Österängen's Open Outdoor Kitchen is an outdoor kitchen with a combined wood fired cooking stove and charcoal grill. The kitchen can be used for traditional grilling but also for boiling and frying food over fire.

The purpose of the kitchen is to support diverse food culture, outdoor well-being and social interaction, and to remind of and inform about humanities long relationship to fire. The logs that function as seating are from locally grown trees that were scheduled to be cut for other reasons than for the kitchen. They allow various animals to find shelter and habitat and are therefore a small contribution to the areas biodiversity.


The kitchen was quickly adopted by the adjacent cultivation initiative and has also been used by other residents in the area. However, it remains to be seen if the rocket stove is a good idea in practice. During the opening of the kitchen there was a workshop where the participants cooked fire soup on the stove, baked stick bread on the grill, and talked about humans long and complex relationship to fire.

A fire soup is hot and spicy soup cooked over fire and consisting of primarily red, orange and yellow ingredients. The ingredients for the soup at the opening were harvested from the adjacent cultivations and included pumpkin, beets and carrots. In Swedish "a soup" is a metaphor for "a mess", thus a fire soup can be interpreted as a metaphor for the fire mess humans appear to have gotten themselves into.


At Österängen Konsthall there is a box with cooking equipment that can be loaned for cooking activities in the kitchen. The box also includes a handbook on basic fire safety and how to use the stove and grill. In the handbook there are also recipes for fire soup and stick bread as well as a short essay on humans, fire, and food. The handbook is available here as pdf (in Swedish).



In the exhibition "Nature takes over" a scale model of the kitchen and the equipment box for the kitchen was presented. The box included soup bowls, a cooking pot and various other utensils for cooking and eating, and also the books Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham, Fire and Civilization by Johan Goudsblom and Cooked by Michael Polland.

Thanks to Österängens Konsthall, Vätterhem, ÖK Kolonilott and Naturen tar över / Public Art Agency Sweden.