upstairs
厨房：楼上楼下

Dec 19th 2007

Women have not escaped the kitchen; it has come after them
妇女们未能逃离厨房；它如影随形。

MEPL

THESE days, nobody needs to cook. Families graze on cholesterol-sodden take-aways and microwaved ready-meals. Cooking is an occasional hobby and a vehicle for celebrity chefs. Which makes it odd that, at the same time, the kitchen has become the heart of the modern house: what the great hall was to the medieval castle and the parlour was to the Victorian terrace, the kitchen is to the 21st-century home.
今天，人们无需下厨。家家户户都在吃富含胆固醇的外卖和微波热化的现成食品。烹饪成了一种偶尔嗜好以及名厨们的一种表演。奇怪的是，同一时间，厨房业已成为现代家居的核心：厨房之于21世纪的家园的地位就犹如大厅之于中世纪的城堡，以及客厅则之于维多利亚时代的庭院。

The money spent on them has risen with their status. In America the kitchen market is now worth $170 billion, according to the National Kitchen and Bath Association—five times the country’s film industry. In the year to August 2007, IKEA, a Swedish furniture chain, sold over 1m kitchens worldwide. The average budget for a “major” kitchen overhaul in 2006, calculates Remodeling magazine, was a staggering $54,000; even a “minor” makeover cost on average $18,000.
花在厨房上的钱财随主人的身份而涨。据美国全国厨卫协会（National Kitchen and Bath Association）称，美国厨具市场如今高达1700亿美元，是该国电影产业的5倍。截至2007年8月，瑞典家具连锁公司宜家（IKEA）在全球售出了超过100万套厨房。据美国《家装》杂志（Remodeling）估算，2006年，一次厨房“大（major）”革新的平均预算为5万4千美元；即便是“小（minor）”改造平均也要花费1万8千美元。

Exclusivity, more familiar in the world of haute couture, has reached the kitchen: Robinson & Cornish, a British maker of bespoke kitchens, offers a Georgian-style one which would cost £145,000-155,000 ($290,000-310,000)—excluding building, plumbing and electrical work. Its big selling point, the publicity suggests, is that nobody else will have it: “You won’t see this kitchen in Hello.”
在高级时装界更为人知的专卖店也已经进入了厨具市场：英国一家定制厨具制造商罗宾逊-康尼什（Robinson & Cornish）公司向顾客提供一套乔治王时代风格的厨房，价值14万5千至15万5千英镑（合2万9千至3万1千美元）——建筑、管道和电路工作费用不计在内。宣传广告称其主要卖点在于绝无雷同：“你不会在别人家中见到这种厨房。”

Estate agents commonly use photographs of kitchens to sell properties. Celebrity chefs slice, steam and sear in aspirational culinary shrines of stainless steel and high gloss. An entire genre of television reality shows has grown up to supply ideas for turning that pokey back room into a place of cherry wood cabinets, polished granite and brushed aluminium.
地产代理商们普遍利用厨房照片进行售卖。名厨们在他们所渴望的布满不锈钢的高光泽的烹饪圣殿中切、蒸、烧。一整套的电视真人秀已经成熟起来，向人们提供种种思路，将狭小的密室改造成一个满眼樱木橱柜、磨光花岗石和铮亮铝合金的世界。

The elevation of the room that once belonged only to the servants to that of design showcase for the modern family tells the story of a century of social change. Right into the early 20th century, kitchens were smoky, noisy places, generally relegated underground, or to the back of the house, and as far from living space as possible. That was as it should be: kitchens were for servants, and the aspiring middle classes wanted nothing to do with them.
由曾经只属于仆人的房间到成为现代家庭的设计展示的这一演变讲述了一个世纪的社会变革。就在20世纪早期，厨房还充满了油烟和嘈杂声，并且通常都放在地下或者屋后，距离居室越远越好。原本就是正得其所嘛：厨房是为仆人准备的，抱负远大的中产阶级可不愿与之有丝毫的沾边。

