THE PANTRY is 10 years old!

I will never forget that moment when I held and opened a copy of my first book, The Pantry–Its History and Modern Uses, for the first time. It was more euphoric than when I saw my first published article, back in the January 1990 issue of Victoria Magazine (the original Hearst version) on my several years living and giving tours at the Victorian-era Gibson House Museum in Boston, Massachusetts. But it was a similar, once-in-a-lifetime experience: because there will never be a first book, or a first article, again.

The comparison to writers opening up their published books for the first time to holding their first child, or any of their babies, is very apt. The labor that goes into a book, the timeframe, the expectancy, the wondering, the fretting (the "will other people like it?"). All of it. It's very similar because, as with a child, you are birthing something from your heart and soul and mind. And unlike a child, a book has a longer shelf-life. It might exist for centuries and it is its own kind of legacy.

But yet, no, nothing is like holding your newborn for the first time. That is in its own special realm!

I am working on several other books right now and will keep this blog updated and at my more active blog on our farm life in Kentucky, Farmwife At Midlife.

The Pantry is still available via my website, only $20 postage paid (USA). The original cover price was $16.95 and is still that, if not less when you consider that postage has gone up in the past decade (even media mail, which is the most affordable way to send and actually quite quick, too).

I am happy to sign your copy, or inscribe it, and send it out as soon as possible (which is faster now that spring is here and the roads are clearer...well, or as life is less complicated as it has been).

Today, April 21st, is also the 12th anniversary of this very blog, started while researching and writing the book. A lot has happened in social media since that time and I still enjoy blogging over at "Farmwife at Midlife" which has had a recent revival of sorts.

Downton Abbey Fever

There is much to love about Downton Abbey. Airing here on PBS as part of "Masterpiece Classics" and now ending its second season, the series is filmed in an historic English estate, there are marvelous clothes and real settings, and the characters are feisty and largely likeable, with fast-paced plots just sudsy enough to keep our interest. It is written by Julian Fellowes, who also wrote the equally frothy motion picture Gosford Park (and whom you may remember as the rascal Killwillie in the Scottish-based Monarch of the Glen, a more modern take on the aristocratic and sporting life that remains in Great Britain). The series is a glimpse into the large scale country house era that once existed on both sides of the Atlantic and, seemingly, something of which we can not get enough. Of course, there are pantries and larders and silver vaults, too.

Carson, the loyal butler of Downton Abbey, awaits his supper below stairs.

As in Gosford Park, Fellowes has created a world where the servant and sire know their position and everything runs within well-oiled systems, precise order, and an awareness of one's place. World War I was a game-changer for all of that, even for our American "aristocracy." What I like about Fellowes' approach is that he pays equal attention to the domestic staff, which outnumbered the family members several times over, as he does the lives of those who are on the receiving end of such loyal service. In the past several decades, the museum world in Britain and the United States has begun to take notice of this importance. No house museum tour is worth its admission without seeing a glimpse into the "below stairs" life. Kitchens, sculleries, pantries, cellars, laundries, and servant bedrooms are now regular parts of most house museum experiences with the names, faces and histories of the domestic staff of a household often researched in detail. [Of course, a love of these spaces fueled my interest in writing, The Pantry-Its History and Modern Uses.]

Stan Hywet Hall in Akron, Ohio is an architectural nod to English manors and an

example of the country house expression in the United States in the early 20th century.

I have always been an Anglophile. This is motivated by architectural and historical interest as much as great literature, a rainy and lush climate (but notice how it never seems to rain at Downton Abbey?), stodgy nursery food and a good cup of tea (OK, and for a brief few pubescent years I read a lot of Regency romances). My great-grandparents, of German and English heritage, were über Anglophiles. In 1912 they set out with their architect and decorator on buying trips to Great Britain to find suitable furnishings–even buying old bits of manors and castles that were for sale–for the Tudor Revival estate they were creating back in Akron, Ohio. Enamored as they were with their British travels (Compton Wynyates and Haddon Hall were especially inspiring), they decided to stay a few extra weeks and went ahead and cancelled their homeward trip on the Titanic in April 1912. Stan Hywet Hall likely owes it ultimate completion to that fateful decision. That it even exists today is because it was signed over in 1957 by the six Seiberling children to a non-profit museum foundation and left as originally furnished and decorated–complete with paintings, china, silver, full cupboards, closets and drawers.

Gertrude Penfield Seiberling, c. 1925.

