Origin of the term "kitchen"?

Question

I've been playing pool all of my life and I've always wanted to know why the area behing the headstring is called the "kitchen". Any thoughts?

Answer 1

According to Mike Shamos' Illustrated Encyclopedia of Billiards, the question has been the subject of some speculation but the best explanation known is that in the 1800s, many American homes didn't have room for both a billiard table and a dining room table. The solution was a billiards table that had cover converting it into a dining table. Kept in the dining room, which was often barely large enough, it would be placed so that the head rail would face the connected kitchen door, thus afforded a player room for the backswing without hitting a wall. The player was therefore either half or sometimes fully "in the kitchen" when breaking the balls.

Answer 2

Opps, sorry wrong kitchen.

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In The Kitchen

   Same as "ball in hand" but requires the cue ball to be behind

   the head string.

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Ignore the definition underneath then...

The Frankfurt kitchen was a milestone in domestic architecture, considered the fore-runner of modern built-in kitchens, for it realised for the first time a kitchen built after a unified concept, designed to enable efficient work and to be built at low costs. It was designed in 1926 by Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky for the social housing project Römerstadt in Frankfurt, Germany of architect Ernst May. Some 10,000 units were built in the late 1920s in Frankfurt.

The German word "kuchen"