Kitchen and Table

The everyday act of dining plays a significant role in nearly every culture. In the kitchen, people cook for their loved ones, work side by side, and share skills and recipes. The dining table is not only a place to eat nourishing food, but also a place where families and friends can socialize and form bonds. We imagine the people of Seneca Village utilized the kitchen and table in the same way we do today.

Our theme, “Kitchen and Table,” is especially important for understanding women’s lives, given the large amount of time women spent preparing and serving food. Women, often assisted by their daughters, cooked over an open hearth–stews, served in large wooden or ceramic bowls, were popular in the time of Seneca Village. When the cookstove became more popular, meals increased in complexity and number of courses, spurring the need for different types of plates and utensils. The four objects from Seneca Village that our group researched include a blue Willow plate, dipped whiteware bowl, stoneware jug, and glass bottle. Only fragments of each remain. By investigating these fragments, which initially seemed unrecognizable and even meaningless to us, we learned about the Wilson family–what they ate and drank and how they presented themselves through their dining wares. We thought about what food presentation tells us about life in the nineteenth century, especially in contrast to the present century.

There are several crucial questions we focused on when researching these objects. First, we attempted to figure out what our objects were, their manufacturing processes, where exactly they were made, who they were made for, and what their use was (in general and specifically in the Wilson household). The second step was contextualizing the information we learned. We asked questions like: Why does it matter if the Wilsons drank alcoholic beverages? What was so special about a ceramic bowl? How did the Wilsons use a stoneware jug in their everyday lives? And, where and why did they acquire an imitation of a Chinese blue and white plate? The Wilson family most likely left these objects behind when they were forced to leave their home and land in 1857. Perhaps the Wilsons packed in a hurry and chose to bring other objects instead of these. Even if these objects were not their most prized possessions, they have encouraged us to investigate nineteenth-century New York families and their lifestyles and to imagine what life was like for Seneca Villagers. 

Works Cited

Howland, Mrs. E.A. 1845. The American Economical Housekeeper and Family Receipt Book. Cincinnati, OH: H.W. Derby & Co. Library of Congress.

Snell, Rachel A. 21 Aug., 2014. “Old-Fashioned Recipes, New-Fashioned Kitchens: Technology and Women’s Recipe Collecting in the Nineteenth Century.” The Recipes Project (blog). https://recipes.hypotheses.org/tag/womens-work.

This frontispiece from Mrs. E.A. Howland’s The American Economical Housekeeper and Family Receipt Book (1845) depicts women cooking in a kitchen with an open hearth before the introduction of the cookstove in the 1830s. This was the method of cooking used by generations of women before them, and it completely changed once the cookstove was employed in the late nineteenth century (Snell 2014). (Howland, Mrs. E.A. 1845. The American Economical Housekeeper and Family Receipt Book Cincinnati, OH: H.W. Derby & Co.. Library of Congress.)

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