The house, which opened in 1915, had all of the grandiose trappings of its era and yet always maintained a cozier sense of home and family. There were balls and galas, events in the Music Room, garden parties and large family dinners (F.A. Seiberling, my great-grandfather, was one of nine children who lived in the Akron area and he liked to gather the clan together often). Christmas was a beloved time and my father's childhood Christmases at the manor were a source of many happy memories. On certain occasions, the manor and its grounds were also opened to the public or to employees of Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. The English would have scoffed, I'm sure, but the attention to detail in the house is transporting and the intended effect has succeeded in the appearance of an estate that has evolved over centuries. Charles Schneider, a Cleveland architect, won the commission because his design was warm and appealing, not at all like the marbled halls of many of the Gilded Age homes in Newport and New York that the Seiberling family found wanting.

Lord and Lady Grantham–

to the manor born in Downton Abbey

Downton Abbey incorporates aspects of the American Gilded Age in the newer wealth of Cora, Lady Grantham's heritage paired with the aristocratic, but slowly impoverished, Edwardian English estate of her husband Lord Grantham. Despite his wife's money, and their three daughters, the estate and its contents must pass by law to the next male heir, ideally with sufficient funds for its maintenance to keep it within direct lineage–an example of the male heir primogeniture holdover of feudal law. Marriages of this kind were not uncommon during this time when wealthy women from American industrial families were paired with English noblemen to infuse dwindling estates with cash and uphold their preservation. Thus, a tentative "marriage of convenience" was forged between pockets of the American nouveau riche and a few bastions of fading English aristocracy.

The F.A. Seiberling family around 1915, after Stan Hywet was completed. My grandfather, James Penfield, is at the upper left, alongside his sister-in-law Henrietta Buckler Seiberling (who would later be instrumental in the creation of Alcoholic's Anonymous), brothers Fred and Willard, and in front (from left), sister Virginia Seiberling Handy, parents F.A. Seiberling and Gertrude Penfield Seiberling, flanking youngest sibling, Franklin, Jr., and sister Irene S. Harrison.

One of the many reasons I continue to enjoy Stan Hywet today is because it is the only repository of family memory that I have left in Akron: we long ago left the small house across town where I grew up and my grandparents' home, just up the road from Stan Hywet, was sold in 1983. Where there were once several dozen staff, by the end of World War II there were only a few servants (and the once well-manicured grounds more or less went wild). Meanwhile, my father's household in a comfortable 1923 Spanish Mission style house nearby had two live-in staff and several hired as needed. He and my mother spent their married years in a much smaller suburban Colonial, across town, with no maids. By the 1960s, the world that my family had known no longer existed and paralleled the demise of the midwestern Rust Belt's industrial heyday. While I can't deny that I am grateful for a glimpse into this other world––or that I take pride in my heritage on both sides of my family––at the same time I am blessed to have had a grounded upbringing from each of my parents that focused on values, kindness and the merits of a good education: part middle class suburban offerings and part New Hampshire farm.

F.A. Seiberling in front of Stan Hywet in 1942.

It's fun to speculate "what if?" What if the family had returned on the Titanic? Would Stan Hywet still have been built? What if there hadn't been a hostile takeover of Goodyear Tire & Rubber in 1921? What if the family had still been involved with Goodyear and never founded Seiberling Tire & Rubber (when F.A. lost Goodyear he turned around after a few months and started another tire company, which stayed in the family until a corporate raid in 1960)? What if the family still owned Stan Hywet? Would there have been a pattern of primogeniture as there was in Great Britain or would my grandfather, the second of two sons, who ran Seiberling Tire after his father passed the baton, been the heir apparent to the home? The speculation is fun but the reality is that, in deeding the entire estate and its contents in 1957, the six siblings guaranteed that the property and grounds would never be divided, sold or destroyed. Today it continues to live up to its noblesse oblige Latin motto carved over the door: "Non Nobis Solum" (Not for us alone) with a well-preserved house, collections and accurately restored landscapes and gardens. [Meanwhile, Highclere Castle, the very English and historic setting of Downton Abbey, remains privately owned through direct lineage of the Carnarvon family since 1679, and is also open to the public.]

So as my husband and I watch Downton Abbey from our humble doublewide on our Kentucky farm, it seems a rather strange way of glimpsing a reassuring sense of order and family life in a changing world. While the fictional characters in the household of Downton Abbey mourn the way it was before World War I, nearly one hundred years later we look back at a past we did, or did not, know with the same, odd kind of longing. No matter what era we're in, it's usually about one's sense of place in the world, family hierarchy and relations, a well-appointed house (or hopes and plans of one), great dinner parties, and the intricacies of romance and relationships. Strong and imperious no-nonsense matriarchs with great one-liners go a long way, too, even if snark was probably not very fashionable in those days. I want to be like the Dowager Countess when I grow up! And, while we're being silly (sort of), a devoted butler would be fabulous.

At a Newsstand Near You! Yummy Kitchens-and pantries!

