Larder
What's behind closed doors?
The time is 2pm exactly, I can hear the grandfather clock in the hall chime twice. Sitting in the dining room at my grandparent’s house, my sister and I are itching to get down from the table. At the end of lunch, we’re sent into the kitchen to fetch pudding from the larder. We never asked in advance, the surprise of finding what was on the shelf was part of what made it special.
We’re hoping it’s a hazelnut meringue cake, our absolute favourite. We reach up to click open the latch on the door. There on the shelf is a towering meringue, its layers plump with cream and toasted hazelnuts. We squabble over who should carry it into the dining room. I lose, and bring a pile of dessert plates and cake knife. At the table, grandpa presides magnificently in his arm chair. At the other end, cigarette in hand, holding court, pearls flapping around her wrists, grandma takes the meringue from my sister and cuts generous slices. We’re given the first pieces. Children first she says. On our plates the meringue sings out to us. I cut a small sliver and let it dissolve on my tongue, crunching the hazelnuts. Shards of dark chocolate fall on my dress and mum tuts at me. Before I’ve even taken my second spoonful my sister has finished her slice. Swiftly I move my plate away and demolish my portion.
We both look hopefully towards my grandmother who gathering steam has adjusted her crimplene dress and launched herself into another antidote about a friends’ daughter in law. My mother is looking bored, my father is staring out the window into the garden where bird song is echoing in the trees. Now, can we cut another slice without anyone noticing? Grandpa notices that we’re stealthily eyeing the cake knife and winks. He moves ponderously towards us and grabs the knife. The remaining piece is cut in two huge slices and lands on our plates. Mum notices and exclaims that’s far too much they’ll be sick. Grandma drops ash on the carpet. I’m the only one who notices.
After lunch, the adults lounge on their chairs, discussing other daughters in law, who’s married, who’s divorced, and how grandma is playing bridge with Nigel Lawsons’ mother next week. My sister and I are out in the garden, listening to bird song.
This memory has stayed with me for so long, full front and central. An open door to the larder in the kitchen, the repository of all things fascinating and wonderful. It was a proper larder, built onto the outside of the house, facing the garden, with a little mesh window. Always cool, on its sturdy shelves it capably stored soft drinks, bottles of cider, puddings and pies.
At our grandparents house, we loved cupboards that hid secrets, we knew where to find the sweet dish in the dining room, amongst the cabinet of silver, brimming with special chocolates that came from a little shop in Bristol, sugared almonds and oval shaped pastel coloured mints. A deep dish on the sideboard was the splendid repository for almonds and muscatel raisins on their stalks or new season shell on Jordan almonds with delicate flaky shells that almost crumbled in the hand.
The kitchen was divided into two, a small room with the cooker and sink, and the larger space backing onto the garden, lined with floor to ceiling cupboards with many secrets to reveal, a table and chairs, and the larder at the back. I wish I had a photo of that kitchen.
Opening a cupboard door reveals a variety of tea sets with different shapes and patterns. We’d take it in turns to choose when tea time came around.
A bowl of rainbow coloured sugar crystals sit snug against the rose bud painted coffee cups.
Best of all, in the bottom kitchen cupboards were the tins of biscuits and savouries. If we were lucky we’d find a tin of Japanese rice crackers. Sitting on the cold lino we’d nibble at the seaweed, carefully eating it all away, sorting through the tin of crackers for the ones with most seaweed wrapped around them.
What is the difference between a pantry and a larder? The words seem to be interchangeable these days.
I’m listening to Ruth Goodman, the historian of social and domestic life of Britain. She’s on Radio 4 talking about the history of our homes. A brilliant story teller, you may know her from documentary series like The Edwardian Farm or The Tudor house. I love that she focuses on stories that most of us can relate to. She digs down into the underbelly of the ordinary. How the majority of the population survived and lived.
Her episode about fridges is fascinating. About ten minutes in she comes to pantries, giving a perfect definition. The Victorian era is the age of the pantry. She goes on to call them walk in larders and to describe what to look for. First, location. Make sure your pantry is placed on the shady side of the house with no direct sunlight to fall on the external walls. Good ventilation with a hatch in the door and an open window. To keep out flies it should be fitted with a mesh. Go for a stone or tiled floor and ideally your pantry should contain a stone shelf for dairy products. And there you have it. A low tech way to keep food cool.
Although she uses the words pantry and larder interchangeably, as do most modern kitchen designers, they are different things.
The term “larder” derives from the fact that they were originally used to store raw meat which had been covered in lard (fat) to preserve it. As Ruth says, the shelving and work surfaces in larders are made of thick stone (usually marble) or slate. These are often constructed into external walls, which stay at a cooler temperature.
The term "pantry," and related words like "pantryman" and pannier, derive ultimately from Latin panis (bread). In aristocratic medieval households, the pantry was a standing cupboard where the bread was kept for the table. Over time, pantries became more popularly used for storing tableware, while food was kept in rooms simply called “storerooms”. There still exists rarefied types of establishment calling themselves The Pantry.
So a larder is for storing products that need to be kept cool and a pantry is for everything else.
