Cabinets

A cabinet is usually a box-shaped furniture, either standing alone as a piece of furniture or built into or attached to a wall (such as a medicine cabinet) typically made of wood but now often made of synthetic materials, and used for storage of miscellaneous items.

Cabinets usually have one or more doors on the front that are mounted with door hardware and occasionally a lock; they may also contain drawers. Short cabinets often have a finished surface on top that can be used for display, or as a working surface such as the countertops found in kitchens.

A cabinet intended for clothing storage is usually called a wardrobe or an armoire (or a closet if built-in). In previous centuries, such a cabinet was also known as a linen-press. In British usage, a wardrobe occasionally was referred to as an oakley, because of the oak wood used in its construction. In India, a cabinet is often referred to as an Almari.

A pantry is a room where food, provisions or dishes are stored and served in an ancillary capacity to the kitchen. The derivation of the word is from the same source as the Old French term paneterie; that is from pain, the French form of the Latin pan for bread.

In a late medieval hall, there were separate rooms for the various service functions and food storage. A pantry was where bread was kept and food preparation associated with it done. The head of the office responsible for this room was referred to as a pantler. There were similar rooms for storage of bacon and other meats (larder), alcoholic beverages (buttery) known for the "butts" of barrels stored there, and cooking (kitchen).

In America, pantries evolved from Early American "butteries", built in a cold north corner of a Colonial home [more commonly referred to and spelled as "butt'ry"], into a variety of pantries in self-sufficient farmsteads. Butler's pantries, or china pantries, were built between the dining room and kitchen of a middle class English or American home, especially in the latter part of the 19th into the early 20th centuries.

First developed in the early 1900s by the Hoosier Manufacturing Company in New Castle, Indiana, and popular into the 1930s, the Hoosier cabinet and its many imitators soon became an essential fixture in American kitchens. Often billed as a "pantry and kitchen in one," the Hoosier brought the ease and readiness of a pantry with its many storage spaces and working counter right into the kitchen. It was sold in catalogues and through a unique sales program geared towards farm wives. The popularity of the Hoosier would herald a gradual shift towards increased cabinetry and workspaces in the American kitchen until they, like the pantry, became all but obsolete. Today the Hoosier cabinet is a much sought-after domestic icon and widely reproduced.

In the West, a modern kitchen is typically equipped with a stove, a sink with hot and cold running water, a refrigerator and kitchen cabinets. Many households have a microwave oven, a dishwasher and other electric appliances. The main function of a kitchen is cooking or preparing food but it may also be used for dining and entertaining.

The evolution of the kitchen is linked to the invention of the cooking range or stove and the development of water infrastructure capable of supplying water to private homes. Until the 18th century, food was cooked over an open fire. Technical advances in heating food in the 18th and 19th centuries, changed the architecture of the kitchen. Before the advent of modern pipes, water was brought from an outdoor source such as wells, pumps or springs.

The kitchen remained largely unaffected by architectural advances throughout the Middle Ages; open fire remained the only method of heating food. European medieval kitchens were dark, smoky, and sooty places, whence their name "smoke kitchen". In European medieval cities around the 10th to 12th centuries, the kitchen still used an open fire hearth in the middle of the room. In wealthy homes, the ground floor was often used as a stable while the kitchen was located on the floor above, like the bedroom and the hall. In castles and monasteries, the living and working areas were separated; the kitchen was sometimes moved to a separate building, and thus could not serve anymore to heat the living rooms. In some castles the kitchen was retained in the same structure, but servants were strictly separated from nobles, by constructing separate spiral stone staircases for use of servants to bring food to upper levels. An extant example of such a medieval kitchen with servants' staircase is at Muchalls Castle in Scotland. In Japanese homes, the kitchen started to become a separate room within the main building at that time.