Pantry

Pantry

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 , 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. Great estates, such as Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina or Stan Hywet Hall in Akron, Ohio had large warrens of pantries and other domestic "offices", echoing their British 'Great House' counterparts.

A butler's pantry or serving pantry is a utility room in a large house. It is usually located adjacent to the kitchen or to the wine cellar and usually contains counters (benches in British English) or tables and sinks and may or may not be used for storing food.

Common uses for the butler's pantry are storage, cleaning and counting of silver The wine log and merchant's account books may be kept in the butler's pantry. The room is used by the butler and other domestic staff; it is often called a butler's pantry even in households where there is no butler.

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.

Traditionally kitchens in Asia have been more open format than those of the West. The function of the pantry was generally served by wooden cabinetry. In Japan a kitchen cabinet is called a "Mizuya Tansu". A substantial tradition around wood working and cabinetry in general developed in Japan, especially throughout the Tokugawa era. A huge number of designs for Tansu (chests or cabinets) were made, each tailored towards one specific purpose or another.

The idea is very similar to that of the Hoosier Cabinet above, with a wide variety of functions being served by specific design innovations. See the Tansu page for a more complete listing of different designs and more extensive information.

The pantry is making a comeback in American and English homes as part of a resurgence of nesting and homekeeping since the late 1990s. It is one of the most requested features in American homes today, despite larger kitchen sizes than ever before. There is a charm and nostalgia to the pantry, as well as a practical, utilitarian purpose.

Chapters of earlier books, particularly written during the era of domestic science and home economics in the latter half of the 19th century, featured how to furnish, keep and clean a pantry. Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe in their seminal The American Woman's Home, written in 1869, advocated the elimination of the pantry by having pantry shelving and cabinetry come into the kitchen. This idea did not take hold in American households until a century later, by which time the pantry had become a floor-to-ceiling cabinet in the post-War kitchen. During the Victorian period and until the Second World War when housing changed considerably, pantries were commonplace in virtually all American homes. This was because kitchens were small and strictly utilitarian and not the domestic, often well-appointed, center of the home that we enjoy today (or that our Colonial predecessors had). Thus, pantries were important workspaces with their built-in shelving, cupboards and countertops.

In the last chapter of These Happy Golden Years, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote a descriptive account of the pantry that Almanzo Wilder built for her in their first home together in DeSmet, South Dakota. It details a working farmhouse pantry in great detail which she sees for the first time after her marriage to Wilder and subsequent journey to their new home.

Pantry raids were often common themes in children's literature and early 20th century advertising. Perhaps the most famous pantry incident in literature was when Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer had to do penance for his getting into his Aunt Polly's jam in her pantry: as punishment, he had to white-wash her fence.

This design book is an unprecedented domestic history of the emergence of the pantry in American homes over the past 300 years.

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Pantry Pride

Pantry Pride, also known by its predecessor name Food Fair was a large supermarket chain in the United States. It was founded by Samuel N. Friedland, who opened the first store (as Reading Giant Quality Price Cutter) in Reading, Pennsylvania in the late 1920s. As of 1957, Food Fair had 275 stores, and at its peak, the chain had more than 500 stores. Friedlan's family retained control of the firm through 1978, when the chain entered bankruptcy.

Samuel Friedland opened his first "Reading Giant Quality Price Cutter" supermarket in the 1920s. The success of the first store led to the opening of more stores, and by the late 1940s, and the introduction of a new name: Food Fair.

In 1958, Food Fair purchased Setzer's Supermarkets, a 40-store Jacksonville, Florida chain. At about the same time as the Setzer purchase, the company bought J.M. Fields Department Stores, a chain of discount department stores in New England.

The latter chain grew substantially, expanding the stores to areas already served by Food Fair, particularly Florida. By the 1960s, most J.M. Fields stores featured a J.M. Fields or Food Fair/Pantry Pride grocery store.

During the 1960s, Food Fair enjoyed great success, but the most significant purchase for the company was that of a small Philadelphia chain called Best Markets. Best's private label brand was called Pantry Pride. When the company launched a chain of no-frills discount grocery stores in mid-decade, they used the name "Pantry Pride". The stores that were under the "Pantry Pride" logo eventually became so popular, they eclipsed the "Food Fair" brand as the company's dominant trademark banner. By 1970, Food Fair had converted most of its stores to the Pantry Pride banner, and the company began to rise to new heights.

In the late 1960s, the company, led by its Pantry Pride stores, continued to grow. The company also opened additional J.M. Fields stores and entered new businesses, launching drug stores, gasoline stations and shoe stores. It also boosted its core business by entering the California and Nevada markets through the purchase of the Fox Markets chain. The western expansion proved exhausting for the predominantly East Coast retailer, and it eventually divested itself of the 50 stores by 1972. In 1976 it acquired Hill's Supermarkets of New York. Later that year it purchased the remaining 17 stores from the Philadelphia-based Penn Fruit Company.

In 1978, Food Fair fell victim to financial problems. It entered bankruptcy that year and a new management team, led by supermarket veteran Grant Gentry, began streamlining the 456-store $2.7 billion dollar company. By the end of 1978 the company took the first steps in the long journey out of bankruptcy by closing all of the JM Fields stores. Those stores were quickly purchased by Caldor, Jefferson Ward and Kmart. In early 1979, the company left its home market of Philadelphia, where the firm was headquartered, closing its more than 50 stores in the area, even though it was the second largest chain in greater Philadelphia in terms of market share. Between 1979 and 1981, more than 200 stores were closed, along with several warehouses. Food-a-Rama bought 14 of its 48 Baltimore-area stores in 1981 from the company. By this time, the company had exited bankruptcy a much smaller company, now based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and taking the name Pantry Pride Stores, Inc. Also that year the company had entered into talks to be purchased by Pathmark Stores. Discussions were abandoned when Pantry Pride's stockholders filed a complaint. Pantry Pride outsourced its wholesale operations to Supervalu when it sold its Miami and Jacksonville distribution centers. The company then began selling huge chunks of its assets when it sold two-thirds of its remaining stores, including the last of its Richmond, Virginia stores to A&P,leaving only about 40 stores in southern Florida under the company fold.

