THE FUTURE OF KITCHENS
We look at how our cooking habits are evolving, and how our kitchens could look in years to come
Good Food readers will agree that the kitchen is at the centre of the home – and never more so than now. A Home Report conducted by Lloyd’s in 2019 found that a third of us spend more time in the kitchen than anywhere else in the house. As lockdowns forced us out of cafés and restaurants, our kitchens became one of our only sources of sustenance, as well as entertainment and solace. Sales of clothing dropped, while kitchenware rocketed. In the hours we had previously spent commuting, we cooked. Our kitchens, more than ever before, are sites of selfexpression, reflecting both who we are, how we live and who we want to be. Clare Finney talks to designers, historians and writers about our love affair with the kitchen.
Ultimate convenience
‘Closing the oven door and swinging a tea towel over my shoulder is one of the most satisfying movements I make in the kitchen,’ writes Good Food contributor Diana Henry, in her book From the Oven to the Table. Comprising recipes that require little more than a roasting tin, it’s one of a growing number of bung-it-in-the-oven books to be published recently. One of the first writers to really popularise this approach is Rukmini Iyer, whose four-book-strong The Roasting Tin series has sold over half a million copies. ‘Of course, the one-pot idea has been around a while – but the appeal of the tin format is that it’s hands-free and easy,’ she explains. Though there is little in the way of e ort or skill involved, Rukmini’s recipes promise maximum flavour. It’s proved popular because it provides a choice: ‘I can spend an afternoon making pierogi; but I know I can throw something delicious together in 10 minutes,’ she says. ‘You can enjoy entertaining,’ she points out, instead of being squirreled away in the kitchen, ‘feeling frazzled and missing friends.’ The casserole and the roasting tin are, if you like, low-fi approaches to all-in-one cooking, but the last decade has seen a high-fi version slowly come into its own in Britain, in the form of the Thermomix, Magimix, Kitchenaid, Instant Pot and Ninja Foodi, among others. ‘In Spain, the Thermomix is in one in 10 households; in Portugal it’s completely normalised,’ says Janie Turner, author of four Thermomix cookbooks. ‘It’s evolved from being a blender that cooks, to being capable of slow cooking, preserving, making ice cream, cooking rice and making dough.’ One of its chief draws, Janie believes, lies in its ability to replace almost all other surface appliances in your kitchen at a single stroke. For kitchens with limited storage space, which most citydwellers live in now, this is ideal. ‘If I have
Sales of clothing dropped, while sales of kitchenware rocketed. Our kitchens are sites of self expression
two hours on a Saturday before friends come over, I can now make four or five dishes instead of three.’
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Cook, chat and eat together
Rukmini is in the middle of installing her dream kitchen, with a peninsula that dinner guests can perch at so she can chat while cooking. ‘I wanted an entertaining space,’ she says. ‘I’m hopeful that we’ll have people round again.’
In its design and philosophy, Rukmini’s new kitchen encapsulates much of what kitchen designer Johnny Grey hopes will soon become commonplace. For years he has been lamenting the absence of proper design in kitchens. ‘I don’t mean design in design terms,’ he explains. ‘I mean the scope to put things in to personalise your kitchen and make cooking and design easier.’ At Johnny Grey Studios, he applies neuroscience and, ‘this concept called soft geometry. If you think about the way people circulate and find a route in a space, if you have lots of sharp corners, you’re pushing people around and triggering a lot of your fight or flight response mechanisms.’ Creating a kitchen island in place of counters that are built into the wall ‘allows people to circulate easily, increases your worktop space and enables you to make eye-contact and chat with others.’
Open-plan kitchens and the death of the dining room are developments Johnny thinks should be celebrated. ‘What I love is that people are becoming more European in their mentality, recognising the role of food as an organising event even during the day.’ Johnny has been involved in researching a multigenerational – described as 4G – kitchen with The National Innovation Centre for Ageing (NICA) and Newcastle University. The aim is to design kitchens that ‘enable people of all ages and abilities to stay in their homes’. Joining him on the project is Professor Peter Gore, an expert on population and ageing, who pointed out that ‘so much of ageing designing is emotionally defective. His idea is to combine technology and design to make the
It’s one of a growing number of bung-it-inthe-oven cookbooks to be published recently
The majority of people who go into care homes do so because of issues around cooking
experience of being in a kitchen safe. The majority of people who go into care homes do so because of issues around cooking. He and Johnny want to ‘enable people to stay in their homes through creating a kitchen they love and that works for them’.
An easier life with food technology
Sci-fi is full of soup-stirring robots, but in focusing on these we risk missing the advantages digital technology can bring. Siri, Google Home and Alexa are increasingly commonplace, says Michael Wolf, who runs the Smart Kitchen Summit and food tech website, The Spoon (thespoon.tech). ‘We’re using them for meal planning, grocery lists and recipes.’ Besides, for all the hype around kitchen robots, ‘from a cooking behaviour standpoint, consumers change really slowly’. The common thread running through the technologies we do eventually adopt permanently is, ‘does it make my life easier?’ After all, it took a global pandemic to really normalise internet shopping, he points out.
The next trend that he anticipates taking o is connected appliances, such as ‘fridges with cameras built in, so you can be in the shop and see what’s in your refrigerator and what you need to buy’. He explains that designers are looking at putting sensors in fridges ‘that act as a digital nose, which detects the gas food puts out when it’s beginning to expire.’
For now, most technology tends to concentrate on restaurants – and cleaning. ‘Let’s not forget that,’ says Michael. ‘A good use of robotics would be to automate that process more.’
As for the fully robotic kitchens? ‘In 15 years people might be selling them, but there are practical applications: people who, through age or injury, are losing the ability to cook for themselves. People like you and I, who love cooking, won’t change.’
Making pasta or patatas bravas by hand is a fun experience every so often, but if you’re doing it every day, the idea of automation appeals
The world kitchen
Countries around the world have taken di erent technologies and adapted them for their own use. ‘In India, in the south, a lot of the dishes involve crushing grains into a paste,’ says Rukmini. A standard Magimix would struggle – ‘so in India they have a sort of electric pestle and mortar attachment, called a stone grinder, which grinds to a fine paste.’ In Nigeria, the Kitchen Aid is iconic. ‘It’s a serious wedding present,’ says Professor Deborah Sugg Ryan, a British design historian whose current area of research is in the past, present and future of the kitchen. Meanwhile, in Italy, the Thermomix is ‘a must-have’, to the point that some refer to it as ‘Bimby’, meaning child. In Spain, more households boast a deep-fat fryer than a kettle. Again, it goes back to Michael Wolf’s point about making life easier. Making pasta or patatas bravas by hand is a fun experience every so often, but,
‘if you’re doing it every day, the idea of automation appeals.’ He cites as a recent example the Rotimatic, invented in north America by an Indian-born couple. ‘A lot of Indian families make flatbread every day, so many buy it.’ Yet one of the biggest shifts for kitchens of the world has been largely invisible: social media, which has enabled communities to form around certain appliances and cuisines. ‘Food connects you with place,’ Deborah says. ‘It’s been interesting to see communities come together online, and connect with each other through recipes.’