Just a note to say that if you are looking for some great ideas for your new or old kitchen, inspired by vintage and historic prototypes, Old House Journal and Old-House Interiors magazines have joined forces to produce a special issue, Kitchen Classics. It is available for a limited time at larger bookstores and/or certain magazine stands (and possibly via their website, although I'm not certain).

The editors were also kind to include two articles I had written several years back for Old-House Interiors on pantries and Hoosier cabinets. It is online here (although the layout in the magazine––with more photographs–-is much better!). The publication of the original pantry article was what inspired me to put together the book proposal for The Pantry.

This special issue is a keeper for any kitchen (and pantry) enthusiast for new-old design ideas, resources and wonderful photography. I'm going to tuck it away in my file marked "Future Farmhouse Kitchen." I can dream, can't I?

In the meantime, I've been promising photos of our new cottage pantry at the farm which is a great stand-in for the time being: we don't live in the cottage because it is too small for all of us, so, naturally, I have adopted it. [And it will one day be our 'doty house' for our older years.] It also has a great canning kitchen that has been in constant use these past two months. So, I will make those photos a priority as soon as I get organized post-canning!

Best wishes and have a lovely autumn season wherever you may be,

Catherine

Canning Season

It is full-fledged canning season at the farm so come on over to my other blog Farmwife at Midlife and visit me in my cottage canning kitchen. There are gently cooling breezes down from the knob and we can enjoy the porch again after a long heat wave and drought-like conditions here in south-central Kentucky.

I promise there will be more regular updates here at In the Pantry with pantry-related posts throughout the autumn and winter months ahead.

In the meantime, I'm filling our pantries and freezers from now until the colder weather. Getting a woodstove installed–oh how I miss a woodstove!–and we will soon be piling up many cords of seasoned wood from our farm on our back porch. Here in the very hot and dry South we will welcome Fall sooner than we did in the Northeast. And Fall rains will be welcome as will the cozier and cooler days ahead. I used to mourn the summer's passing in late August–now I embrace it like an old friend or my favorite shawl.

And oh how I still love to fill a pantry, our many freezers, and a wood box. There is something immensely gratifying about seeing your jars of the summer harvest lined up in rows on the shelf. It is a visual record of a day's work, of self-sustenance and good nourishment, too. The idea of living out of our own food stores, with our own animals and eggs, local produce from farmers we know, and avoiding the store? Priceless.

Pantries I Saw on My Summer Vacation

An old Hoosier-esque cupboard in the shed at Green's Heritage Museum
 in Orient, Ohio. [I particularly like the vines growing around it.]

We took several trips to Ohio this summer and, of course, I brought my camera along. I'm always on the lookout for unusual spaces and pantry places along the way. What's fun about visiting Ohio is that even though I have spent much time there––as a child and adult––there is always something new to see or find. [For more about "What I Learned on My Summer Vacation," please see my Farmwife at Midlife blog.] We don't go far together now that we have a cattle farm and much responsibility here in Kentucky, so we do try to pack as much time as we can into our short trips.

The butler's pantry at the James A. Garfield Historic Site in Mentor, Ohio.

The interior of the small field worker's wagon at Green's Heritage Museum.
It was used by migrant workers from Kentucky who came up to Ohio each summer.
There is a small bedroom and an open area for cooking and living space––like a Gypsy caravan.

The cupboard and counter in the field worker's wagon.

A former tourist cabin.

The cupboard and kitchen area of the tiny tourist cabin
 at Green's Heritage Museum. What little girl, or grown woman,
would not want this as a playhouse of their  own?

Two views of the kitchen and pantry area that was in the old store at Green's Heritage Museum. 

A row of old oatmeal boxes in the old store.

A "Portable Pantry," made in Ohio in the latter part of the 19th century. I'd heard about them but had never seen one before. I found this in an antique shop in Berlin, Ohio (but did not buy it!).

A flower arranging volunteer in the room made for the same purpose at
Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens in Akron, Ohio. Above this space,
on the second story, is a commodious linen closet with cupboards and drawers.

Last but not least, my friend Linda spotted a copy of my book on the upper shelf
of the gift shop of Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens. I was glad to see it and they ordered more copies.

A Nice Nod to Pantries ~ and THE PANTRY

© Catherine Seiberling Pond

The Pantry––Its History and Modern Uses was mentioned (and quoted) in an article called "Tips on Designing a Pantry" in the Winter 2009 issue of New Old Houses [through the wonders of the internet, I am only now discovering this article as it was just posted on line]. You will find OldHouseOnline.com to be an invaluble resource for all of your old house questions.

Thank you for the informative tribute to pantries, Jennifer Sperry!

And the winner is...

