House utensils: examples, purpose. Household items

Housekeeping is an integral part of every person's life. No inhabitant of our planet is able to exist without a reliable shelter, food and clothing. To provide for everything necessary and make life more comfortable, and daily work - easier to perform, a person surrounds himself with a variety of useful household items. Home utensils are the lion's share of all the movable property of each of us, though different people can have different things in the list of this utensils. What is it all about and what exactly is suitable for the definition of household items?

A familiar incomprehensible word

"Utensil" is a word that is not melodious or sounds pleasant to the ear, but, despite its "unpresentable" nature, it is used to determine almost every thing in our homes. In popular explanatory dictionaries of the Russian language, the authors (SI Ozhegov, VI Dal) interpret the phrase "household utensils" as household items in a house, a dwelling due to which a person keeps food supplies, prepares food and organizes his life (personal hygiene , Cleaning, laundry, etc.).

This group of people's property includes utensils of any purpose, various capacities, trinkets, although they carry in themselves often only a decorative function, but which can bring certain benefits or benefits (for example, an old samovar, shuddered from generation to generation as the rarest family value).

So it becomes clear that with all those things that fit under the definition of "household items", we have to face several times a day, though often we mean by them all that is concentrated strictly in the kitchen or dining room, although this Somewhat erroneous opinion.

Home or kitchen

Of course, a greater number of all kinds of gadgets and devices, as well as items useful in everyday life, are collected in the kitchen. Due to the fact that mankind simply can not function normally without food, the cult of food in modern civilization is elevated to the rank of the highest pleasures. And this situation is valid not only for the last decades. People have long realized that it is more convenient to eat from a plate with a spoon, and not with hands from a burdock leaf, and store the harvest and supplies more appropriately in barrels, tubs and chests.

Until then, as humanity had to survive a milestone called "industrialization," which brought to each of us an almost unlimited and affordable range of goods for a variety of purposes, household items were much more respected. Even the most simple dishes, which were used in everyday life, were carefully guarded. Parents of girls were stocked with tare, pots, plates and various "stove" appliances (poker, stag, scoops and panicles for soot), when the daughters were still very young, to marry their beautiful women not with empty hands, but with a good dowry.

Expensive items, not an ordinary ceramic pot or wicker basket, but metal products, silverware, glass, porcelain, were particularly valuable. Their independent manufacture for the majority was impossible, purchase - inadmissible luxury.

All that is used for personal hygiene, storage of clothes and other property is also considered a household utensil. The chest of drawers, a closet, a bed, sleeping accessories, bath accessories were actually inherited. To get good furniture from a distant relative was a solid acquisition, such things were sold in case of despair and extreme need.

Kitchen overlords of the present

The civilization for the last two centuries has changed the way of life of a person so drastically that now very few people know why the houses were equipped with a rocker or a tub, why it was impossible to imagine themselves living without a huge, half-house oven. Many of the attributes of the household have now been sunk to oblivion and unconditionally forgotten, but a man from the past would not have found a half of what is available in the ordinary kitchen of a modern city apartment.

The present utensils are designed to facilitate many times the already simple cooking process. We do not have to get a ceramic pot from the bins to weld the crumbly porridge, for this purpose we use a thick-walled stainless steel pan or multivark. We do not need a wooden bowl to pour rich pot of cabbage soup, we have a metal or plastic ladle and a good set of utensils for cooking. We do not know what grinding stone is, because modern miracle knives do not need to be edited for many months.

And in the drawer of your kitchen cabinet, a good corkscrew, a vegetable peeler, a knife for pizza and cheese, a can opener and several variants of cutlery of different size and purpose (forks, spoons and knives for dessert, soup, garnish, fish or poultry) were probably lying around in the drawer of your kitchen cabinet. The assortment of corncups, scapulas and knives for cutting anything and anyone - this is the household utensils of the most ordinary modern housewife, which would make you howl with the envy of the personal chef, who lives in the middle-class nobleman's kitchen several centuries ago.

All new - well forgotten old

But, of course, no one will argue that reinventing the wheel is an ungrateful and irrational thing. It is unlikely that mankind will return to stove heating and cooking on an open fire, but still there are those items of use that our grandmothers used, followed by their mothers, and, of course, we ourselves will tell them about it to our children.

House utensils - dishes and containers, which are necessary for us in everyday life, will always rule in the kitchen, without it it is impossible to cook the simplest fried eggs or make preparations for the winter. Even such archaic objects of everyday use, like clay pots or a ceramic brazier, cast-iron frying pan and grandmother's gusjatnitsa, will not be hidden in a dark and dusty closet. After all, the taste of dishes prepared according to ancient recipes is not forgotten, and observance and support of traditions is what makes a person who he is an intelligent being.

Greetings from the past

Nevertheless, if the list of utensils and kitchen helpers has not undergone significant changes for many centuries in a row, other household utensils have in many ways radically changed their appearance.

There are household items that are simply impossible to meet in modern life, they are reminiscent of only exhibits in museums or literary sayings of the authors of historical and artistic opuses of past years. Many of us will never guess why in each bedroom there was a nocturnal pot under the bed, why people used the tub and tub for washing, and they drank water from the field, carried it out of the crinoline in wooden buckets with the help of a rocker, and the milk was stored in a lid , Which was poured immediately after the hostess milked a cow in a podoynik.

Also, in modern society, it is not customary to store grain or flour in large tubs and barrels, and heavy chests with barn locks, in which clothes were folded and transported in case of travel, were replaced by light suitcases on wheels.

Invaluable Wealth

Objects of antiquity, in whose list household utensils occupy an honorable place along with ancient family ornaments, have not only historical and cognitive value. Antiquaries, collectors, lovers of things come from the past with rapture looking for everything that was used by people many centuries ago. Especially high cost have those household items that have preserved their original appearance and have reached our times in an unchanged and ideal state. Such things are traded both at quite legal auctions and sales, and in a black, illegal market, which proves their need and relevance even centuries later.