Cupboards and Food Safes

Cupboards fixed to kitchen walls were often fitted with sliding shelf-boxes for storing such items as cleaning supplies and closed bins of meal and flour. Freestanding cupboards held preparation tools as well as tableware and serving pieces. Sometimes such cupboards were called “dressers.” In 1869Catharine Beecher and her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of the antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852), published The American Woman’s Home. It depicts a practical kitchen layout with fixed shelves, some below the work surfaces, laden with boxes and tins.