The Rationalization of Kitchen and Cooking 1920–1970

Abstract

The article deals with the ways in which relationships of increasing interdependency were established between households and industrializing companies, through the production of food and cooking equipment. This development started in the inter-war period and gained momentum after 1945. A new phase of mechanization and chemicalization was underway: new food products and new cookery techniques, including the use of electric cookers and other electrical equipment, were introduced. Primary sources are drawn upon to support the thesis that it was not only the companies who, through their advertising, promoted a modernization of the kitchen and cooking. There was also a movement of ‘new housewives’, who embraced the new industrial products to save labour and time in housework, and burned with enthusiasm to spread the message of the modem, well-equipped and intimate family. These intermediaries between companies and households kept authority in the Netherlands until the 1970s. During this period prosperity was rising for ever broader groups of the population; this constituted another condition for the rapid mutual adaptation of supply and demand for industrialized food and modem ways of cooking.