The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600-1850

by Sara Pennell, Beat Kümin (Editor), Brian Cowan (Editor)

Overview

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, 1600-1850 opens 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350056183
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	12/28/2017
Series:	Cultures of Early Modern Europe
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Sara Pennell is 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).

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

A deeply impressive, immersive and multifaceted account. The study links production, consumption, technology, gender and social structure, the history of science, religion and the magical in creative, unexpected and suggestive ways. The author can justly claim to have definitively put the overlooked kitchen on the scholarly map. It is the ultimate historical sociology of the early modern kitchen.
Amanda Vickery, Queen Mary, University of London, UK

This in-depth history of the early modern English kitchen is long overdue. Historian Pennell (Univ. of Greenwich, UK) analyzes past histories of the kitchen and their weaknesses, then provides a definitive yet nuanced, multifaceted, technical/social/religious/material/spatial/gender history of the kitchen up to 1850. ... Pennell establishes the absolute importance of the kitchen to any household, whether elite or plebeian. The final chapter, "The Kitchen Displayed," examines the kitchen in historic houses today, suggesting ways to rethink those spaces and interconnect various disciplines that touch on the role of the kitchen--"the sensory realm of the pre-modern kitchen should not just be left to baking smells."... A welcome addition for public historians and early modern English historians, as well as those merely interested in kitchens. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.
CHOICE

From the Publisher