The last couple of weeks I have been busy looking at all the new trends in kitchens. I tell myself that I must keep up with the latest trends in new kitchens since if I ever get around to redoing my kitchen, I do want to at least know that I made my choices from the latest bells and whistles that are out there—even if in the end I use none of them and decide to go with the old and the true!
It took me down memory lane. Years ago when I started working in the Five Towns, I had many Italian clients. I would visit many homes with a beautiful kitchen in the main part of the house, but many of those older Italian residents also had a second kitchen that they called a “summer kitchen.”
The summer kitchen could be a small kitchen in the basement near a back door and a lot of windows, or even in a back enclosed porch. I even had several clients who installed their summer kitchen outdoors near their garage with an overhang and some walls that protected it from the rain and other elements.
The explanations I used to hear of what those who had those kitchens used them for were very interesting. I guess depending on where they originally came from, the trend or “minhag” for them and what they used a summer kitchen for went with them.
Some would tell me that they would do all their heavy cooking in the summer kitchen so the smells and dirt of the cooking and baking would not permeate the entire house and smell up a perfectly clean house and the beautiful main kitchen they had on the main floor.
This made some sense to me although it seemed like an awful lot of work since most of those summer kitchens were the mini size of the main kitchens and had less space and doodads to handle heavy cooking and baking.
Logically I told myself if that was what you are trying to achieve wouldn’t it have made more sense to make the summer kitchen and then have a smaller model on the main floor for heating and serving? Of course, no one asked me my opinion and I am sure this was what their parents had done, so they did things the same way.
The second reason I heard for a summer kitchen was that it was just that—a summer kitchen. Back when there was no air conditioning, when the weather was very hot, having a summer kitchen made it easier to cook and bake and stay cool if it was either nearly out of the house near lots of windows or literally outside where they hopefully built those kitchens in the shade to keep them cool in the hot weather.
All these reasons to have a summer kitchen made a lot of sense except that to me it seemed like a lot of trouble to use in the interests of making things easier. If you needed to carry all the ingredients and the pots, pans, and what not to the summer kitchen in order to do the heavy cooking and baking, then clean up, then bring all the cooked and baked dishes back up to the main kitchen to either put away or serve, the people doing this must have been absolutely exhausted at the end of a cooking and baking day.
I rarely see these summer kitchens anymore. I believe with the newer generations, they did away with them and just made sure they had good air conditioning and air filtration systems in their main kitchens instead. But I must say they were a very cute amenity that certainly was an interesting conversation piece when I used to show a house that had one.
Anessa Cohen lives in Cedarhurst and is a licensed real-estate broker (Anessa V Cohen Realty) and licensed N.Y.S. mortgage originator with over 20 years of experience offering full-service residential, commercial, and management real-estate services as well as mortgage services. She can be reached at 516-569-5007 or via her website, www.AVCrealty.com. Readers are encouraged to send questions or comments to anessa@AVCrealty.com. Read more of Anessa Cohen’s articles at 5TJT.com.