This week, the Fall Cure is working on the kitchen. Call me crazy, but it could be my favorite week. Take the time to empty out your pantry, refrigerator, cupboards, and drawers, clean them, and put back only what is fresh, if food; and what is in good condition and useful, if tools.

For what’s left, I love little containers. You know, boxes, tins, cups, and the like. They can hold some of the pantry odds and ends that may be taking up a lot of space in nearly empty boxes, like granola bars, microwave popcorn, or hot cocoa packets.

So, if you find yourself needing to store things in containers larger than spice tins but smaller than file cabinets, consider the recipe box. I’m pretty sure you could also keep recipe cards in at least most of them. And some are so pretty, you may even want to keep them out in plain sight.

These are the ones I’m considering for my own kitchen:

but these are lovely as well:

The box above was made by a company called Globe-Wernicke, which is best known for its innovative barrister bookshelf systems – what would probably be described as “modular” today but was called “elastic” when it was invented by the Wernicke Company at the end of the 19th century. The bookshelves were composed of cabinets of different heights and with different glass doors that fit together to make beautiful custom-looking bookcases.

The Globe Files Company (their maiden name before getting hitched with the Wernicke Company in 1899, which was a good thing since they were totally MFEO) was the first to make filing cabinets with a vertical paper storage system, much like today’s hanging files. The Globe-Wernicke Company also made library card catalogs, and clearly, small card boxes as well. Antique GW bookcases are quite valuable today.

For something a little less real, there were a lot of metal recipe boxes manufactured in the dawn of mass-production by companies like J. Chein, Ballonoff, and Ohio Art. This nameless beauty could be as worthy of your vanity as your pantry:

This lovely, almost chinoiserie, metal recipe box is by J Chein:

J. Chein is best known for their toys – mechanical banks, tin toys, noisemakers, and other vintage pieces of enjoyment for children who didn’t have television or video games. They began making toys in New York in the early 1900’s and continued to do so until the late 1960’s, when some sensitive little kids went screaming to their moms when they got hurt or bored by metal toys. Cheinco had caught the metal housewares bug in the 50’s anyway, and by the mid 1970’s, they turned their attention to housewares exclusively: bread boxes, canisters, lunchboxes, wastebaskets, and, as you see above, recipe card boxes.

This one would look nice in just about any rustic or vintage kitchen:

So go forth and clean out your pantry, and when you have orphaned Trader Joe’s fig bars, you’ll know where to put them.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 11:14 pm and is filed under AT Cure, Antiques, Interiors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.