I’ve always wanted a larder. I still do. Larders certainly seem to be increasing in popularity with kitchen designers and those of us who have the luxury of space to include one. As I don’t have a spare external wall, what I have is a storeroom pantry.
Why are they so popular, what’s the appeal? The dream of opening a door to find beautifully ordered groceries, stacked and labelled. Put the words perfect pantry in a web search and open yourself up to a Willy Wonka world of practically perfect pantry shelves . There’s sublime and there’s ridiculous. The world exploded last year when a Kardashian shared their walk in pantry on Tiktok. A room larger than the average kitchen, with the most over the top biscuit displays (Who DOES that? Really, who does do that; if someone eats a biscuit does a minion leap up from the basement, because the pantry is live-streamed, and immediately replace it?) And more UPF than the average teenager could dream of. I know it’s smug to say it, but money does not buy taste.
Friends in Cornwall who have the land and know how, have built themselves a cold store for their apple and vegetable harvest.
As beautiful as their Hobbit house looks from the outside, they’ve found that there’s not enough ventilation and produce they carefully stored last Autumn went mouldy. All apart from their apples. These are last years, still looking perky.
The reality for most of us is opening a cupboard and trying to stop that last packet of pasta from unbalancing and tipping onto the floor. Trying to remember what’s lurking at the back, around the corner, or over buying lentils because you were sure you’d run out. If only I had a pantry you cry, I’d be able to see everything clearly. I could find my rolling pin/pasta maker/baking tin I use once a year. When friends come round I could fling open the doors to reveal how neat and orderly my kitchen is. The world would be a better place.
There’s the odd jar without a label; mysteries that I concede will continue to slumber in the darkness to mature in peace
Bereft of a larder as described by Ruth, I have created a pantry of my own out of an echoingly empty cupboard that was crying out for deep wooden shelves and bottles of preserves. It houses my own preserve collection, bottles of this years elderflower cordial, jars of peach chutney, dark quince vodka and gin. Grape and chili jelly made from locally grown grapes gifted to me by a generous friend with an over abundant vine. There’s the odd jar without a label; mysteries that I concede will continue to slumber in the darkness to mature in peace.
It’s where I store my precious hoard of olive oil, large tubs of tahini and peanut butter that get decanted into smaller jars for kitchen use. There’s a tower of tinned laverbread from Wales. I love making it into little cakes with oatmeal and frying them for breakfast. Henderson’s Relish, brought back from Yorkshire because it’s such a Yorkshire thing. I wish I’d read the label first because it contains sweetener. I have more preserves than I’ll ever need in my lifetime. Most will be given as gifts. There are jars of wonderfully sounding apple and sweet woodruff jelly, and oregon grape and elderflower jam, given by a talented chef/forager. Travel souvenirs; Wild flower and sea buckthorn teas from Riga. Dried, powdered wild mushrooms from Vilnius. A gift from Japan I can't use because I've forgotten what it is and the writing is in Japanese. Screw
pine water from India (if only I’d known I could find it here), dried chilies from the Mexican stalls at the Downtown market in LA, and the last of my oily, smoky pul biber from Istanbul which means a return trip has to happen soon because whatever anyone says, it’s just not the same here. There are bottles of saved flower seeds I forgot to label. My collection of empty bottles and jars, ready for the next preserve parade.
My pantry also houses the ironing board, and any miscellaneous objects that don’t belong anywhere else. It wouldn’t feature in House and Gardens. But it’s mine, and it’s the closest thing I have to a larder. Here it is. No art direction, nothing rearranged. I’ve thoughtfully presented it in colour, and in black and white to make it look more moody and sophisticated.
The great thing about pantries is they have doors. No one need ever see that you haven’t alphabetised your spice jars or colour coded your conserves. And those perfect pantries with everything in their place? They take work. There ain’t no kitchen fairies wafting around. If you want a pristine pantry like all the photos on social media, you either have to put in the hours or you employ someone to do it for you. The picture at the top of the page, of chef Jeremy Lees’ kitchen shelves is one I’ve had horded away for years because I love it so. It’s not a pantry, it has no doors, its sheer fabulousness says ‘look what I have on display.’ Some things in our kitchens we want out on view, others we keep hidden behind doors. I’m never going to have a minion to arrange my biscuits for me, thank you very much. Nor would I ever want to. I’m very happy for my pantry to be private. Because it’s not in my kitchen, it’s in my living room, and without a door, it would look odd to have bottles of olive oil and my laundry pile on view. But also because it’s not for display. It’s for me.
Enjoyed this post so much! I lived in a tiny cottage once that, despite its size, had a large kitchen and a pantry. A long-ago beau’s grandparents’ home had a storeroom and a butler’s pantry. There’s truly something about these that I adore.
Such a lovely post to read. The meringue story reminded me of family Sunday tea at an aunts house. For dessert we had tinned fruit cocktail and tinned fresh cream. All very grand in those days. We always had to ask permission to leave the table.
We also had a larder before parents bought a fridge. One of the shelves was a thick slab of marble or cold stone where butter and other preserves were placed. How I wish I had one now.