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- All About Antiques
- Cupboards for all tastes
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- Cupboards for all tastes
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- By Peter Green
- Cupboard originally simply
a cup board, a shelf or a stand for plates and cups. This was
a common piece of furniture in Tudor and Elizabethan times. Farmers
in the 16th century decorated their cupboards with plates and
the term cupboard was used for an open structure of this type.
Early cupboards, which had a door, were known as aumbries or
almeries. Furniture inventories listed cupboards with aumbries
(this term came to mean food stand). The almery was the ancestor
of many cupboards where the almoner of a great house kept food
for distribution to the poor.
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- Small hanging cupboards found
in churches, which also contained bread for the poor, were called
dole cupboards.
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- A term applied to late medieval
cabinets or cupboards on which food was placed ready to be tasted
before being served was a credence cupboard.
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- Food cupboards were also known
as hutches and some had various forms of ventilation.
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- The earliest were made by carpenters
and were of the same plank construction as the early chests and
had doors pierced with Gothic tracery, with decorative patterns
with branching and crossing lines, as in the upper part of many
church windows.
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- In Canada, food safes or pre-safes
often had metal sheets with punctured holes in their doors. The
obvious purpose of the holes was to ventilate the inside.
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- A court cupboard in the middle
of the 16th century was a structure of several shelves (usually
three) for the display of plates, while the term buffet was more
associated with food. Both of these cupboards varied over the
years in design but essentially remained the same for the purpose
intended.
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- A press was a completely enclosed
cupboard with fitted door or doors and sometimes referred to
as a close press. Early very large presses were also
called armoires, after the French term.
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- One form of press used in the
hall or dining room had large doors on the lower shelf, while
the upper part was slightly recessed.
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- The later, larger press had
a flush front, usually broken up by paneling, with one central
door or two doors hung at the sides. This was for storage of
linen and eventually became what we now call a wardrobe or armoire.
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- In America, and to some extent
in Canada, the press was known as a Dutch a solid type
of cupboard similar to the flush-fronted English press. Also
the German and Swiss settlers in Pennsylvania had a massive cupboard
called a shrank, which was often painted with colorful designs
of fruit and flowers.
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- The last two cupboards I will
mention are the small hanging cupboard with doors, and of course,
the corner cupboard. The corner cupboard came in various designs,
some flat-fronted and some bowfronted, usually with doors at
the top and bottom and often with drawers in the middle area.
Both of these cupboards were very popular in the country areas
of the US and Canada.
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- Peter Green, founder of Asheford
Institute of Antiques, an antique and appraisal home-study-school,
and owner of South Meadow Farm Antiques in Muskoka, ON, is a
syndicated antique columnist.
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- Other columns: Issue
76 - Issue 75
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