Carolyn MacDonald! She will win a signed copy of The Pantry as well as a vintage apron from my extensive collection. It was a difficult selection to make from many fine entries (I would like to include all of them here in the coming weeks, if I may) and I thank you for all of them. However, Carolyn wrote about a variety of pantry memories in the process of building a new pantry of her own (we hope that she will share photographs of the finished pantry with readers here). In the meantime, here is Carolyn's winning entry: 

I am having a pantry built.  I am so excited about it that it is all I can think about!  The construction started about 3 weeks ago and it is almost completed except for cabinet fronts and painting. It is a space in the back of my garage but it is attached to the house with a hallway that leads to my kitchen.  I am trying to have it be a tribute to both my grandmothers who loved to cook.  It will have open shelving and cabinetry with glass doors.  I had a piece of marble in the garage that will be used as a small counter.  It will have scalloped brackets similar to the ones on page 18 of your book. I have your book The Pantry.  I have read it several times.  I am going to display it in my new pantry.  I love it! Along with the book I am going to hang my grandmother’s aprons that they sewed or crocheted.  I am going to display one of my grandmother’s canister sets.  I have random dishes from my mother and aunts that will be proudly displayed.

My maternal grandmother had a wonderful pantry.  I tell my daughter about it all the time.  She had jars of clarified butter for baking, canned vegetables from the garden and lots of rolling pins.  I have one of her rolling pins and I am going to hang it in my pantry.  My grandmother always made sweet cookies and they were proudly displayed on the counter of her pantry. She had beautiful handmade doilies hanging on the shelves and bottles of rose water or orange blossom water used for baking in the cabinet. When you opened the cabinet you would smell the fragrance from these bottles.  I tell my daughter that she never wasted anything.  All jars and containers were used and filled with nuts, golden raisins and chocolate sprinkles for baking.  You never knew what was in a recycled coffee can or cookie tin until you opened it.  But, she knew what each container held.  An avid gardener, my grandmother always had a bowl of apples, mulberries, tomatoes or cucumbers on her counters.  I hope to do the same.  My grandmother passed away in 1986 the same year my daughter was born.  I tell my daughter about her and I always mention her pantry and how she loved to cook for her family as I do.

My mother also had a pantry and she tell me that as a little girl I would ask her to stand me up on the counter to look out the small pantry window at our back yard.  I don’t remember this but I love the story and I can picture myself as a small child in the 1950’s climbing up to see out our second floor pantry window.

My husband remembers his grandmother’s pantry also.  He said she had a wonderful wooden ladder that helped her to reach the top shelves.   He used to climb up on it.   Oh, how I wish we kept some of these things!  I do have a salt and pepper shaker collection of his grandmother’s and I am sure they will look fantastic in the glass cabinet.

I have let everyone in the family know about the construction of the pantry and it puts a smile on their faces.  I am sure they will give me mementos to display. I am trying to find a quote from your book to hand paint on my pantry walls along with my favorite saying “count your blessings."   

Thank you for letting me "count my blessings" here In the Pantry on a regular basis these past five years. I appreciate, as always, your stopping by for some sugar or salt. 


Blessings,

Catherine

Entertaining 101: Have Lots of Hobbit Pantries

It is hard to imagine that after looking for pantry references in so many books when I was writing The Pantry several years ago, that I should have forgotten about Mr. Bilbo Baggins' pantries at his hobbit-hole in Bag End, Hobbiton. I read and loved The Hobbit when I was about twelve but I never got into J.R.R. Tolkein's other novels. There was something about the wee folk in the lovely English countryside that seemed familiar and less menacing to me then the greater adventures with scarier creatures in Middle Earth.

The hobbit-hole of Bilbo Baggins was a sizable hill and is introduced in the first chapter:

No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were all on the left hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.

Today on Facebook, a friend put up this quote: "If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world," which one of the dwarfs says later on in The Hobbit in reference to Mr. Baggins. As someone who likes to eat, cook, sing and entertain, this sentiment rings true for me. And, I was reminded, again, of how pantries ("lots of these") were a part of Bilbo Baggins' home in the shire and how a full larder is a good thing to have when a wizard–and thirteen dwarfs–show up on your doorstep, unexpectedly, for tea (and tea in England can be more like an American supper). PHOTO–Our guests, which included mostly children, were appreciative and did not make any extra requests like the dwarfs who came to tea at Mr. Bilbo Baggins' hobbit-hole. And no, our humble hobbit-hole is not tilting–it almost looks like the crooks' hide-outs in the old television show, Batman!

Like myself, Hobbits tend to be reclusive little people, "inclined to be fat in the stomach...(with) good-natured faces, and laugh deep fruity laughs (especially after dinner, which they have twice a day when they can get it)." They also are about three and half feet tall and have full heads of curly hair. I expect I've heard a "fruity laugh," or uttered one once in a while, myself, although it has likely been a while. [Come to think of it, my dear husband reminds me of a taller, balding Bilbo!]