Royalty ran them on an industrial scale. Henry VIII extended the Tudor kitchens at Hampton Court Palace into 55 rooms, covering over 3,000 square feet (280 square metres). These included the great kitchen, privy kitchen, cellar, larder, pantry, buttery, ewery, saucery, chaundry, spicery, poultery and victualling house. They were staffed by 200 people, serving 600 meals a day. In one year during Elizabeth I’s reign, according to records at Hampton Court, the royal kitchens roasted 1,240 oxen, 8,200 sheep, 2,330 deer, 760 calves, 1,870 pigs and 53 wild boar.
王室的厨房则是工业级的规模。亨利八世（Henry VIII）将其位于汉普顿宫（Hampton Court Palace）的都铎（Tudor）御膳房扩张到55间屋子，占地3千平方英尺（合280平方米）。这些厨房包括大厨房、私密厨房、地窖、贮藏室、备膳室、酒窖、水洗房、茶碟室、仓储室、调料室、饲禽房以及储粮室。200人在这里服务，每天供应600道餐。根据汉普顿宫的记载，伊丽莎白一世（Elizabeth I）时期，御膳房每年要烘烤1240只公牛、8200只羊、2330只鹿、760只小牛、1870只猪以及53只野猪。

The scale was more modest but the principles the same for the middle class. The Victorian and Edwardian kitchen was organised for live-in servants, which were plentiful in England, as they were in America until the civil war. Only the poor and the servants ate in the kitchen. The master of the house scarcely set foot beyond the green baize door; the mistress only to supervise. The kitchen’s comfort, let alone its aesthetics, were of little concern to them.
对于中产阶级而言，规模要更小些，但原则则是一样的。维多利亚以及爱德华七世时期的厨房都安排给寄宿的仆人，这在英格兰数量很多，内战前的美国也是如此。只有穷人以及仆人会在厨房用餐。一家的主人几乎从不跨越绿色的羊毛毡门，女主人也仅仅是监督。厨房的舒适与否——更遑论美观与否——几乎不在他们的关注之中。

But as the working classes prospered and the servant shortage set in, housekeeping became a matter of interest to the literate classes. One of the pioneers of a radical new way of thinking about the kitchen was Catharine Esther Beecher, sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the abolitionist. In “American Woman’s Home”, published in 1869, the Beecher sisters recommended a scientific approach to household management, designed—with puritanical zeal—to enhance the efficiency of a woman’s work, and promote order.
但是当工人阶级兴起，而开始出现仆人短缺后，持家成了知识阶级（literate classes）的一种乐趣。以一种激进的新方式思考厨房的先驱之一就是凯瑟琳·埃丝特·比彻（Catharine Esther Beecher），废奴主义者哈里特·比彻·斯托（Harriet Beecher Stowe）的妹妹。在出版于1869年的《美国妇女的家庭》（American Woman’s Home）一书中，比彻姊妹推荐了一种家庭管理的科学方法，这种方法是（以清教徒的热忱）设计来提高妇女劳动的效率并促进秩序的。

A full supply of all conveniences in the kitchen and cellar, and a place appointed for each article, very much facilitate domestic labour. For want of this, much vexation and loss of time is occasioned while seeking vessels in use, or in cleansing those employed by different persons for various purposes.
在厨房和地窖中充分配备各种便利用品，以及分门别类地放置都非常便于家务劳动。之所以需要如此，是因为当不同的人因不同的目的使用或者清洗时，寻找碗碟的过程引起了很多烦恼，浪费了大量时间。

No corner of the kitchen escaped Catharine Beecher’s critical eye, nor the precision of her advice. She recommended the construction of cupboards, shelves and drawers adapted to each sort of utensil. She favoured a work-table with built-in drawers, in order “to save many steps”. She advised a “grooved dish drainer” for the sink, an ingenious idea at the time. She included detailed instructions for hanging dish cloths, stressing that these should be hung on three separate nails over the sink: one for greasy dishes, one for non-greasy dishes, and one for pots and kettles. “A housekeeper who chooses to do without some of these conveniences”, she wrote, “and spend the money saved in parlour adornments, has a right to do so, and others have a right to think she in this shows herself deficient in good sense.”
厨房的任何一个角落都没有逃出凯瑟琳·比彻犀利的双眼，她的建议也极为精准。她提出建造碗橱、货架以及抽屉，以便适合不同种类的器皿。她更喜欢内建抽屉的工作台，从而可以“节省许多步骤”。她建议给洗涤槽安装一个“开槽的碟形排水道”，这在当时可算是很巧妙的思路。她总结出悬挂抹布的详细说明，并强调抹布应该挂在洗涤槽的三个不同的挂钩上：一个用于洗涤油腻盘碟，一个用于洗涤不油腻的盘碟，另一个用于洗涤各类锅、壶。她写道：“那些没有采用这些便利，花掉了从客厅装饰中节省下来的钱财的主妇们可以这样去做一做，而已经采纳的也可以对照这些说明去判断其不足。”

