We can be confident that children have always played games revolving around the preparation and eating of food. Props have been used to enhance the play – perhaps sticks, stones and mud in the earliest days. A toy kitchen has an obvious appeal for children and manufacturers have duly obliged with products for purcahse. Perhaps playing with many of these toys has not actually taught children how to cook – but it has been a way of consolidating their understanding of what they have seen others doing and of generating and maintaining enthusiasm for the process. Unfortunately, most of the time, these advantages have been largely limited to girls.
Nuremberg Kitchens
Doll’s house furniture has been found from the Roman times, but the earliest complete toy kitchens we know about come from the early modern period when they could be found in dolls' houses manufactured for aristocratic families. Separate kitchens, known as Nuremberg kitchens, were also produced and these were being imported to England by the seventeenth century (Fraser, 1966). The purpose of such dolls’ houses and kitchens was, it was sometimes claimed, to teach girls about household management. In 1631, Anna Köferlin advertised a doll’s house that children could view for payment: ‘Look at it and learn well ahead how you shall live in days to come. See how all is arranged in kitchen, parlour and chamber’ (Pasierbska, 2001:6).
Toy kitchens that really worked
By the end of the nineteenth century, dolls’ houses were being made of cheaper materials and were affordable to more and more families. Some of the kitchen equipment actually worked, with metal pieces which could be heated by candles or by the household gas. It was possible to actually cook tiny meals. A vast array of these working stoves were reviewed in the Lucy Crump’s 1905 novel Three Little Cooks. The children finally choose one ‘made of firebrick, marked out like little Dutch tiles and painted a lovely Dutch blue. Its top was of polished steel, its saucepans were of nickel, so were its oven doors and two lamp doors’. (Crump, 1905:25). The dangers are obvious but these toys were popular for many decades. The cookery writer, Moira Meighn, blithely stated that ‘a child sensibly trained with one of these sets will realize the danger of fire and will never, when grown-up, put a lighted flame in a direct draught’ (1936: 27). The tide was turning against such an approach by the 1950s. The Chad Valley catalogue of 1954 stated that ‘We do not supply burners with our stoves, believing that absolute safety is preferred to any extra play value’ (p.42).
‘Toys just like Mummy’s….. for the Modern Girl’
This slogan, taken from an advert for Wells-Brimtoy in the Games and Toys Year Book for 1956, indicated the directions that toy manufacturers took for much of the twentieth century. The modernity lay in reproducing the latest gadgets and fashions. The gender politics did not move forward in the same way. The History of Advertising Trust has a television advertisement from 1984/5 for the Petite Kitchen Range, in which a young girl proudly manipulates the items on her plastic kitchen range, setting the oven to Gas Mark 4, and says she is ‘doing Dad’s dinner tonight, exactly like Mummy does it’. When Dad comes home (wearing a suit and tie), she shouts at him ‘You treat this house like a hotel’. It’s not as hilarious today as it was obviously thought to be at the time.
Where are we now?
The BBC good food website offers many recommendations for toy kitchens. Most have a variety of interactive features, including opening oven doors, adjustable timers and clocks, ‘ice’ dispensers, taps that make water noises, pop-up toasters and clicking knobs. All would seem to be gender-neutral and are promoted with photographs of boys and girls playing with them together. Toy kitchens that are pink, decorated with hearts or Disney princesses and are explicitly described as girls’ toys are still available but there has been a significant move away from this approach. The pressure group ‘Let Toys be Toys’ claims it has had success in persuading some retailers, such as Marks and Spencers and John Lewis, to stop all gender specific targeting of toys. This is a trend we very much welcome. All children should have opportunities to play with toy kitchens in the hope that many of them will be inspired to develop a love of real cooking experiences.
References
Chad Valley (1954) Toys and Games Catalogue.
History of Advertising Trust (2016) ‘Kitchen Activity Centre: Commercial Ruined Dinner 1984-1985’ Available at https://www.hatads.org.uk/catalogue/record/76a73ab2-3f00-4417-9c05-2d7ff13791f8
Let Toys be Toys (c.2013) ‘Retailers’ Available at https://www.lettoysbetoys.org.uk/about/retailers/
Meighn, M. (1936) The Magic Ring for the Needy and Greedy, London: Oxford University Press/Humphrey Milford
Pasierbska, H. (2001) Doll’s Houses, Princes Risborough: Shire Publications.
Truss, K. (2023) ‘The Best Toy Kitchens for Kids’ BBC Good Food Available at https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/review/best-play-toy-kitchens
Wells and Brimtoy Ltd (1956) “Toys just like Mummy’s … for the Modern Girl’ (Advertisement) Games and Toys Yearbook 1956 Available at , https://www.brightontoymuseum.co.uk/index/Category:Wells-Brimtoy
Picture Credit: American or German Toy kitchen, natural substance, 1830 – 1880, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Sylmaris Collection Gift of George Coe Graves, 1930. MET ES5699. jpg Uploaded from Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Toy_Kitchen_MET_ES5699.jpg
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I made a kitchen for my daughter out of cardboard boxes and left over wall paint. She loved it. Also loved the workbench with hammers and screwdrivers...
My grandfather once made me a beautiful Sindy bedroom for Christmas. I liked it very much but I was still slightly peeved it wasn't the commercially availably pink plastic one in the shops. I'm glad your daughter was less susceptible to the influences of advertising than I was.
My son had a toy cooker, with pots and pans and plastic food that had velcro sticking bits together. There was a plastic knife that you could cut the vegetables in half with. He loved it.
I can remember an amazing set of teddy sized cutlery that I had as a child. It was so realistic.
Dolls house kitchens appeal to adults as well as children. There’s something fascinating about a miniature world, with a miniature tea set.