Pantry - Books On Pantries

Books On Pantries

Chapters of earlier books, particularly written during the era of domestic science and home economics in the latter half of the 19th century, featured how to furnish, keep and clean a pantry. Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe in their seminal The American Woman's Home, written in 1869, advocated the elimination of the pantry by having pantry shelving and cabinetry come into the kitchen. This idea did not take hold in American households until a century later, by which time the pantry had become a floor-to-ceiling cabinet in the post-War kitchen. During the Victorian period and until the Second World War when housing changed considerably, pantries were commonplace in virtually all American homes. This was because kitchens were small and strictly utilitarian and not the domestic, often well-appointed, center of the home that we enjoy today (or that our Colonial predecessors had). Thus, pantries were important workspaces with their built-in shelving, cupboards and countertops.

In the last chapter of These Happy Golden Years, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote a descriptive account of the pantry that Almanzo Wilder built for her in their first home together in DeSmet, South Dakota. It details a working farmhouse pantry in great detail which she sees for the first time after her marriage to Wilder and subsequent journey to their new home.

Pantry raids were often common themes in children's literature and early 20th century advertising. Perhaps the most famous pantry incident in literature was when Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer had to do penance for his getting into his Aunt Polly's jam in her pantry: as punishment, he had to white-wash her fence.