Many contemporary ideas about kitchen design can be traced back to another American, Christine Frederick, who set about enhancing the efficiency of the housewife. Her 1919 work, “Household Engineering: Scientific Management in the Home”, and her articles for the Ladies Home Journal on radical notions such as “Suppose our servants didn’t live with us?”, were based on detailed observation of a housewife’s daily routine. A zealous advocate of Taylorism, she borrowed the principle of efficiency on the factory floor and applied it to domestic tasks on the kitchen floor. On dishwashing, for instance, she noted the following:
同一时代，关于厨房设计的许多理念则可以追溯到另外一个美国人，克里斯丁·弗雷德里克（Christine Frederick），正是她开始提高主妇们的效率。她在1919年写就的《家务工程：家庭的科学管理》（Household Engineering: Scientific Management in the Home）一文以及为《女士家庭杂志》（Ladies Home Journal）撰写的关于诸如《假如仆人没有与我们生活在一起？》（Suppose our servants didn’t live with us?）之类极端想法的多篇文章都是基于对家庭主妇日常活动的详细观察。作为一名泰勒主义（Taylorism）的倡导者，她借鉴工厂车间的效率原则，将之应用到厨房家务中。比如，关于洗碟子，她提到：

Usually after our dinner I wash forty-eight pieces of china, twenty-two pieces of silver and ten utensils and pots, or eighty pieces in all; and for years I never realized that I actually made eighty wrong motions in the washing alone, not counting others in the sorting, wiping and laying away. Like all other women I thought that there couldn’t be much improvement in the same old task of washing dishes.
通常用餐后，我要洗涤48件瓷器、22件银器以及十件餐具——或者说总共有80件；多年来，我从未意识到，事实上仅仅是在洗涤——不算及整理、擦拭以及收存——过程中我就错了80次。 与其她女性一样，我认为在同样古老的碗碟洗涤上不可能有多大的改善。

How wrong she was. It turned out that her sink was too low (the “stupidity of builders”, she sighed); for every five extra inches in a woman’s height, she calculated, the sink should be raised by two and a half inches. She repositioned the draining board, moved the drying towels, and scraped her plates more thoroughly before washing. Thus a 45-minute operation was reduced to a mere 30.
她真是大错特错。事实上，她的洗涤槽太低（她感叹这是“建筑师的愚蠢”）；她计算，由于女性身高增加了5英寸，洗涤槽的高度也应该提高两英寸半。她恢复使用排水板，取消了干毛巾，并将盘子擦拭得更干净之后再进行洗涤。这样，耗时45分钟的工作就可以减少到仅仅只需半小时。

Frederick’s central idea, that “stove, sink and kitchen table must be placed in such a relation that useless steps are avoided entirely”, directly informs modern kitchen design, based on the “work triangle” between fridge, cooker and sink. It also inspired the first fully fitted kitchen, designed in the 1920s by Margarete Schütter-Lihotsky. She developed the “Frankfurt kitchen” for social housing in the city, its size—1.9m by 3.4m—and layout determined by a time-and-motion study. It was a modernist triumph, and many elements—the L-shaped work surface, head-height rows of built-in cupboards, an extractor hood above the cooker—remain central features of today’s kitchen.
弗雷德里克的中心思想——“炉灶、水槽以及厨桌的使用必须满足这样一种关系：完全免去无用过程——直接赋予了基于冰箱、厨具和水槽之间“工作三角（work triangle）”的现代厨房设计概念。它也促生了20世纪20年代由玛格丽特·舒特尔-里霍茨基（Margarete Schütter-Lihotsky）设计的第一个完全配备厨房。她为城市社会住房开发了“法兰克福厨房（“Frankfurt kitchen）”。它的大小（1.9米X 3.4米）及布局是根据时间-动作（效率）研究（time-and-motion study）决定的。这是一个现代化的成功，其中许多元素——L形工作台面、等头高的壁橱列、灶具上的排烟罩——依然是今日厨房的中心特色。

