Glorious Flavours of Summer 2015

Delighted as always to provide the kitchens for Flavours of Summer at Henham last weekend

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Outdoor kitchens

We often provide outdoor kitchens for events such as at the Flavours Summer Food & Drink Festival at Henham this weekend. Well, strictly speaking, they’re in a tent – but they could be outdoors in a strong wind! It struck us that, with temperatures increasing, an outdoor kitchen may be an option for part of the year. A quick search produced these ideas courtesy of Builder magazine: –

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It’s just a thought on a warm weekend, but do pop in and see us, we’re here to help.

Anglia Factors, Suffolk Show, Paul Foster!

Posh cheese on toast!

A great Cookery demonstration last weekend saw Dawn Elsom from Neff cook all sorts of goodies, including posh cheese on toast, using the latest ovens from Neff

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Kitchen design 1869

For centuries, we didn’t have kitchens in our homes. A separate room for cooking only really occurred in places where specialist cooks were expected to turn out food for large numbers of people — in a grand house with servants, a castle, a palace and, possibly, a farmhouse. For ordinary people, the fire that heated the room was the fire on which things were cooked, says Tim Hayward recently in the FT Magazine.

In the years after the industrial revolution, as the population moved into urban areas, food usually came from cookshops, inns or street vendors and, if necessary, could be reheated on the home fire. We’ve been a culture of takeaway junkies for longer than we admit.

Catharine E Beecher was an American social reformer and advocate of education for women. In 1869, along with her sister, the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, she published The American Woman’s Home — the first book to suggest continuous work surfaces, built-in cupboards and separate areas for food preparation and cleaning. Their belief in a servantless society, empowering women and a growing scientific rationalism made the building of a well-designed kitchen not just a rational but also a political act. And while Beecher’s idea of using the free time created by “scientific kitchen planning” for prayer didn’t take off, the movement towards freedom through efficiency had begun.

Christine McGaffey Frederick was an American home economist who, in 1915, published a correspondence course on “household engineering”. She had turned part of her own home into a laboratory, testing kitchen design, layouts and appliances according to the tenets of Taylorism, the theory of scientific management then being applied to industry. Frederick was keen on “grouping” appliances and plotting efficient routes within the kitchen — work that led to the “ kitchen triangle”, a plan for swift movement between fridge, sink and cooker that still governs kitchen design today.

She went on to work on advertising to women and, with her husband J George Frederick, first expounded the idea that the “planned obsolescence” of appliances was a vital driving factor in an industrial economy.

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was an architect working on social housing as it was being rebuilt in Frankfurt after the first world war. She studied galleys on ships and trains to create the tiny “Frankfurt Kitchen”, a beautifully rational construction that, through efficiency, could free “women of the worker class” to return to the factories and contribute to national regeneration.

After the second world war, factories no longer needed for war production in both the US and the UK turned to manufacturing cars, fridges and “fitted kitchens” — something between a piece of furniture and a room. The public bought them in droves. In 1951, the Festival of Britain displayed aluminium kitchens built in the same factories that had made Spitfires. In 1959, at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, Richard Nixon engineered a debate with Nikita Khrushchev in a model American kitchen. To the millions who saw it on TV, there couldn’t have been a more powerful symbol of the promise of capitalism.

Most of us are old enough to remember the fitted kitchen as an aspirational purchase and a few of us actively mourn how its use for actual “cooking” is declining. Today, ripping out a perfectly serviceable kitchen and sticking in your own seems to be the first thing most people do when moving to a new home.

Tim Hayward was writing this in light of the interviews given in kitchens in the recent election but if you would like us to rip out a perfectly serviceable kitchen and replace it with a new one then please pop in and see us, we’re here to help.

Take your kitchen when you move!

Last November the Harriet F. Rees House (1888), an historic residence in Chicago, Illinois, United States was moved. Located on the once-affluent Prairie Avenue, the Rees house was built for the widow of a property developer. Ironically the house became threatened by a development project. Instead of demolishing the building, the city decided to preserve it by moving it across the street and north one block. It stuck us as a handy way of keeping your bespoke Anglia Factors interior if you just couldn’t bear to leave it!

Of course you could always get a new one!

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Yum yum diddly yum

Here’s a list of what you may expect at the Anglia Factors Cooking demo on the 20th June with TV celebrity chef Paul Foster: –

Nibbles

Pigs head croquette, mustard mayonnaise

Smoked garlic cracker

salt and vinegar popcorn

Dishes

Sous vide corn-fed chicken leg, peas, broad beans, pickled mushrooms

English strawberries, crispy wild rice, vanilla “sorbet”

Here are some of the dishes served in earlier demonstrations: –

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SPRING COOKING DEMO – Wednesday 29th April 2015

7pm – 9pm *FREE*
Not long to go now until celebrity chef Paul Foster, head chef from The Dining Room at Mallory Court is showcasing his culinary expertise using the range of kitchen appliances here at Anglia Factors! This is your chance to see first-hand how the appliances we supply work in practise whilst relaxing and having the opportunity to sample the results and ask questions of any of the experts.
The event is free to attend although seats are going fast so if you haven’t booked your place, don’t delay! Book here: https://v1.bookwhen.com/angliafactors
or call: 01394 383646
There will be a raffle in aid of St. Elizabeth Hospice to support the fundraising efforts of our owner Daniel Barr and his son who are taking part in the 300 mile Team 100 London-Paris cycle race later this year.

Robot kitchen anyone?

UK-based Moley Robotics unveiled an autonomous kitchen machine on Hannover Messe 2015 that uses two UR5 robot arms from Universal Robots and robot hands to reproduce the movements of a human chef from a 3D-recording of a cooking process that maps every individual motion. In the space of 25 minutes, the robotic gourmet prepared a bowl of crab bisque from a recipe developed by Tim Anderson, a previous winner of BBC’s Masterchef competition. Its UR5 robot arms, which are mounted above a kitchen surface including a hob and a sink, move up and down as it scrapes butter off a spatula. They even wipe the ladle on the side of the saucepan to prevent drips.
Or….pop in and see us, we’re here to help.

Vanilla spread

An annotated Anglia Factors kitchen in this month’s Vanilla Magazine

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