The Pantry

The Pantry—Its History and Modern Uses will be published in May 2007 by Gibbs Smith, Publisher and is available wherever books are sold, or buy online at Amazon.com.

$16.95 Hardcover; 8.5 x 8.5in
96 pages; 75 color photographs
ISBN #1-4236-0004-5
Available May 2007

View a slideshow of photos by Susan Daley and Steve Gross, featured in the book.

Written by Catherine Seiberling Pond, The Pantry—Its History and Modern Uses includes principal photography by Susan Daley and Steve Gross and images from their archive of historic kitchens. The book is also illustrated with vintage images about American pantries and includes select quotations from primary and literary sources.

The Pantry throws open the doors of an interesting utilitarian space, revealing its historical evolution and nostalgic memories, as well as design inspirations and style tips for a pantry of your own. An unprecedented history and design book of an important domestic place, it includes chapters on:

THE EARLY AMERICAN PANTRY
THE FARMHOUSE PANTRY
THE VICTORIAN PANTRY
THE GREAT ESTATE PANTRY
THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY PANTRY
THE MODERN PANTRY

“In those good old days we used to have pantries and china closets and butteries and all that sort of thing, and people were contented.”

—Eugene Field, The House, 1896

For media inquries about The Pantry—Its History and Modern Uses please contact:

Jessica McKenzie
Publicist
Gibbs Smith, Publisher
801.927.2143
jessica@gibbs-smith.com

Excerpt from The Pantry

From the Preface of In the Pantry—Its History and Modern Uses by Catherine Seiberling Pond (Gibbs Smith, Publisher, 2007)

IN THE PANTRY

Pantry—the crisp, even tidy, sound of the word conveys a sense of order and “a place for everything and everything in its place.” Perhaps the origin of that well-worn cliché comes from The Practical Housekeeper, written by Mrs. Elizabeth Ellet in 1857: “Let there be a place for every article, and when not in use let every article be in its place.”

Pantries harbor a nostalgic whiff of our domestic past. Like the attic of an old house, filled with the stuff and chaff of generations, pantries hold the staples and extra things from our kitchens and dining rooms. From early America, throughout the broad stretch of nineteenth-century building styles, and well into the twentieth-century, the pantry evolved along with the many socioeconomic and design changes in the American home. As well as storage and preparation space, a butler’s pantry during the Victorian era was a buffer between the domestic service arena of the kitchen and the murmur of a full-course dinner party. Meanwhile, the self-sufficient farmhouse had pantries and a warren of workrooms for preparing a vast amount of food to eat and store. There is a universal quality to the food pantry and cellar storeroom—they are symbolic of a plentiful simplicity dependent on what we “put up” from our own place and not what we purchased at a store.

When I was eleven I bought my first cookbook, The New England Butt’ry Shelf Cookbook, by Mary Mason Campbell. While drawn to the book because of its diminutive size, nostalgic watercolor illustrations by Tasha Tudor, and traditional New England recipes, it was the title that especially appealed—what was a butt’ry? I thought. It sounded old-fashioned and certainly like it came from old New England, a place I loved to visit each summer when we stayed with my grandparents in their 1792 farmhouse. Meanwhile, back in Ohio, my paternal grandparents had a huge 1920s-era serving pantry where colorful glassware and gold-trimmed sets of china shimmered behind tall glass cabinets awaiting the next holiday gathering. Usually on the counter was a tin full of cutout ginger cookies from an old German family recipe—I can still smell and taste them in my mind. Pantries can be a part of our longings for Grandmother’s kitchen or a place of memories…

…A pantry can invoke all manner of pleasant things—visual delights, memories of taste and smell, perhaps even security and comfort. After a long century of pantry decline, many American households are once again returning to the pantry to store their foodstuffs, dishes, unusual collections, and memories of their own making. This book offers ideas and design inspiration for those who wish to create or restore a pantry and for those interested in the domestic history and evolution of American kitchens.

Questions & Answers about The Pantry

Do you have a pantry in your home? What is in it?