Bob, Betty and Jamie
鲍勃、贝蒂与杰米

In the 1920s, three factors ushered in the modern kitchen. One was the influence of the European modernist movement, led by Bauhaus architects in Germany and Le Corbusier in France. Another was the development of electrical appliances. General Electric was promoting all manner of newfangled equipment, including the electric refrigerator, automatic clothes washer, pop-up toaster, electric coffee percolator, electric iron and automatic suction sweeper. Finally, the rising cost of servants boosted demand for such labour-saving devices. Lorain Gas Ranges advertised their new oven thermostat in 1926 as “The Answer to the Servant Problem”.
20世纪20年代，三大要素导入了现代厨房。一个是由德国包豪斯建筑学派（Bauhaus architects）与法国勒·科布西耶（Le Corbusier）所领导的欧洲现代主义运动的影响。另一个是电器应用的发展。通用电器公司（General Electric）一直在推销各类新款设备，包括电冰箱、自动洗衣机、弹出式烤箱、电咖啡滤壶、电熨斗以及自动吸尘器。最后，仆佣成本的上升推动了这类机械装置的需求。1926年，洛雷恩灶具公司（Lorain Gas Ranges）宣传其新式恒温烘箱时就将之标榜为“仆佣问题的解决之道”。

MEPL
All’s swell in the kitchen
厨房里，人人尽兴。

The kitchen by the 1930s became a showcase for the middle-class home, its newest appliances badges of status. Magazines explained how to introduce flair and colour. A woman was taught to fulfil her dreams through her kitchen. In 1936 Monel Metal, an American kitchen manufacturer, advertised a new model with a photograph of Betty, newly wed, apron already securely fastened around her waist. Her hands happily plunged into soapsuds, she gazes gratefully at her husband, Bob, under the headline: “She wouldn’t take No for an answer”. “Said Betty to Bob one day,” reads the ad, “wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could have a bright and shining kitchen—with everything matching in Monel Metal?”“Swell,” he replies, but fears it will cost too much. She discovers otherwise. He is seduced. She gets her kitchen.
到30年代，厨房成为中产阶级家庭的展窗，其最新设备象征着身份地位。杂志向公众介绍如何引入风格和色彩，向妇女们宣扬可以通过厨房来实现其梦想。1936年，美国厨具制造商蒙耐尔金属公司（Monel Metal）为其新款所做的广告就是一张照片：新婚燕尔的贝蒂腰间围裙紧裹。“她不会答‘不’”的大字标题下，她快乐地将双手浸没在肥皂水中，感激地注视着丈夫鲍勃。广告上写道：“某天，贝蒂对鲍勃说，如果我们拥有一个明亮闪耀的厨房——所有的一切都可以在蒙耐尔金属公司找到——那该多好啊？”“好主意！”他说，但又担心太贵。她不这么认为，他被说服了。于是她得到了想要的厨房。

It took post-war prosperity, suburban living and Formica to finish off the kitchen’s coming of age. By the 1950s, in newly built houses, the kitchen was promoted to the front of the house, allowing the housewife to anticipate cheerily her husband’s return. The kitchen had taken central place in the American dream.
战后繁荣、郊区生活和富美家产品（Formica）毁掉了厨房巅峰期的到来。到50年代，新建的住宅中，厨房被置于屋前，以便主妇们可以开心地提前看到丈夫归来。厨房已经在美国人的梦想中占据了中心位置。

Yet the kitchen remained a place for cooking, and thus principally for women. As Ellen Plante, author of a history of the American kitchen, points out, its revival as a hub of the home did not take place until women joined the workforce in big numbers, during the 1970s and 1980s. Working mothers were decreasingly keen to cook—hence the rise of the takeaway—but still had to prepare meals, and they did not want to spend their evenings slaving away in a space cut off from the rest of the family.
然而，厨房依然是一个烹调之地，因而主要还是属于女性。美国厨房史的作者艾伦·普莱德（Ellen Plante）指出，直到女性在70年代和80年代大规模地加入劳力大军，厨房才再次成为家庭的中心。职场母亲们日益不愿下厨——因此外卖兴起了——但仍必须准备饭菜，而且她们不希望晚上在一个与其他家庭成员隔绝的地方累死累活。