On Monday we had some friends over for lunch and I could somewhat relate to Bilbo's angst. However, unlike with Mr. Baggins, I knew I was expecting a lot of guests (sort of–we did have a "snow day" reschedule) and my anxieties tend to occur in advance: I fret about how the house looks, how the food will work, and oh so many things not tended to (and that in the end don't really matter). I used to entertain in New Hampshire quite often, for small groups of friends or dinner parties or around the holidays, but here I've gotten rather rusty and the old perfectionist streak creeps in again. It is so unnecessary, but there it is.

When Baggins invited the wizard Gandalf to tea he asked himself (and don't we always second-guess ourselves after sending out a party invitation? I know that I do! What was I possibly thinking!?):

"What on earth did I ask him to tea for!?" he said to himself, as he went to the pantry. He had only just had breakfast, but he thought a cake or two and a drink of something would do him good after his fright.

Then the dwarfs, whom Gandalf had invited, kept piling into Baggins' hobbit-hole, one after another. Baggins went "scuttling off" to "the pantry to fetch two beautiful round seed-cakes which he had baked that afternoon for his after-supper morsel." They begin asking Baggins for more and more food.

+ + +

"And raspberry jam and apple-tart," said Bifur.

"And mince-pies and cheese," said Bofur.

"And pork-pie and salad," said Bombur.

"And more cakes, and ale, and coffee, if you don't mind," called the other dwarfs through the door.

"Put on a few eggs, there's a good fellow!" Gandalf called after him, as the hobbit stumped off to the pantries. "And just bring out the cold chicken and pickles!"

"Seems to know as much about the inside of my larders as I do myself!" thought Mr Baggins, who was feeling positively flummoxed, and was beginning to wonder whether a most wretched adventure had not come right into his house. By the time he had got all the bottles and dishes and knives and forks and glasses and plates and spoons and things piled up on big trays, he was getting very hot, and red in the face, and annoyed.

"Confusticate and bebother these dwarves!" he said aloud. "Why don't they come and lend a hand?" Lo and behold! there stood Balin and Dwalin at the door of the kitchen, and Fili and Kili behind them, and before he could say knife they had whisked the trays and a couple of small tables into the parlour and set out everything afresh.

Gandalf sat at the head of the party with the thirteen dwarves all round: and Bilbo sat on a stool at the fireside, nibbling at a biscuit (his appetite was quite taken away), and trying to look as if this was all perfectly ordinary and not in the least an adventure. The dwarves ate and ate, and talked and talked, and time got on. At last they pushed their chairs back, and Bilbo made a move to collect the plates and glasses.

"I suppose you will all stay to supper?" he said in his politest unpressing tones.

"Of course!" said Thorin. "And after. We shan't get through the business till late, and we must have some music first. Now to clear up!"

Thereupon the twelve dwarves–not Thorin, he was too important, and stayed talking to Gandalf–jumped to their feet, and made tall piles of all the things. Off they went, not waiting for trays, balancing columns of plates, each with a bottle on the top, with one hand, while the hobbit ran after them almost squeaking with fright: "please be careful!" and "please, don't trouble! I can manage." But the dwarves only started to sing:

Chip the glasses and crack the plates!
Blunt the knives and bend the forks!
That's what Bilbo Baggins hates?
Smash the bottles and burn the corks!
Cut the cloth and tread on the fat!
Pour the milk on the pantry floor!
Leave the bones on the bedroom mat!
Splash the wine on every door!
Dump the crocks in a boiling bowl;
Pound them up with a thumping pole;
And when you've finished, if any are whole,
Send them down the hall to roll!
That's what Bilbo Baggins hates!
So, carefully! carefully with the plates!

~ excerpted from The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkein:
Chapter 1. "The Unexpected Party"

+ + +

As a hostess I am terrible about two things: delegating any kind of task or letting people help me in the first place. I am awed that my Mennonite friends are able to do both with great ease and efficiency and aren't afraid to ask for help or to offer it, either. They think nothing of swooping into another woman's kitchen and pitching in–but somehow that is less a part of our own culture and more about their communal one where the kitchen is not only the center of the home but an extended living room, too, as well as work room. And everyone in their home–man, woman, child–has a specific role or is able to learn to do many things. There is something inviolate, at times, about coming into another woman's kitchen and over the years, with good friends, as welcome as we've felt in each other's homes, we just seem to respect this unwritten code of conduct.

