Top kitchens in literature

When John O’Connell was doing research for a book he is working on, he read a lot of historical cookery books, and plenty of novels. The latter were to glean information about food storage and preparation. He was struck by how few descriptions of kitchens existed before the 1930s. Nevertheless, O’Connell found enough material for his work, and he recounts his top 10 favourite literary kitchens in The Guardian. 

Coming in first was a kitchen from the 1958 novel Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting by Penelope Mortimer. In this book, “the kitchen is a place of refuge – where housewives defeated by the frustrations of commuter-belt life and their husbands’ philandering go to drink, brood on what might have been and say out loud (albeit to themselves) unsayable truths while “tracing the pattern of the Formica tabletop”.“

More modern novels also make the list, like Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding.
Bridget’s attempt to prove herself a brilliant cook and hostess ends in disaster: “Cannot go on, Have just stepped in a pan of mashed potato in new kitten-heel black suede shoes from Pied à Terre (Pied a pomme-de-terre, more like), forgetting that kitchen floor and surfaces were covered in pans of mince and mashed potato.”