Out went the idea of the kitchen as service area, where housewives scrubbed, chopped and boiled. In came the open family space, where friends hovered, teenagers grazed and children did homework. Its early incarnation, in the late 1970s and 1980s, was often “country-style” or “farmhouse”, all oak, orange Le Creuset casserole dishes, and often centred on the AGA cooker, as urban women, shuttling between the office and the home, tried to recover something of the pre-industrial age of hearth, flagstone and pantry.
认为厨房是主妇们擦洗、砍劈和烧煮的服务区的观念已经过时了。流行的看法是，厨房是朋友们徘徊、少年们吃饭以及孩童们做功课的一个开放的家庭空间。它的早期典型——二十世纪七八十年代后期——通常是“乡村式”或者“农家”，全都是橡棕色、橙色的法国“Le Creuset”牌沙锅，而且通常集中在“将军牌”炊具（AGA cooker）上，因为穿梭于办公室和家庭之间的都市女性试图复原些前工业时代的什么东西，那个时代满是灶台、石板和餐具室。
        
The farmhouse style still sells well, even in New York and London, where it seems to speak to some nostalgic yearning among urban families. Some of the priciest hand-built English kitchens today are a cleaner, less fussy, often Shaker-inspired, version of the farmhouse kitchen. In a 2004 study in Britain, June Freeman, a sociologist, found that the farmhouse kitchen, of natural wood and terracotta, was the preferred model for 41% of her sample, beating hands down the designer kitchen in “high-gloss aubergine and black lacquer”, which only 11% favoured.
农家式厨房依然销售旺盛，甚至在纽约和伦敦也很好，似乎体现了城市家庭的一些怀旧之情。今天，一些最昂贵的手工建造的英国厨房都是农家厨房的一个更干净、更少讲究，通常是震教派风格（Shaker-inspired）的翻版。社会学家朱恩·弗里曼（June Freeman）2004年在英国的一次调查发现，在她的样本中，41%的人更喜欢满是天然木和陶器用具的农家式厨房，很轻易地就打败了涂有“高光泽紫色和黑色原漆”的设计师厨房，只有11%的人偏爱后者。

So the kitchen has come full circle. As Ms Plante puts it: “In the early Colonial kitchen, with its massive cooking hearth, the family gathered together for meals, conversation and home-related activities.” Today’s lived-in kitchen, the central set for much TV drama, from “The Sopranos”, to “Desperate Housewives”, is not so different. “People want to express themselves through their kitchens,” says Jesper Brodin, global head of kitchens at IKEA: “Today, the dream of an open living kitchen designed for social use is universal.”
因此，厨房又兜了回来。普莱德女士指出：“早期的殖民式厨房灶台庞大，一家人聚在一起用餐、交流以及家庭内的相关活动。”今天的入居式（lived-in）厨房虽然主要安排了大量电视剧，从《黑道家族》（The Sopranos）到《绝望主妇》（Desperate Housewives），但并没有很大不同。“人们希望通过自家的厨房来表达自己，”宜家全球厨具总监耶斯佩尔·布罗顿（Jesper Brodin）表示，“今天，人们普遍梦想拥有一个有社交用途的开放式生活厨房。”

Certainly, European kitchen suppliers are thriving internationally. At Bulthaup, an upmarket German supplier, sales of kitchens in Asia tripled in the year to April 2007. Kitchens by Poggenpohl, another smart German brand, are selling well in Dubai, Shanghai and Istanbul; it recently opened a showroom in Nairobi, Kenya. In the middle market too, IKEA is busy spreading flat packs and frustration into all corners of the globe: in 2008 it plans to add two more stores in China to the four it already runs there, for instance, and four more to its eight stores in Russia.
当然，欧洲厨房供应商正在全球范围内蓬勃发展。截至2007年4月，德国高档厨具供应商“布尔托（Bulthaup）”在亚洲的厨具销售量翻了两倍。另一家德国时髦品牌“博德宝（Poggenpohl）”在迪拜、上海和伊斯坦布尔也销售旺盛；它最近在肯尼亚首都内罗毕开设了一家展厅。在中档市场，宜家正忙于将其平板包装（flat pack）款式和商业阻击拓展到全球的各个角落：比如说，它计划2008年在中国已经运行的四家店铺基础上，另外再增开两家；在俄罗斯，也要在现有的八家店铺基础上再增开四家。

