The Kitchen

The kitchen today is the room to which the eyes of the technical engineers turn before any other room in the house: for it they take the measurements of the flues, the openings for light, and the placement and fitting of the cupboard fronts and the cooking burners. It is the workshop on which the efforts of the specialists among the chemists are spent: they analyze the food that enters it — eggs, meat, and vegetables, bread, fat, and milk products — and compile for it, in the magazines and newspapers, the choicest of the experiments useful for nutrition; and so arose the vitamins in all their kinds and the tonics in all their forms. And the doctors came, entering it in their turn, prescribing the kind of food and writing out for the patient a diet list before the prescription for medicine. And the industrial factories came, competing with one another — some offering it fireboxes, iron ovens for coal, kerosene, and electricity, others offering the kitchen's utensils of copper, iron, aluminum, glass, and earthenware. And then came the woman of this age, adding to it from the work of her own hands and the reach of her own taste — sheer curtains for the windows, oilcloths with attractive designs and colors for the tables and shelves, and colored paint for the cupboards and drawers — until her kitchen has become one of the most splendid rooms of the house, for the sunshine and light it admits, for the bright colors it holds, and for the tools it contains, inviting to work and comfortable in use.

This, Madam, is the kitchen as it is with them. I hope I have succeeded, even approximately, in setting down the picture our new Arab kitchen ought to present. And this duty should not daunt us, for those who build their houses today have awakened to the importance of the kitchen's location — the necessary exposure, and its need of openings for air and sun, like the rest of the rooms of the house. But what I observe of our indifference to this new architecture and to the way of profiting by it is what makes me fear we shall remain where we were in our estimate of the importance the kitchen holds in our life — for health, and even for society as well: we cram into it everything we do not care to look upon — cleaning implements of every sort, uncovered garbage and refuse pails, the servants' clogs and the children's shoes, the dirty laundry, the buckets, and the mops of all kinds, wet and dry, and all those other things that have neither beginning nor end, which surround the kerosene burner on which we cook our food as the bracelet surrounds the wrist — and oh, what an appetizing meal, its substance mingled with the fragrance of refuse and the dust flying off the sweeping tools and the carriers of filth!

Taking Important Considerations into Account

These images that gather in my head, from what I have seen and know of some of our kitchens, move me to call upon you, my refined sister, to fight these kitchens with all our strength, to cleanse them of these things that harm our health, humble us before foreigners, and shame us before ourselves. Let us set before our eyes the following:

1 – The importance of the kitchen relative to the rest of the rooms of the house. To the family it is what the heart is to the human body: as the heart is the reservoir from which the blood is distributed to the rest of the body's members, so from the kitchen the resources of life — food and drink — are distributed to the members of the household.

2 – The necessity of complete and comprehensive care for cleanliness within its walls, for nothing bespeaks the cleanliness and good sense of the housewife like the cleanliness and order of this storehouse. If the house needs to be wiped and cleaned once a day, the kitchen needs tidying twice and three times; for the abundance of food and food scraps in it attracts the flies, which pass from it to the other rooms after spitting their poisons into the victuals. Moreover, the prudent housewife may spend most of the hours of her day in the kitchen, and her children may come and go there; and if it is not spotlessly clean, it becomes a refuge for the germs of numerous diseases. How many are the calamities in which families have been stricken by the death of a number of their members by way of this kitchen, which malignant germs enter borne on the wings of flies, on the leaves of vegetables, in the folds of meat, and in the bellies of stale fish.

3 – The importance of choosing dishes and selecting materials fit for nourishment. We were accustomed in the past to look upon food as a pleasure only, to be enjoyed and obtained at every opportune moment and by every possible means, regardless of what is good for us in quantity and kind — though food is not like the rest of life's pleasures, which we take without deliberation or reckoning, pleasures we can easily forgo and still remain alive. Food is a pleasure and a duty at one and the same time. It will not do to confine ourselves to what delights us of it or what our appetite fancies, nor to forgo part of it or all of it; for if we do, the balance of health is upset and diseases find their way into our bodies — diseases of the liver, the stomach, and the intestines, and anemia. Poor nutrition and undernourishment have their own particular diseases, just as excess in foods of a single kind has its evil results.

4 – For all the keenness of our desire to adopt every novelty — the modern fashions for our persons, the modern furniture for our dining and reception rooms, the expensive customs to multiply our pleasures — we are still where we were hundreds of years ago in the manner of preparing and cooking food; though if there is anything that ought to be changed and modified, it is food and the way of its preparation, that it may accord with the modern theories which have developed so astonishingly in recent years. We will not give up the stuffed dishes that consume most of the hours of the morning, nor the pastries, nor the frying of vegetables before cooking them, so that they soak up the fire and the "oils and samns," nor the kibbeh whose pounding for several hours on end would wear a mountain down — though if we looked a little closer, and chose to profit from those who have more experience than we in this path, or from those who have made a study of the art of nutrition, we would find that by our old ways of cooking the materials lose many of their nourishing properties, so useful to our health, and that we could prepare savory and beneficial dishes in half the time and cost we now spend on some of what we have been making.

From all this you see, my sister, that the kitchen is the sensitive nerve that conveys to the members of the family either what fills them with the joy and comfort of life, or what clouds its serenity and ease. It is incumbent on us, then, to give it our greatest attention, for it is the room and the workshop in which food is prepared skillfully, according to the rules of hygiene, for our sick and our children and the healthy among us, lest diseases find their way to us.

Let us enter our kitchen tomorrow with sincere resolve, to reform what we can reform and to modify what we can modify, that we may make it one of the glories of the house — a room we enter at every hour of the day as we would enter our parlor, with no trace of food scraps in it, no flies about its edges, no foul odors in its drains.

Let our kitchen, from this day on, be one of the rooms to which we are not ashamed to lead our women friends and our lady visitors.