Posted by Adam Quinan on May 06, 2001 at 12:56:38 from 24.112.32.14:
In Reply to: Re: LARDER or PANTRY posted by Ed Kiser on May 01, 2001 at 00:28:47:
We recently (midnight last night) returned from relatively close to Ed's home turf (Orlando) to the freezing wastes of Toronto, and there are major cultural differences between those two scions of the Mother country! Let me put my oar in.
My grandparent's house in Somerset, built in the early 1800s, as a gentleman's residence in a small country town, had a larder, a small room with a shaded, unglazed, though screened, window. Stone floor, stone shelves etc. It opened off a larger room called the scullery (to add another word to the mix). It also had a stone floor, though this was not very surprising as the entire ground floor was made of flagstones except in the study, dining room and drawing room which had wooden floorboards laid on top of the stone. The scullery had a large sink and the back door opened into it from a small yard and the stable block. The scullery opened on to the kitchen and then the parlour which was easily one of the warmer rooms in the house as it had the coal fired hot water boiler. There were backstairs from the pantry to the first (NA = second floor).
My grandparents had no live in servants in the 1950s and 60s, my grandfather was a doctor and used the cellar, which was much more like a liveable basement than most English cellars, as a surgery (NA = doctor's office) and dispensary where he prepared his own medicines. The house was up on a bit of an elevation so you could walk into the surgery from street level through what amounted to a narrow walkway between two walls. Before it was a doctor's house, it had been used as a private school. In its earliest times, the scullery would have been used for "dirty" jobs, heavy duty cleaning, potato peeling etc. The parlour was the small staff's final preparation area for meals and where they would have relaxed waiting for the bell to ring to summon them. That system was still in place and had been electrified early in the 1900s. They would have had a bedroom up under the roof in the attic, one of which I used when we stayed with my grandparents and they had a full house.