The enormous number of cooking utensils in the kitchen show that the most lavish hospitality was offered in this house. Every kind of copper pot and pan, from the largest saucepan and boiler (_de schonck of hespenketel_) to the tiniest pans for cakes and pastry (_een clein coper panneke waarin men dry eieren kan doppen_, and _koek_ and _taart pannen_), are present in great numbers; and, moreover, there are portable ovens to bake tarts, ladles, skimmers, sieves, spice-boxes, spits, skewers, ten grills, large and small, some of them for roasting oysters—in short every article that a cook would need to prepare a feast for a _gourmet_. The _buffets_, _armoires_ and shelves of the kitchen are filled with valuable metal ware, including eight _aiguières_ and eight dishes, weighing sixty-five pounds. These are marked with the arms of Spies and Syberg. Then there are seventeen candlesticks, some of which have round and others square bases; there are ninety-three large and small dishes with the arms of Lutzenrode, Spies and Syberg, and a hundred and twenty-eight plates with the arms of the various commanders. The shelves also contain a great number of wine jars and measures and pots for holding grape-juice and a great number of earthenware dishes, crocks, etc. There is a special pantry, and near this a pastry-room; and a brewery, a harness-room, tool houses, a house for the gardener, and in the park, which is a kind of botanical garden, there is a pavilion on a knoll, where any one desiring to fish could find rods and lines. The kitchen is the most important room in the majority of the middle-class houses; in fact, in many a Flemish and Dutch interior it appears as the general living-room. Plate XXVII and Plate XXXVI afford Dutch examples. A fine example of a Flemish kitchen of the seventeenth century is by Teniers the younger, called _The Good Kitchen_ in the Hague Gallery. This was painted in 1644. Another fine kitchen of the period occurs in a Family Group by Cocx (Coques), in the Cassel Gallery. In the foreground a man is seated at a table looking at his son’s drawings. Not far away his wife is teaching her daughter to make lace, and through a large door the kitchen is visible, where fish, oysters, pastries and birds show preparations for a feast. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam has a series of rooms fitted up in the old style with original furniture. The kitchen represented in Plate XXXII is equipped with all the pots and pans dear to the heart of the Dutch housewife. The hearth, ovens and shelves are furnished with all the implements and utensils necessary for good housekeeping: cauldrons, spits, churns, plate-warmers, kettles, bellows, waffle-irons, etc., are all there. A Frisian clock hangs on the tiled wall, and the cupboards contain everything necessary for cooking and cleaning.