Kitchens!

Three of our Finnish kitchens could fit into our kitchen in New Hampshire. The Finnish kitchen is very European with the small fridge, no freezer, but with a dishwasher that I am afraid to use. The most distinctive feature of a Finnish kitchen is the dish drying rack. We first experienced this when we visited Finland 2 years ago. The recently washed dishes are placed over the sink to drip dry.

I read about this innovation in the "Welcome to Finland" magazine. The drying rack was developed in the 1940s to increase kitchen efficiency by the Finnish Society for Work Efficiency. Maiju Gebhard, a home economics teacher who trained in Sweden, returned to Finland with the idea for a drying rack that was neatly hidden in a cupboard. For more information on kitchen innovations, you should watch the delightful Norwegian movie, Kitchen Stories. A team of Swedish efficiency experts is dispatched to Norway to study the kitchen habits of Norwegian bachelor farmers. In this comical movie, the observer becomes the observed.