Toronto - 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.

Small hanging cupboards found in churches, which also contained bread for the poor, were called dole cupboards.

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.

Food cupboards were also known as hutches and some had various forms of ventilation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The last two cupboards I will mention are the small hanging cupboard with doors of course, the corner cupboard. The corner cupboard came in various designs, some flat-fronted and some bow-fronted, 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.