The Evolution of the Kitchen Pantry Through the Centuries

By Bill Primavera

After having written almost 750 articles about the home for this newspaper, I sometimes think I’ve exhausted my supply of topics about the home.

But each week, as I go about my household chores and pleasures, I always find something else that catches my interest about the way we enjoy our homes. So, I suspect the supply of ideas about our domiciles is infinite.

Just this morning, I sneaked into our pantry (sneaked because my wife doesn’t like me eating between meals), which is actually just a big closet in our kitchen, with five shelves of food and other kitchen necessities, to grab a snack – pecan sandies cookies, my favorite. Darned if I didn’t get hooked with curiosity about this kitchen feature before I closed the door (with snack in hand). So, here’s the rundown as I explored it.

During Medieval England, the term “pantry,” derived from the Latin word for bread, or panis, came into use to describe this domestic space.

By the 17^th and 18^th centuries, colonists in New England were incorporating small northern rooms off of kitchens for food storage, at that time called the buttery.

In the latter half of the 1800s, the era of the “butler’s pantry” began in England and America – a small pantry between kitchen and dining room, where china and silver were stored and meals were plated and served, often by a butler or household staff.

At first, the pantry was a feature of great estate homes, but later they could also be found in moderate middle class homes.

In 1869, Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote their seminal “American Woman’s Home” promoting the idea of bringing the pantry into the kitchen by adding more kitchen cupboards and shelves.

However, the idea of a formal pantry didn’t take hold for almost another century.

From 1850 to1886, the reclusive Emily Dickinson often wrote poems from her pantry in Amherst, Mass. as described by her cousin Louise Norcross.

In 1876, Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” began with Tom paying penance for his pantry raid on Aunt Polly’s jam by having to whitewash her fence.

In 1896, The Boston Cooking-School Magazine was founded (later renamed American Cookery), part of the influential home economics movement that helped shape the American kitchen and its design, including the pantry.

Around 1900, the invention of the Hoosier cabinet was often billed as a pantry and kitchen in one and went on to become an enduring icon in American kitchens.

During the world wars, canning from the home kitchen became popular as a patriotic duty. Even though we had only a small plot in West Philadelphia that lined our driveway, just three feet deep or less, my mother was very proud that she was able to grow and can her own tomatoes.

(This reminds me of when my wife as a new bride asked my mother how she made her great spaghetti sauce, my mother replied, “First, you grow your own tomatoes…” My wife passed.)

In the 1920s and ‘30s, the increasingly popular “breakfast nook” began to displace pantries in kitchen design as the pantry starts to merge with the kitchen by means of extended cabinetry and cupboards.

By the 1950s, with an increase in prepared foods for the housewife following World War II, and with better refrigeration and freezers, the pantry assumed less importance but nonetheless survived as a tradition.

In the 1960s, modern pantries experienced a revival and became floor-to-ceiling cabinets in American kitchen design.

By the ‘90s, there was another pantry revival in American homes, driven by a preference for separate food or dish storage and an emergent nostalgic appreciation of this valuable kitchen space.

And in the 2000s, in a survey conducted by the National Association of Home Builders, a walk-in pantry was the most requested kitchen feature in American homes.

Bill Primavera is a realtor associated with William Raveis Real Estate and founder of Primavera Public Relations, Inc. (www.PrimaveraPR.com). His real estate site is www.PrimaveraRealEstate.com, and his blog is www.TheHomeGuru.com. To engage the services of The Home Guru to market your home for sale, call 914-522-2076.