3 Kitchens

Part 1: ‘The oldest kitchen’

Recently I had the pleasure of reading Feast. Why Humans Share Food by Martin Jones (OUP 2007). I was particularly taken with his discussion of what he describes as perhaps ‘the oldest kitchen’ that has yet been uncovered in an archaeological dig at Jerf-el-Ahmar, on the left bank of the Syrian Euphrates dated to about 11000 years ago.

 'In one room of the building, a careful removal of the collapsed mudbrick revealed a series of stone implements in their places of use around the room, a space approximately three metres by two and a half. These implements comprised three limestone basins, one small limestone bowl, several pounding stones, two flat polished stone plates, and three long grinding stones or 'saddle querns', over which a kneeling individual would work an upper stone back and forth to prepare flour...the charred plant remains could be sampled and their densities plotted across the room, and in relationship with the various species of equipment. The most abundant remains Wilcox recovered were barley seeds which had been mostly broken up into fragments...That small room less than 8 square meters, was a busy, crowded space. It gives the general impression of serving another unit rather than being self-contained. One such candidate is its near neighbour, the largest building in the group, a sunken round building...What seems clear from the organisation of activities across space at both Mureybet and Jerf-el-Ahmar is that culinary preparation happens in one place, and the transformed creation is taken to a second venue for consumption...An enduring feature of food-sharing among our own species, as we have explored in the preceding chapter, is the conversational circle of the familiar group around the hearth, the focal point of food preparation at the centre of the social action. At these sites, the logic of the central hearth is broken, the focal point has been taken from the conversational circle and transferred to a separate space. The room that has been so meticulously sampled at Jerf-el-Ahmar may well be the oldest 'kitchen'.

He links the development of this separate space to a shift in the mobility of people and the increased likelihood that someone outside the family may arrive at a meal time – the guest – and a corresponding shift to removing ‘the preparation of food to an ancillary space, to conceal its transformation from the eyes and senses of the diners....Looking at food in far more recent societies of Asia and Europe, the anthropologist Jack Goody had drawn our attention to an axis of food-sharing, between the basse cusine of ordinary family meals, and a differentiated haute cuisine amongst diners of status, a status that may be both preserved and discreetly contested in the drama of this distinct form of meal...Haute cuisine involves a large element of theatre, display, and disguise, prestigious ingredients and exotic flavourings hinting at distant, almost mythical regions. Not all kitchens are found in prestigious places, but a separate place of preparation does serve well as an ante-room to culinary dreams, maximising the element of surprise and mystery. Today, we are used to kitchens in much lowlier, homelier contexts, but even here, they remain places where food is transformed and disguised in order to impress. Moreover, even in the lowliest of homes, the separation of spaces for the preparation and consumption of food typically reveals much about status and differentiation. There will typically been a distinction of gender or age in who is in the kitchen and in the dining space.’

This set me thinking about three kitchens with which I am most familiar. The first is the ‘kitchen’ in the round hut I stay in when I visit with my wantoks in the village of Paiga in Papua New Guinea. The second is the kitchen of my childhood in Sri Lanka, the kitchen presided over by our cook, Rosaline. The third is my own home kitchen. I decided to look at these three through Jones’ lens to see how they fit his schema for the transition of this core domestic space.