![]() ![]() By the beginning of the nineteenth century, housewives on southern plantations were able to live a genteel life while servants took care of kitchen drudgery-although they kept a strict eye on everything and carried keys to all the storerooms.Īs European settlers spread westward, they built houses from logs in Scandinavian style. To keep cooking smells, heat, and the threat of fire from the main house, kitchens became separate buildings with food carried into the main house through a covered breezeway. Slaves from Africa worked the fields, and some were trained as house servants and cooks. In the southern states, large plantations prospered from cash crops-rice, tobacco, and cotton-ideally suited to the warm, humid climate. Prospering villages and towns attracted shopkeepers who began to offer ready-made cloth, foodstuffs, and other staple items, lessening the housewife's workload. Pewter plates and mugs, and wood trenchers (bowls and spoons used by the earliest colonists) were gradually augmented by glass and earthenware vessels and by 1750, imported china. Adjuncts to the kitchen included a smokehouse (sometimes in the attic), a root cellar, an icehouse-which might double as a springhouse to chill milk-a dairy for cheese and butter-making, and a poultry yard. Brick beehive-shaped baking ovens were equipped with iron doors. Forged iron swingingĬranes held heavy iron pots conveniently over the fire. ![]() Fireplaces were reduced in size and chimneys given more efficient flues. ![]() Kitchen improvements were invented throughout the eighteenth century. She lit fires using a tinder box tended an orchard and kitchen garden grew flax carded wool spun yarn wove fabric knitted stockings dipped tallow candles made soap for laundering preserved food baked bread from home-grown grain ground at a mill and produced a large family to aid with chores. While the husband and field hands worked democratically side by side taming the land, the housewife, usually with a servant who was treated as extended family, worked from dawn to dark. The kitchen was the hub of the house, with an eight-to ten-foot-wide medieval-style fireplace. In New England, early colonists lived in small, landscape-hugging farmhouses. The colonists brought the idea of a more permanent hearth within a specific room-the kitchen. Long before the European colonists arrived, Native Americans had cooked on open fires or hot stones. ![]()
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