In 1984, in separate transactions, it acquired Devon Stores, a home improvement store and the 400-store Adams Drug Company, which operated in the northeastern United States. The owner of Devon Stores, who obtained about 10.4% of the merged company, then sought an ouster of the Pantry Pride Board of Directors. In 1985, using junk bonds, 38% of Pantry Pride (establishing effective control) was acquired by investor Ronald Perelman, who liquidated its assets, kept its losses on the books to offset profits from MacAndrews and Forbes, which he had previously acquired, and used Pantry Pride as a vehicle to acquire other companies, in particular Revlon. By 1986, the name of Pantry Pride was changed to Revlon Group.

In 1985, the last stores in southern Florida were sold to Red Apple Group, a New York supermarket chain owned by John Catsimadidis. By 1990, the chain was being supplied by the Fleming Companies. The last store opened in 1991 in Sunny Isles, Florida. By this time, nearly all of the stores were renamed Wooley's, after acquiring the latter named chain of seven stores in the early 1990s. In 1993, Fleming bought the Wooley's chain after a dispute with Catsimadidis. The remaining stores were either closed or sold by the turn of the century.

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Plaid Pantry

Plaid Pantry is a chain of privately-owned convenience stores based in Beaverton, Oregon, USA. Of one hundred stores, three are in the Seattle, Washington area, eight are near Salem, and the balance are in the Portland metropolitan area.

Plaid Pantries, Inc. traces its founding to 1960 by John Piacentini. The name refers to the plaid decoration originally on both the store buildings and the roadside pole signs.

Plaid Pantry can date its origins to Handy Pantry, a California company which built multiple stores in the Portland area, with the financial backing of Alpenrose Dairy. Stores built from scratch by Handy Pantry/Alpenrose were under the Handy Pantry name; stores made by converting an existing structure were referred to as Speedy Mart. In 1963, the Handy Pantry/Speedy Mart chain went into bankruptcy. Alpenrose Dairy, as the major creditor, gained control of all the stores.

In 1960, John Piacentini decided to go into business for himself and opened his first store in east Portland, under the name John's One-Stop. He opened a few more stores and eventually was offered the opportunity to purchase the Handy Pantry/Speedy Mart chain with financial backing by Alpenrose Dairy. Piacentini changed the name of all the stores to Plaid Pantry, and continue to stock Alpenrose Dairy products.

Nearly 20 years later, when Piacentini tentatively sold the company to Convenient Food Mart (CFM) in March 1987, he had built it into a chain of 161 stores in the Portland and Seattle areas. That sale fell through about two months later, after CFM conducted its due diligence audit. A subsequent leveraged buyout a year later led to bankruptcy and reorganization by 1990. Piacentini died later in 1988, and several lawsuits followed.

A series of transactions made public in 1998 put half of the chain under the ownership of a holding company majority-owned by Houlihan Lokey Howard & Zukin (HLHZ), with minority ownership stakes held by senior Plaid Pantry management including CEO Chris Girard.

The details of the 1998 deal and several subsequent transactions became the subject of a lawsuit in 2007 before the United States District Court for the District of Oregon between HLHZ and Girard.

In 1969 as the Oregon Bottle Bill was contemplated as a way to reduce litter, large retailers opposed the idea and said that no one would return bottles and cans for a two-cent deposit. Piacentini disagreed, and as proof offered a half cent for each can and bottle returned to a Plaid Pantry store. He collected more than a million cans and bottles and brought them to the steps of the state capitol, a demonstration that some say helped enact the bottle bill.

Plaid Pantry, reportedly under pressure from the Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC), has a policy against selling alcohol to "homeless street drinkers" According to Plaid Pantry's president Chris Girard, the policy has been in place since 1997.

In the late 1990s, Plaid Pantry failed 30-40% of spot checks conducted by the OLCC to determine if the company was selling alcohol or tobacco to minors; by March 2000, they became the first retailer recognized by the OLCC as a "responsible vendor", a milestone reached changes to the company's training and its credit card validation system, which were updated to simplify a clerk's ability to ascertain whether a customer was of legal age.

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Ants in the Pantry

Ants in the Pantry is the 12th short subject starring American slapstick comedy team the Three Stooges. The trio made a total of 190 shorts for Columbia Pictures between 1934 and 1959.

The Stooges are pest exterminators who are forced to drum up business by planting mice, moths, and ants in an unsuspecting house. They select a fancy mansion where a high society dinner party is being held. After successfully infesting the house with vermin, the trio are predictably hired to clean up their own mess, without interrupting the party, dressed as guests.

One highlight is the piano recital of Johann Strauss II's "Blue Danube Waltz." A chorus of cats in the piano responds, bewildering both the audience and the pianist. The chaos is compounded when a mouse enters the upright piano, agitating the cats. The Stooges are forced to get the offending pest and the cat out of the piano, destroying it in the process. Eventually, the guests take to the boys and find their antics absolutely hilarious.

The short ends with the Stooges on a fox hunt. Curly, who has developed a cold, mistakes a skunk for a fox, the stench of which knocks out the other two Stooges and a horse.

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