Ironically (and I always enjoy good irony and symbolism), I wouldn't let anyone bring anything but one person who did not attend had a bouquet of flowers delivered and they arrived a half hour before the lunch. And frankly, I hadn't thought about a centerpiece so it was a kind and unexpected gesture and it graced the center of our table. One thing I love about entertaining, as in life, is to expect the unexpected in situations, and in others, and be glad of it–embrace it, even. Taking a good cue from the poet Emily Dickinson, I try to always "dwell in Possibility," from a poem that explains as much as I feel about heaven on Earth in a shared transcendentalist stance with the poet, as I seem to feel about entertaining and having visitors in my home:

I dwell in Possibility–
A fairer House than Prose–
Superior–for Doors–

Of Chambers as the Cedars–
Impregnable of Eye–
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky–

Of Visitors–the fairest–
For Occupation–This–
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise–

~ Poem #657, c. 1862, by Emily Dickinson

My husband knows to make himself scarce in the hours before a party, if not the day before. This week, one of our boys helped me to get the house ready in the morning and did some vacuuming and was a great sous chef for last minute things. Regardless of any advance mayhem, we always have fun once the gathering begins–and there's always plenty of food.

When one of the toddlers at the lunch opened our bedroom door, which is just off the living room, he made this discovery. I was able to say with a sweeping gesture, "See!? This is how we really live..." (But at least the bed was made!!) Around the corner from this bedroom, and fortunately only accessible from the bedroom, is my unkempt hobbit-hole of an office. (And no, I'm not proud of it...)

Unlike in Mr. Baggins' hobbit-hole we have no cellars here to hide stuff in. So here's my entertainment advice for what it's worth:

1. Unless you are planning a huge open house or garden party, you'll always have enough food no matter what you make or how many people are coming (and you can freeze leftovers). I've never had this fail.
   
2. Do your major cooking and "light cleaning" ahead of time.
3. When all else fails, pile every stray bit of clutter on your bed a few hours before company comes and shut the door!
   
4. (Plastic cups are also good for a crowd.)
   
5. (Nice days help when you have a lot of kids–so do games.)

The varied women of Cranford–a series of novels by Elizabeth Gaskell set in Victorian rural England and adapted in two sagas by the BBC–always seem ready for tea-time. But they are just as adept as brushing over any conflict with each other and value love and friendship above all. I am blessed to have made friends like this in my life.

Another parting "party tip": do your major vacuuming in the day(s) after the party and only a bit before hand–and let your children do the before hand "sweep" (if you are like me, you'll be less hard on them and happily have them do it while you tend to other things). You'll thank me–and unless you have some one who is doing a white-glove inspection of every nook and cranny in your hobbit-hole, no one will really notice...or care. And if they do, they probably won't want to come back any way.

Take it from Mr. Bilbo Baggins: it is always easier to entertain thirteen raucous, hungry, messy but grateful dwarfs–and a kind old wizard–than it is to please one imperious queen. Not that royalty ever visited the hobbit's shire, that Tolkein wrote about or that is in my memory, but a good hobbit must be prepared for anyone, at least, with his ample larders and seed-cakes. And, above all, dear readers, we must always allow the time in our day and in our homes for tea-time.

[I just discovered that The Hobbit will at last be made into a (two-part) movie: get ready for more Hobbit fever in the next few years.]

Lucy's Pantry

Lucy's practical pantry is an extension of her kitchen where she enjoys more counter space and good eastern light. In true New England farmhouse fashion, it was built on the northeast corner of the ell where it is cool in summer and like a natural ice box in winter.

One thing I'd like to do more regularly on my blog is to feature more pantries and kitchens. As you can imagine, if you have your own copy of The Pantry (or even if you don't!), it was impossible to feature all of the pantry photos and pantry quotes I might have liked to have done. I still photograph pantries when I can or write down pantry-related quotes in books I am reading or old magazine articles I come across. One thing is for certain: pantries have always been well-loved, much used, practical spaces. Some people, like Lucy Davison, have never done without one.

I met Lucy several years ago when driving around Henniker, New Hampshire with my husband and boys. He saw his old friend Shirley (or "Shirl"), Lucy's husband, out haying across from the old Quaker meetinghouse, and we stopped to visit. That winter, while I was still researching and writing The Pantry, we had them to dinner and I spoke with her about pantries and kitchens and food (three of my favorite topics). Lucy was a former school teacher before she married Shirley in her late 30s. Since the 1970s they have shared an old New England farmhouse together, complete with an ell kitchen, a well-used pantry, and an old wood-burning Glendale cook stove that she uses most of the year. She reminds me, in her practical self-reliance, of my Old Order Mennonite friends and others in Kentucky who have always put up food from their sustenance gardens.


Lucy has many old-fashioned cottage garden flowers: the rampant valerian (or "Garden Heliotrope"), blue lupine and, over on the east side of the kitchen, the largest bed of "Golden Glow," in the rudbeckia family, that I've seen before. It blooms later in the summer (and I brought a clump to Kentucky from my own New Hampshire garden).

