The Warmest Room in the House: How the Kitchen Became the Heart of the Twentieth-Century American Home

Freelance writer Gdula begins his story of the kitchen when women were wives and mothers, sanitation a primary concern and most modern industries in their infancy. Decade by decade America's domestic kitchen history unfolds, rapidly modernizing from a candlelit, well water–supplied pantry to a streamlined, lifestyle-supporting laboratory where sliced whole-grain bread toasts in seconds and hot-and-cold running water is forsaken for imported bottles from foreign springs. Even large social and economic forces like the Depression and WWII contributed to making our kitchens more efficient. Innovations now taken for granted, like frozen vegetables and the microwave, came from unexpected places: a field naturalist on assignment in the subzero Arctic; a defense-industry engineer's melted candy bar coming too close to a magnetron. While the book is well researched and entertaining, the narrative advances at such a rapid pace that entire decades (such as the chapter on the 1910s) are compressed into a handful of pages. Gdula successfully personifies the American kitchen, but he has to fight the evidence piling up on the other side of his argument, which continually and just as plausibly suggests that the real heart of the American home may be the television and the automobile. (Jan.)