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 expo-sure, 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 appe-tizing 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 distrib-uted 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 clean-liness 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 abun-dance 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 mem-bers by way of this kitchen, which malignant germs enter borne on