A Factory-kitchen or kitchen factory () was a large mechanized enterprise of

food service The foodservice (US English) or catering (British and Commonwealth English) industry includes the businesses, institutions, and companies which prepare meals outside the home. It includes restaurants, grocery stores, school and hospital cafeteri ...

in the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

, originated in the 1920–1930s. Its main purpose was centralized preparation of food (both prefabrication and full processing) supplied for communal dining rooms or for personal purchase. Factory-kitchens were characteristic of their unique architecture. Sometimes the term is inadequately translated as communal kitchen, the latter being a kitchen in a Soviet

communal apartment Communal apartments (, colloquial: ''kommunalka'') are apartments in which several unrelated persons or families live in isolated living rooms and share common areas such a kitchen, shower, and toilet. When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917 aft ...

. The idea of centralized food preparation was part of the emancipation of women from the household work in the early Soviet Union, and to better tap into women's workforce. Along with the house-communes, factory-kitchens were to get rid of "the yoke of the household economy". Slogans of the day were "Away with Pots and Pans!" and "The Saucepan is an Enemy of the Party Cell".

Richard Stites Richard Stites (December 2, 1931 – March 7, 2010) was a historian of Russian culture and professor of history at Georgetown University, famed for "landmark work on the Russian women’s movement and in numerous articles and books on Russian and ...

, ''The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930'', 1978,
p. 409
/ref> Various Soviet writers described how "a single person can prepare from fifty to hundred dinners a day". A children's book ''A Cook for a Whole City''Т.Габбе, З.Задунайская. ''Повар на весь город.'' (''A Cook for a Whole City'') OGIZ, 1932, 1934 described in detail how efficiently a kitchen-factory works.

References

{{reflist Architecture in the Soviet Union Women's rights in Russia Food industry