The metaphor of “the ghastly kitchen” of life science research, the places that, said the physiologist Claude Bernard, stirred “the fetid and throbbing ground of life,” is well known. This paper concerns not a metaphor, but an actual space. In the early modern era and particularly in the seventeenth century, the kitchen, or a room in a private home that stood in for a kitchen, was quite often the site where life science was done. I will argue that the kitchen corresponds to what Michel Foucault in The Order of Things referred to as a heterotopia, or what Peter Galison, and more recently Pamela Long, have called a “trading zone.” Looking in particular at the uses of animals in experimental natural philosophy in this period, I will look at ways in which the kitchen served as a laboratory, and ways that the laboratory served as a kitchen. I will say something about the places in which experimenting occurred; the actions, including cooking, eating, tasting, and smelling, that occurred in these places; and the animals that experimenters sacrificed.