National Clean Up Your Pantry Day – April 11, 2024

History of National Clean Up Your Pantry Day

A pantry is a dedicated space, a room, or a cabinet, where items related to the kitchen are stored. These items can be beverages, food, utensils, cleaning supplies, linens, and groceries. The term ‘pantry’ was first used during the Middle Ages to refer to domestic spaces. Colonists in New England used to store food in a “buttery,” which was a small room near a kitchen. The first buttery was an underground room in the Theron Boyd homestead in Hartford, U.S. in 1786. The “butler’s pantry” was popular in England and America during the 1800s. “Practical Housekeeper” magazine, published a quote by Mrs. Elizabeth Ellet in 1857: “Let there be a place for every object, and when not in use, let every article be in its place.”

In 1869, Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe published a fundamental work that endorsed the idea of incorporating the pantry into the kitchen, called “The American Woman’s Home.” The Boston Cooking-School Magazine was established in 1896 under the influential home-economics movement that inspired American housewifery and kitchen design. During the 1920s and 1930s, as the pantry expanded in size with more shelves and cupboards, the increasingly fashionable ‘breakfast nook’ began to displace pantries in the kitchen layout.

By the 1960s, floor-to-ceiling cabinets became a part of American kitchen design. Three decades later, during the 1990s, a preference for separate storage spaces led to a noticeable resurrection in the use of pantries across America. According to a 2005 poll by the National Association of Home Builders, walk-in pantries were the most liked kitchen feature in American homes that year.