We have two adjoining butler's pantries (or china pantries) that we put in our Federal-era home about six years ago. They are built in the Victorian style that was popular for cabinetry around the late 19th century: cream paint, glass-doored upper cupboards, lots of drawers for linens. We collect and have inherited a lot of dishes so we actually had to pare down our book collection to create these spaces that, in a strange sort of kismet, were likely once pantry spaces off two original kitchens in our 1813 home.

It was important for us to have a look of historic continuity and evolution in the house. The "newer" kitchen, added in 1816 in an ell, has matching built-in cupboards that would have been for dish and food storage. Built-in cabinetry was rare in the earlier part of the 19th century. Meanwhile, down in the cellar, we have several storerooms for canned and dry goods. My dream house has a large walk-in farmhouse pantry off the kitchen with a window. So our pantry renovations, or recreations, came out of a long-term love of pantries that I have had since childhood.

How long did it take you to write/research the book?

The book idea initially came from an article I wrote on pantries for Old-House Interiors after we had put historically inspired pantries in our own home. The entire process—from book proposal to final editing with the publisher—took two years working intermittently on the book. As this is a design book as well as a domestic history, I worked with my principal photographers Susan Daley and Steve Gross on selecting and styling many of the photographs of pantries that appear in the book. Other images are from their archive of historic kitchens. We met long ago on a shoot for Victoria Magazine—where, oddly enough, they took several shots of a butler's pantry on that shoot—and share a similar appreciation for old and off-beat spaces. Some of the other images in the book are archival—ads about pantries, vintage illustrations, etc.—that I have in my own collection.

One of the best things about writing this book was the amount of historic information, especially primary sources from the late 19th and early 20th century, that were available on pantries. As these rooms were once essential to every kitchen, back when kitchens were much smaller and had fewer built-in cupboards and counters, if any, entire chapters on pantries were often included in domestic economy books about their design, contents and maintenance. I also took great delight in finding many descriptive quotes about pantries in period literature and poetry, including children's books (some are included in the book). Also no book, apart from cookbooks using ingredients in the pantry, has ever been written exclusively on pantries from the design or historical perspective so it was fun to delve into the subject and have a great deal of available information from all eras. I'm guessing it is also one of the first design books with footnotes, much to my editor's despair!

What did you learn that you didn't already know about pantries?

Pantries were important ancillary kitchen spaces, like mini galley kitchens with drawers, cupboards, counters, and fun little nooks and crannies. Up until the 1930s, really, kitchens were utilitarian spaces with just the essentials. They were undecorated workrooms. What happened as the 20th century progressed is that the pantry literally came into the kitchen as that space expanded and built-ins and cupboards were added, until the pantry all but became obsolete. This was not a new idea but one that had been generated by Catharine Beecher and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe in their highly influential book, The American Woman’s Home, written in 1869. It just took a while to happen.

The pantry's rise and fall really corresponded with how the American kitchen has transformed. Ironically, we now have the largest kitchens of any era and yet pantries are making a comeback. People want them again and I think for reasons to do with wanting to store a lot of extra food or dishes as much as for nostalgic reasons.

Many of us remember a pantry from a long-ago relative but few of the "Baby Boomer" generation had them growing up, as houses—and kitchens—became smaller throughout the 20th century. My first "pantry experience" was in my grandparents' suburban home, built in 1923, where their serving pantry was as large as their kitchen: it had glimmering glassware and always a tin of homemade cookies (in fact, many past images and literature conjure up "pantry raids" on jam and cookie jars—even Tom Sawyer had to whitewash Aunt Polly's fence for his own pantry raid). There is a nostalgic bent to pantries and as I am a nester from childhood—I was always organizing my mother's cupboards and closets—I realized, too, that I was writing about a place I loved and always wanted.

Anything you would like readers to know—about you, pantries, the book?

I wanted to convey in The Pantry—Its History and Modern Uses that anyone can create a pantry for food or dishes, collections or what-have-you: out of a small room, a closet, even a cupboard. I think anyone who loves kitchens will enjoy this book and hopefully be inspired by it. I also like the book's size: it is 8 x 8 inches, diminutive and just right, just like a pantry.

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