The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600-1850

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.

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).