Smoke kitchen
A smoke kitchen (also Rauchkuchl , Rußkuchl , black kitchen , scullery or smokehouse ) is a kitchen , was cooked in an open fire. The smoke first rose into a "spark hat" erected over the fireplace, which was either bricked or, more often, constructed as a wooden frame made fire-proof with clay. From there, the sparks fell back into the fire, and the now spark-free smoke collected under the (more or less dense) ceiling, where it "hung" up to about a quarter of the height of the room when viewed from above (and colored the surfaces soot-black). From there he pulled either directly through the leaky kitchen ceiling and the attic through the roof (this solution is also called a smoke house ) or through a wooden chimney or an opening above the kitchen door into the anteroom and from there into the open air. The food stored there was smoked above the stove , in earlier times in a smokehouse above the black kitchen, in later times after using a fireplace or smoke outlet directly in this.
Not infrequently the black kitchen was a windowless room in the center of the house; The term black kitchen is probably not derived from the partial lack of light, but from the blackening of the walls and the ceiling due to soot and tar from the smoke.
For its part, the smoke kitchen is an improvement (or a shortening of its functions) of the older smoke room, which still combined kitchen and lounge functions. The smoke kitchen, on the other hand, is already separated from the living room , which has a tiled stove that protrudes into it , which is heated from the smoke kitchen and thus warms the room without exposing it to smoke.
In the rural area, smoke kitchens were only replaced by the combination of the newly introduced economy stove and the brick and therefore fireproof chimney towards the end of the 19th century under the pressure of modern fire protection regulations .
literature
- Viktor H. Pöttler: Experienced building culture . Self-published by the Austrian Open Air Museum, Stübing 1992
- Hans Grießmair: Preserved folk culture, guide through the folklore museum in Dietenheim . South Tyrolean Provincial Museum, o. O. 2004, p. 96