Lucy cans and freezes throughout the summer from her prolific garden and prides herself on not having to go to the store too often (they also have chickens for meat and eggs and raise a few cows for beef–they also used to have dairy cows). They more or less live in their kitchen, as they are in the photograph (taken on my recent trip to New Hampshire), and from windows on either side, to the east and west, they can see who is driving by or who is coming to their door.

In The Pantry in "The Farmhouse Pantry" chapter I wrote about Lucy's pantry (but did not include photographs because of space and design limitations):

For several decades, Lucy Davison has put up the bounty from the garden at the New England farm she shares with her husband, Shirley, 87. Their farmhouse has a long, narrow pantry with shelves and a large workspace in front of a sunny window. "I love a pantry," Lucy says. "I do my baking preparations in there because we entertain in the kitchen–you just leave the bread and the old milk cup and dirty bowls. You can take off your apron and close the door." Their kitchen has a reliable Glendale stove where she does her extensive canning: tomatoes, pickles, all kinds of jams and jellies.

The Hen Pantry

A modern day buttery in an old Western Reserve farmhouse in northeastern Ohio.

Several months ago a reader contacted me about my blog and book and I was delighted to discover that she is a fellow butt'ry (or "buttery") aficionado. She also, at my request, sent me some photos of the buttery (and Hen Pantry) that she has created in her old Ohio farmhouse. [She also happens to be a Della Lutes fan and that combination, as well as her connections to my home state, well, let's just say it is kismet.]


The new Hen Pantry of a blog reader in her Ohio farmhouse could easily be over 100 years old.

This reader, who prefers anonymity, named her pantry "the Hen Pantry" because when she inquired of Tasha Tudor's family why they referred to her pantry as "The Hen's Pantry," they answered that this is where the grain was kept for the chickens and that it was the pantry closest to the chicken house (assuming Tasha Tudor had several pantries, and why not?). These pantries are worthy of a design book and display historic kitchen and pantry items as well as more modern items stored out of sight.

In The Pantry-Its History and Modern Uses I wrote:

"A buttery was originally a storeroom for large barrels, or 'butts,' of beer, ale, and large provisions. In castles with great halls, the nobility ate at one end, on the dais raised above the rest of the room, and on the opposite wall was a screen that divided the great hall from the corridor that led to the pantry and buttery, where servants carried food back and forth to the diners."

This reader's buttery could easily be found in an 18th or 19th century farmhouse.

One of the inspirations for writing The Pantry was Mary Mason Campbell's The Butt'ry Shelf Cookbook. The introduction of this book includes a detailed description of a New Hampshire butt'ry (something that was a part of most farmhouses). This is a mere taste of Campbell's homage (and I included it in The Pantry):

“City people used to have pantries,” begins Mary Mason Campbell in her romantic homage to the New England pantry in The Butt’ry Shelf Cookbook. “The country counterpart of the pantry was called a ‘butt’ry.’ In occasional hidden corners of New England, this country room may still be found in use, but only the most old-fashioned houses, loved and lived in by the most old-fashioned kind of people, have a ‘butt’ry’ these days...The butt’ry (properly spelled buttery, of course) is a small room with a smell of good things to eat and a look of delicious plenty. It is located next to the kitchen in the cool corner of the house. Its window is shaded in summer by a crab-apple tree. . . . In the winter now the butt’ry is warm and cheerful, though in years gone by it was often bitter cold and the New England housewife who never dreamed of such a thing as an electric freezer kept her store of frozen pies and muffins and cookies handy to the kitchen on a shelf of the butt’ry...Sheathed in warm-colored pine boards, the walls of the butt’ry are lined with hand-planed shelves, sturdy enough to bear the weight of jars, crocks, platters, and plates filled with the richness of country cooking...“Every inch of the butt’ry is crowded with goodness.”

Here is another lovely pantry creation, including a display of Mary Mason Campbell's The Butt'ry Shelf Cookbook over at a delightful blog I just discovered called Storybook Woods. Clarice Fox-Hughes has shown her readers "A Well Working Pantry." It is also attractive, too. [Clarice also reminded me today when I emailed her that she featured my book in a blog from last year on Pantry Love that also has photographs of many other enticing pantries. Thanks again, Clarice!]

I miss my pantries and the original kitchen pantry cupboards back in our former 1813 home. I long for, and have planned on paper, my ideal farmhouse pantry. One day! Until that time I will live vicariously through other pantry friends, descriptions, literary references and photographs. Thank you to "The Hen Pantry" for the use of her photographs of her lovely pantry and buttery. I invite any reader to submit other pantry images or references to info@catherinepond.com

PS An afterthought: believe it or not, and in part because of the inspiration of a hen pantry, when we do build that dream farmhouse I want to have the kitchen ell with pantry and laundry room access out a side door near where we have our wood shed (already in place) and where I want the clothesline to be and the hen house...which, by the way, is officially finished TODAY after some last details (most of it was built over a month ago but they are finishing up at the farm on the recent building projects...now for some fencing and cattle and our orchard and the garden...anyway, elusive Chicken House blog will be posted very soon...)

