After several recent visits to the newest, most expensive and supposedly prestigious new apartment buildings in Paris, New York and several other cities, I have come to the sad conclusion that the people designing and building our homes have practically no love whatever for food. All that one has to do is to take a look at the kitchens in these super-expensive flats to realize that these are not places for producing tasty and tempting dishes.

Isolated, generally in a narrow corner of the flat, most of these kitchens look either like bathrooms or surgeries - white, cold and sterile and militantly clean. Like toilets, such kitchens are mere conveniences, places where food can be dutifully rendered chewable and digestible but where taste and aroma are simply not important. In fact, I have devised a rule of almost mathematical precision: colorless, boring kitchens = tasteless food. Most of what goes into such kitchens arrives on the table tasting as if it had been scrubbed with soap, wiped off with rubbing alcohol, disinfected in boiling water and forced through a micro-wave oven.

Abominable kitchens such as these are obviously not the result of poverty. In fact, many of these terrible places are actually quite expensive. What they reflect is the sad fact that as members of one of the most highly developed civilizations on earth we place little value on the pleasure of dining in our own homes. Plastic table tops, chromium trimmed appliances, sinks that look like bathtubs, ugly black-and-white ranges, enormous streamlined refrigerators are merely cramped into smallest space consistent with the unfortunate necessity of having to eat.

This is not what kitchens should look like. Although the ideal kitchen need be neither huge nor expensive, it should be an integral part of the house, a place where cooking, eating, drinking, talking, singing, dancing or listening to music are all appropriate. Kitchens should be places that are "fun".

The first step in creating an ideal kitchen, whether one is building a new home or remodeling an existing flat, is to remove the wall that separates the kitchen and living room. The second step is to partition off a small area for a scullery, a place consisting of a shelf or shelves for dirty dishes and an automatic dishwasher. If possible, the same area should contain a the washing machine and freezer. Beyond this, the object should be to functionally and aesthetically merge the kitchen and living room into a single unit.

Some may choose to do away with dividers completely. Others may prefer to partly separate the kitchen and living room with a bar. Either system allows the person doing the cooking to stay with the party or family while preparing the meal. The use of a bar is fine, so long as it is not one of those half-hearted constructions used only as a convenience for serving drinks or eating breakfast. The bar, which should run immediately alongside the range, barbecue pit and a generous slab of chopping board (all with a hooded vent overhead), should be a place where family and guests can sit comfortably, sip their drinks and have their appetites whetted by the scents, sights and rituals of preparing the meal.

The kitchen as a whole should resemble a delicatessen rather than a bathroom. There should be a large central table of plain, well-scrubbed wood which may be used both for eating and the preparation of food. Strings of onions, garlic, fresh herbs, sausages, salamis, cheeses in wax or muslin, and basketed bottles of Romanian, Spanish or Italian wine should hang from overhead beams. And, as no true lover of books keeps them hidden in cupboards, the basic food supplies that we use should not have their presence concealed. Flour, sugar, salt, rice and other grains should be kept in large glass jars. Spices, canned goods, boxes and bottles should adorn the walls on open shelves, covered only with sliding glass panels if protection from dust is necessary.

Such displays are aesthetically marvelous. Practically, they avoid the nuisance of hunting through cupboards and banging into the corners of open doors. They also allow one to locate and review supplies at a glance. Skillets and saucepans, together with such utensils as cooking spoons, mixing forks, strainers and skewers should dangle from well-ordered wall hooks and not flung into drawers.

As to utensils, nothing should be allowed into the kitchen that is not in some sense a work of art - not prettified junk but exquisitely functional tools, such as heavy wooden spoons from Italy, enameled casseroles from Sweden, Soligen kitchen knives and attractive terra-cotta bowls. Because they make for the best cooking and are highly attractive, only the heaviest saucepans should be allowed into the kitchen. Tinny and plastic utensils from the supermarket are as out of place in a beautiful kitchen as an electric guitar would be in a cathedral. Nor should one have too many gadgets. One should take special care against acquiring those appliances that take more time to clean than they save in operation.

The stove and oven, depending on personal preference, may be of either gas or electric. Next to it should be a charcoal pit or Japanese style hibachi, since with proper ventilation charcoal broiling need not be a purely outdoor affair. One should also consider the possibility of a permanently installed wok, thought by some to be the most versatile of all cooking pans.

For warmth in appearance as well as for better cooking, as much as possible of the counter space should be of heavy wood (except for the draining area of the sink which should be marble, tile or stainless steel). Formica and other plastic counters should be avoided with a passion, for these alien and unnatural surfaces have the magical ability to nullify the taste of anything prepared on them. Above all, we should never lose track of the truism that beautiful dining starts in beautiful kitchens.

© Daniel Rogov