ladies let your pantry fantasies run riot here

[HerHonesty]

i have a pantry, and more importantly i have a pantry which my husband is not the blind bit intersted in (lets face it his fantasies probably involve panties...)which means I can have exactly what i want without any compromise wooo hoooo!

any ideas, photos, must haves gratefully received. i think there was a thread before on similar subject but cant find it...

I have a larder but I am not sure what the difference is
it is indeed full of crap useful things to facilitate a clear kitchen

ANyone who's read Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Those Happy Golden Years' will have read a description of the most swwonworthy pantry in the world - all hand built for her by her fabulous DH...

yes yes yes i get the idea of it being where you put all the crap and therefore what it looks like shouldnt really matter but it is the ONLY room dh will ever let me paint pink and it sort of brings out the inner domestic goddess in me so I have made it into a bit of a project..

i suppose i wouldnt be bothered if it was half ok now but at the mo it has sludge grey speckled tiles, bogey green shelves and some rusty meat hooks in it so something has to be done..

i believe a larder was specifically for coldness and more cupboard like and a pantry was a storeroom, i suppose these days houses rarely have either so they are interchangeable.

What is the difference between a larder and a pantry? is a pantry walk-in size? Mine's not a walk-in and it's full of crap. Time for a make-over methinks.

I don't have a pantry but I do have a garde-manger which is a cupboard underneath the kitchen window which in theory keeps food cool (it was what French apartments had for food storage before the days of refrigerators). And I have a proper housemaid's cupboard

a garde manger... sounds tres glamorous. a housemaids cupboard sounds much more glamorous than a utility room too!

I have a utility room (the room in which the housemaid's cupboard is situated), but it was originally the office (a sort of maid's workroom/antechamber for serving dinner)

i also think housemaids cupboard sounds quite.. erm dare i say it.. naughty.... iykwim.

Yes, you are probably right . I first read the word in a book about housework by Rita Koenig and was very pleased to have found it and to be able to give my cupboard its proper name. But there is something else rather satisfying about it and you have probably hit the nail on the head!

We have back stairs too, which I always think of as a bit risqué... for making quick getaways, IYKWIM....

We moved recently moved into an old house.

It has a larder which is a large cupboard and has no food in it but we use for keeping tools, ladders, ironing board, vaccum cleaner and other hardware in.

We have a pantry in the basement with meat hooks, slate shelves and a wine cellar. None of which contain any food either.

We have a back stairs that DSs use to sneak down in the morning to their playroom without us knowing so they can play computer games at 6.00 a.m.

Intriguingly we have dumb waiter lifts embedded in the walls and secret cupboards that will not open. A bit creepy really - there could be anything in there!

back stairs

[swoon]

one day I will have a house with back stairs
great for playing tag indoors

I also like 'domestic offices'

Sadly we no longer have a chambre de bonne. As is so common now in older Parisian apartment blocks, the top (attic) floor of our building was requisitioned and has been transformed into proper apartments. But we still have a cave down a dark staircase with a huge creaky key and proper mice.

back stairs.. oh the intrigue and mystery just gets better. hide and seek in your house must be brill.
we do have a very large coalshed which has no coal but lots of crap/stuff we surely will need one day..

My pantry has a wooden plate rack (where I keep my plates) and a windowsill full of empty jam jars ready to be used for jam/chutney etc (which are stored on the shelf opposite). Made our first batch of the year on Monday - chilli tomato chutney and brown sauce.

But there the domestic goddessness ends. It also has a fridge-freezer, a shelf full of tins and another of light bulbs, candles and assorted other shite. The floor holds a row of Sainsbury's wine carriers full of bottles (mainly not wine, unfortunately). And also wedged in there is a bucket, a mop, an ironing board, a stepladder and an assortment of semi-useless kitchen items that are too big to store in the kitchen cupboards (salad spinner, George Foreman, grill etc). Pretty it ain't.

Am swooning at idea of pantry, larder or utility room that wasn't also the downstairs bathroom.

However with ds going back to school am going to start by clearing out some cupboards and hopefully getting things a little clearer.

Think my idea pantry would have lots of cath kidston prints around. Gingham check and pretty crockery being stored. Along with jars and jars of homemade everything.

is a bonne not closer to a housekeeper?

[disclaimer: my fr is shockingly bad]

The kind of maid who inhabited a chambre de bonne was a sort of slave who did everything - cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping, serving at table.

These days, now that there are dishwashers, washing machines, tumble driers etc, families have nounous (derived from nourrice = wet nurse) who also do all the housework and also take care of the children. They also sometimes still inhabit the chambre de bonne. The concept neither meets my personal standards of childcare nor my personal standards of treatment of domestic employees...

oh I see

I may have been getting confused with the conciérge who sat at the doorway of the apartment building in a black dress and a lace cap with a bunch of keys at her waist..

[drifts off into C19 Paris as seen by Brits on the Grand Tour)

Nowadays the concierge is called a gardienne and is often Portuguese. She still lives in a one-room apartment on the ground floor of the building, wedged between the lift and the entrance to the back stairs and the local poubelle (dustbins). She no longer knows exactly who goes in and out of the building as we have keypads and entryphones.

The gardienne cleans all the shared areas and is the first port of call for communal structural problems (leaks, mostly, which are a terrible problem in apartment blocks, and of course mice and cockroaches).

It's still frightfully old-fashioned!

you see this is what I mean - I start off thinking these things are quaint historical details from the European chapters of (eg) What Katy Did Next or Little Women and it turns out they still exist

like finding out British families still routinely employ butlers or something...

(I suppose Norland nannies and Silver Cross prams are similar anachronisms...)

You really don't want to know about what still exists here in France! It's very scary indeed. Rote learning in schools, anyone? There is a huge debate on teaching methods going on at the moment, with the tradionalist camp gaining strength. And, in on on-line poll in Le Figaro yesterday, more than 80% of respondents thought parents should have no say at all in what goes on in schools.

You can still ring the butcher or the greengrocer to place an order (meat cut to your spec) and have a same-day delivery here - I quite like that!

now that is service!

I still occasionally think I see grocery boys on delivery bikes in Oxford but they're probably just advertising something...