The Hen's Pantry

Tasha Tudor's illustrations for The New England Butt'ry Shelf Cookbook and three other books with Mary Mason Campbell, all written and illustrated in the late 1960s/early 1970s, were among the reasons I longed for New England as a child, even while living there, but also the inspiration for why I wrote The Pantry-Its History and Modern Uses. Not only was The Butt'ry Shelf Cookbook my first real cookbook (and I have made many of the recipes in it--from Mary Mason Campbell's own New Hampshire and New England background--since I was ten years old), but it began a lifelong obsession with pantries. [Tudor's illustrations for My Brimful Book, another childhood classic of mine, were also evocative of New England summers with my grandparents.]

As readers of The Pantry know, a butt'ry is not named for its buttery sound, although that would be wonderful as that is what it conjures, but, like the later butler's pantry, is an English architectural term brought to Colonial America. A butt'ry was an early food storage room in English manors, and later early American homes, named for the butts of barrels filled with foodstuffs.

Imagine my surprise last weekend when my friend Cat was delighted to show us her recent book sale find (it pays to run one's library booksale!). It was a copy of The New England Butt'ry Shelf Almanac for 25 cents! These are still available, as are the three others in the Mary Mason Campbell/Tasha Tudor collaboration, on eBay or through second-hand bookstores, and are not only collectible but always much higher than Cat's bargain. As it is a book for which I had been keeping my eye out for her, I am delighted that she found her own copy. [I was as gleeful for her as I was when I found a first edition, from 1968, of The Butt'ry Shelf Cookbook, complete with dust jacket, on a used bookstore shelf for $3 a few years ago while writing The Pantry. Over the years I have picked up numerous copies of these Campbell/Tudor books and given them to friends--but never at that price!]


"Harvest Pantry" (1996), © Tasha Tudor, was actually called "Hen's Pantry" by her family because it was closest to the hen yard and thus was where the chicken food was kept. [This print is available on the Tasha Tudor and Family website.]

Recently, I had a posting from a blog reader (thank you!) who told me about Tasha Tudor's "Hen's Pantry." As I am soon to have a chicken house filled with chickens--and one that will eventually be transported up the hill to our farmhouse--I am intrigued by this nomenclature. Now I will definitely have to plan the hen house and hen yard near the back door of our future farmhouse pantry.

As an aside, Tasha Tudor was friendly with my grandparents when they moved to New Hampshire as she had been a neighbor of my grandfather's brother in Redding, Connecticut. She even drew a pencil drawing of a goose for their "Gray Goose Farm" sign, a landmark sign that has had several incarnations over the years. When our daughter was younger, we called Tudor's family in Vermont to see if we might meet her and bring some books to be signed. Also, I wanted to interview her, if at all possible, about her memories of my grandparents who, like her, were back-to-the-landers, although not to the same extremes. We were told, by her son, that we would be charged several hundred dollars (it is embarrassing now to say exactly how much) and that "everyone from New York was paying that" for their children. Well, I can understand wanting to limit access and be gatekeepers to an elderly mother who is likely besieged by fans but then to charge so much for a private audience? Why have them at all if not for the monetary rewards? Regardless, rest assured that we still have many of her books, all unsigned. [Image, above right, of Tasha Tudor with kindling, © Richard W. Brown, c. 1990]


Image of Tasha Tudor hanging up clothes, c. 1940, © Nell Dorr (1895-1988),
Amon Carter Museum

Tudor died in June 2008 at the age of 92. By all accounts she was still cooking, illustrating, gardening and probably doing most things as she always had: steadfastly and in no particular hurry. I think she likely embodied the Zen master quality of embracing each moment--of honoring time but slowing it down with precious tasks and domestic undertakings. Had I ever had the chance to meet her, here is what I would have said: Thank you, Tasha Tudor for the years of delight and inspiration, for not only making the nostalgia for New England's past a thing of longing but for living out and practicing your own beliefs during our modern age when such lifestyles were unfashionable. And thanks for being a pantry gal, long before they were again fashionable.

A NOTE to the readers of this blog: I will try to post at least once a month on different kinds of pantries or pantry photos not featured in The Pantry-Its History and Modern Uses and encourage you to email me with pantry finds of your own--or your own pantry. Also, I'm always looking for literary quotes from the pantry or interesting pantry trivia and will be posting those from time to time here, also. As you can imagine, 100 pages was not nearly enough to include all of the marvelous pantry lore and literary references--or photographs--out there.