Review: The Food Axis: Cooking, Eating, and the Architecture of American Houses by Elizabeth Collins Cromley

Abstract

Book Review| March 01 2012 Review: The Food Axis: Cooking, Eating, and the Architecture of American Houses by Elizabeth Collins Cromley Elizabeth Collins Cromley. The Food Axis: Cooking, Eating, and the Architecture of American Houses. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010, viii + 269 pp., 54 b/w illus. $50, ISBN 9780813930077 Kenneth L. Ames Kenneth L. Ames 1Bard Graduate Center Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2012) 71 (1): 121–122. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2012.71.1.121 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kenneth L. Ames; Review: The Food Axis: Cooking, Eating, and the Architecture of American Houses by Elizabeth Collins Cromley. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 March 2012; 71 (1): 121–122. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2012.71.1.121 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search “I have argued that food has been the engine that drove spatial changes in American houses and their landscapes” (235). Here, in her own words, is Elizabeth Cromley's summation of her central thesis. It is, surely, at least partially correct. With this organizing device, Cromley has written a descriptive and more or less chronological account of American housing from the seventeenth century to the present. Along the way, we encounter bake ovens, smokehouses, root cellars, kitchen ranges, pantries, ice boxes, microwave ovens, and all the rest. All were important, certainly, but were they as pivotal in determining space as Cromley claims? Foodways, broadly construed, may have always played some part in shaping housing but there must be more to the difference between a tidewater Virginia plantation house of the eighteenth century and the Lower East Side tenements photographed and described by Jacob Riis around 1900. Focusing on the changing accommodations... You do not currently have access to this content.