The high-end kitchen of 2004 is outfitted with a six-burner restaurant-style range sheathed in stainless steel, and hardcore cooks wouldn’t consider anything but “dual fuel” capability-gas burners above for high heat, electric ovens below for pinpoint control. Avocado green and harvest gold still ruled the day, and only the most serious foodie had the latest technology: a convection oven, which could cook a 12-pound turkey in under three hours. (And not just because men wear the aprons more often than they used to.) When This Old House first hit the airwaves in 1979, the standard American kitchen featured a four-burner electric range-preferred because no one had yet figured out a way to make gas ovens self-cleaning-and, for a lucky few, an over-the-stove microwave.
A lot has changed in the American kitchen in the last quarter century.
