18th century cooks tended a fire and sustained smoke in this Swiss farmhouse smoke kitchen area The kitchen area stayed largely unaffected by architectural advances throughout the Middle Ages; open fire stayed the only approach of heating food. European medieval cooking areas were dark, smoky, and sooty places, whence their name "smoke kitchen area".
In rich homes, the ground floor was typically used as a steady while the kitchen area was located on the flooring above, like the bedroom and the hall. In castles and monasteries, the living and working areas were separated; the kitchen area was sometimes relocated to a different building, and hence might not serve anymore to heat the living-room.
Few medieval kitchen areas make it through as they were "infamously ephemeral structures". An extant example of such a medieval kitchen area with servants' staircase is at Muchalls Castle in Scotland. In Japanese homes, the kitchen started to end up being a separate room within the main structure at that time. With the arrival of the chimney, the hearth moved from the center of the room to one wall, and the first brick-and-mortar hearths were built.
Pots made of iron, bronze, or copper started to replace the pottery used earlier. The temperature was controlled by hanging the pot higher or lower over the fire, or positioning it on a trivet or straight on the hot ashes. Using open fire for cooking (and heating) was dangerous; fires ravaging whole cities happened frequently.
This type of system was commonly used in wealthier homes. Beginning in the late Middle Ages, kitchen areas in Europe lost their home-heating function even more and were progressively moved from the living location into a different space. The living-room was now heated up by cocklestoves, operated from the cooking area, which used the big advantage of not filling the space with smoke.
In the upper classes, cooking and the cooking area were the domain of the servants, and the kitchen area was distinguished from the living-room, in some cases even far from the dining space. Poorer homes typically did not yet have a different kitchen area; they kept the one-room plan where all activities occurred, or at the most had the kitchen in the entrance hall.
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