Brand-conscious Russians, it seems, are happy to have their taste dictated by design gurus in Stockholm and London. But if Americans and northern Europeans seek timelessness in natural wood, the newly rich Chinese and Russians tend to think high-gloss surfaces are a better reflection of modern designer living.
看起来，拥有品牌意识的俄罗斯人很乐于接受斯德哥尔摩和伦敦的设计大师们所主宰的品味。不过，如果说美国人和北欧人在天然木中寻求永恒，那么新近富裕起来的中国人和俄罗斯人往往认为高光泽的表面更好地反映了现代设计师的生活。

Even in the poorest parts of the world, a modern kitchen seems to have particular aspirational value. Tim Dirven, a Belgian photographer, came across a bizarre but powerful illustration of this at a street photographer’s stall in a dusty run-down district of Kinshasa, the capital of Congo. Of all the pictures that customers could choose as a background to be photographed against, the most popular was a bright yellow and blue European-style fitted kitchen.
即便在全世界最穷困的地方，现代厨房似乎也有其独特的向往价值。对此，在刚果首都金沙萨的一个肮脏的荒废区，比利时摄影师蒂姆·德温（Tim Dirven）在一个街头摄影师的货摊上偶然发现了一个非同寻常而强有力的证明。在顾客可以选为摄影背景的图片中，最流行的是一幅明黄色和蓝色欧式装备厨房的照片。

The cult of the social kitchen has its limits, however. In China and Japan, modern city flats are usually too small to make a lived-in kitchen practical. IKEA says that its Chinese customers are concerned chiefly with how to make the most of small cooking spaces, not with creating open-plan areas. IKEA’s Mr Brodin says smoky wok-cooking also makes the open kitchen less appealing there. According to a 27-country survey for IKEA by IsoPublic, a polling firm, less than 20% of Chinese families eat in the kitchen compared with 64% of Canadian and over 50% of American ones.
然而，对社交厨房的热衷有其局限性。在中国和日本，现代城市公寓通常太小，而无法成为入居式厨房。宜家声称，其中国客户主要关心如何最好地利用狭小的厨房空间，而不是创造一个敞开式区域。宜家公司的布洛顿说，油烟弥漫的铁锅烹饪也令开放式厨房缺乏吸引力。民意测验公司IsoPublic受宜家公司所托，对27个国家的调查表明，不到20%的中国家庭在厨房用餐，相比之下，64%的加拿大人以及超过一半的美国人会在厨房用餐。

The more traditional family roles are, the less likely the kitchen is to be used as a living area. In Sweden, 30% of households say that the man is the main cook, and nearly two-thirds of families socialise in their kitchen, according to IsoPublic. At the other end of the scale, less than 5% of Saudis use their kitchen socially, and a man is the main cook in just 3% of households.
传统家庭的角色越重，厨房用作生活区的可能性越低。据IsoPublic的调查，30%的瑞典家庭表示男性是主要的下厨者，并有接近三分之二的家庭在厨房中进行社交活动。而在天平的另一端，不足5%的沙特人使用厨房进行社交活动，并且男性是主要下厨者的家庭仅有3%。

The French too seem to be reluctant to bash down the kitchen wall and let their guests in. In the land of gastronomy, separate dining-rooms remain common—and an open well-designed kitchen is known as une cuisine américaine. In Paris, the architecture of 19th-century apartments, combined with a formal eating culture, has generally kept the kitchen hidden away at the end of a narrow corridor, overlooking a gloomy interior courtyard. The French, along with the Portuguese and Spanish, do the least socialising in the kitchen among western Europeans—half as much as Swedes and Finns. Despite the fashion for open kitchens in new designer gourmet restaurants in Paris, food-preparation in the home is still often considered an art to be mastered backstage.
法国人似乎也不愿意推倒厨房的墙壁让客人进去。在这个美食之乡，单间的餐室仍然到处可见——而且设计精美的开放厨房会被认为是美式厨房。在巴黎，结合着拘谨的饮食文化的那些19世纪的公寓建筑普遍将厨房隐藏在狭窄的回廊尽头，俯瞰着幽暗的内院。在西欧人中，法国人与葡萄牙人及西班牙人是最少利用厨房社交的，比例只有瑞典和芬兰的一半。尽管巴黎新设计的美食餐厅里，开放式厨房很时尚，但在家备餐仍然往往被视为一种私下掌握的艺术。

