Le Tour - Belgian Kitchens Today and Yesterday

Today Le Tour de France goes through Belgium, through beautiful Flanders, amongst chateaus, canals, and wonderful little villages. Unfortunately, there was rainy weather and a huge crash! Watching the peloton is really something awesome.

While I won't be updating you on the tour every day (I promise) I do feel compelled to give a bit of a showcase of Belgium by virtue of, what else, Belgian kitchens! Now, it's not the easiest thing to do to find Belgian kitchen design, so we have a mix of the very old Belgian kitchen by Belgian painters, and the uber-cool and awesome new kitchens, found in Design Addict.

The first image is called "A Maid In The Kitchen" by David Emile Joseph de Noter. I don't think the maid is doing her job, do you?  She looks awfully depressed!

Next up is a kitchen by Suzon Inber & Associates at www.inger.be  

Let's take a look at another kitchen from Suzon Inber & Associates.

And one more ancient kitchen. I think they had issues in those days. What a mess! This  was painted by Joachim Antonisz Uytaewael, 1605.

Here is an interesting explanation of this painting from lepg.org:"Another erotic kitchen scene, with the cook spitting a chicken in the center of the picture (apparently a suggestive activity to the 16th century mind). She is wearing the same type of clothing as the woman in the van Ryck kitchen scene, only her partlet is more decently done up. There are two men in the picture. they are wearing trunk hose, gathered to just above the knee. In both cases their nether hose (stockings) are falling down. I think this was probably pretty typical for working men.  The stockings come just above the knee normally and are gartered, usually just below the knee, but since elastic hadn't yet been invented, it would not be untypical for the socks to still end up coming down around your ankles all the time. This scene has wonderful details of redware, cooking utensils, and orange carrots. Most carrots at the time were white." 

Take a look at that site, there's some very interesting kitchen scenes and analysis of the paintings.

Comments

[maarten]

Thanks for devoting this post to my country, Belgium.