What is a summer kitchen?

Separate kitchens go back to the eighteenth century, but the term summer kitchen came into common use only around the middle of the nineteenth century. Most surviving examples in Pennsylvania date from about 1850 to 1930. In Pennsylvania, a summer kitchen was usually a small building of one or two stories next to the house, about 150 to 250 square feet, with a chimney or stovepipe.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the cookstove heated the farmhouse kitchen, while the harvest had to be canned, pickled and preserved. The summer kitchen took this hot, heavy work out of the house. In Ohio, many families of the 1880s built separate kitchens to keep the heat of the wood-burning cookstove out of the house during hot, muggy summers.

In 1724, a writer noted that planters in Virginia kept the kitchen apart from the house because of cooking smells in hot weather. Colonial Williamsburg names heat as the main reason and suggests that the detached kitchen may have had less to do with fire than with slavery. At White Haven in Missouri, now a National Historic Site, cooking moved to a stone summer kitchen behind the house in the hot months; before the Civil War, enslaved laborers cooked and washed there.

At Kingsley Plantation in northeast Florida, cooking was done in a separate kitchen house because of heat, noise, smells and the danger of fire, and enslaved people, mostly women, cooked there over hot fires. Florida pioneer houses show kitchens as separate buildings, joined to the house by a walkway or an open breezeway, to keep the heat of the cookstove out and protect the house from fire. In Key West, a detached cookhouse from about 1838 still stands behind a historic house museum on Duval Street; such kitchens kept fire, heat and smoke away from the home.

The summer kitchen most likely faded only after the Depression: with electricity and natural gas, the old wood or coal stove could go, and the summer kitchen with it.