Shirley Conran, a British feminist writer, famously declared in the 1970s that “Life’s too short to stuff a mushroom.” Throwing off the apron was the first step to a woman’s freedom. Today, for some working women, the celebration of gastronomy, and its accompanying cult of the kitchen, is in turn a liberation from this anti-domesticity creed. At last, it is acceptable to know how to bake brownies as well as read a balance sheet. For others, though, it is simply a new form of domestic enslavement. Not only do women now have to climb the professional ladder but they are expected to be domestic divas too.
英国女权主义作家雪莉·康兰（Shirley Conran）在20世纪70年代曾有一著名断言：“人生短暂，尚不足饱食一顿蘑菇。”抛掉围裙是女性获得自由的第一步。今天，对一些职业女性而言，美食庆典以及伴随的厨房风靡又是一次对这种反家务信念的解放。最后，了解一下如何焙烧果仁巧克力以及阅读资产负债表也是可以接受的。虽然，对其他人而言，这不过是家庭奴役的一种新形式。如今，女性不仅要攀爬职业阶梯，人们期望她们也能成为家务主角。

Professional designers reckon that the kitchen of the future will be a more egalitarian place. Women may still be the main cook in 77% of kitchens, according to the IsoPublic survey, but men increasingly spend time there too. Mintel, a market-research group, suggests that British men have been inspired to put on their aprons by male celebrity chefs, such as Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay. Kitchen catalogues show today’s Bob and Betty cheerfully chopping together in domestic bliss.
职业设计师预测，未来的厨房将是个更为平等主义的地方。根据IsoPublic的调查，在77%的厨房中，女性可能依然会是主角，但男性也会花费越来越多的时间呆在厨房中。市场研究机构敏特公司（Mintel）指出，杰米·奥利弗（Jamie Oliver）和戈登·拉姆齐（Gordon Ramsay）等男性大厨们已鼓励英国男人们系上围裙。厨房目录也显出，今天，鲍勃和贝蒂一起愉快地切菜剁肉，沉浸在家务幸福之中。

Kitchen manufacturers are responding with a cool, harder-edged look, designed to appeal to masculine taste. Poggenpohl is shortly to introduce a new model designed specially for men, in aluminium, dark gloss and glass—a “sleek and functional design language specifically addresses male customers”. It comes complete with an in-built high-tech audio-visual system. It even includes a cooker.
厨具制造商也相应推出冷静、硬朗的式样，以男性的品味来进行设计。“博德宝”就迅即将一种专为男性设计的新款式引入铝合金、黑色光泽和玻璃组成的世界——以一种“圆滑而功能化设计的风格去明确迎合男性顾客”。它还配有一个嵌入式高科技视听系统，甚至还包括一名厨师。

Appliance manufacturers are also beaming music, TV and the internet into the kitchen, in part to meet what are considered male demands. Various manufacturers have introduced a digital TV refrigerator, with a built-in LCD screen on the fridge door. Electrolux has a model with an internet screen built in above the fridge doors, complete with a bar-code-detected food stockage and ordering system.
家电制造商也将音乐、电视以及互联网送进了厨房，部分原因就是为了满足男性的需求。各个厂家都已推出数字电视冰箱，在冰箱门上装有一个嵌入式液晶显示屏。“伊莱克斯（Electrolux）”有一种款式是在冰箱门上内嵌一个互联网屏幕，并配有一个采用条码检测技术的食品贮藏与订货系统。

What with wireless and digital entertainment zones, kitchens have come a long way from the era of the open fire and blackened pot. Kitchen designers plainly think that the lure of state-of-the-art multi-media gadgetry will pull more men into the kitchen in the future. And they may well be right. But whether they go there in order to stuff a mushroom, or rather to download music and stick a frozen chicken tikka in the microwave, is probably an open question.
从明火和黑锅的时代到带有无线及数字娱乐区，厨房走过了漫长的道路。厨房设计师们显然认为，尖端多媒体产品的诱惑未来将会把更多的男人拉进厨房。他们很可能是对的。不过，男人们是去那里饱食一顿蘑菇，或者是去下载音乐，还是放一只冰冻的印式烤鸡肉（chicken tikka）到微波炉里，可能还是一个悬而未决的问题。