Sara Pennell traces the emergence of the domestic kitchen as a distinctive space that helped make houses homes from the 17th century through to the middle of the 19th, and explores how the kitchen and its contents ??? from the hearth to the contents of the dresser drawer -- became a site of specialised activity, sociability and strife. Drawing upon texts, images, surviving structures and objects,
The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600-1850opens up the early modern English kitchen as an important historical site in the construction of domestic relations between husband and wife, masters, mistresses and servants and householders and outsiders; and as a crucial resource in contemporary heritage landscapes.
Sara Pennellis Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Greenwich, UK. She is the co-editor, along with Michelle DiMeo, of
Reading and Writing Recipe Books, 1550-1800(2013).
List of figures
Acknowledgements
Note on the text
Abbreviations
1. Where's the Kitchen?
2. Dream Kitchens? Imagining the Pre-Modern Kitchen
3. Locating the 'Kitchen'
4. The 'Power House': Technologies in the Kitchen
5. 'Kitchen Stuff': Useful Things in the Kitchen
6. Peopling the Kitchen
7. Kitchen Moralities
8. The Kitchen Displayed
Notes
Bibliography
Index