Storeroom Stories: Cooking in the Heyward-Washington House kitchen

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The Heyward-Washington kitchen features a large cooking fireplace and bake oven popular in the eighteenth century. Excavations in the cellar and around the building produced the remains of foods and the vessels used to prepare foods. Glazed earthenware pots and pans joined the more durable cast iron griddles, pans, and utensils as standard colonial cooking implements. Earthenwares produced in the Philadelphia region joined those made in England to furnish the Charleston kitchen. The recovered vessels include butter pots, milk pans, pastry pans, and pipkins Colono wares, likely made by enslaved Africans, were also used in planters’ and merchants’ kitchens.

Archaeologists found the kitchen cellar filled with animal bone, the remains of cooking and meals at the Heyward-Washington house. Analysis suggests that cows, pigs, sheep, and goats were maintained and butchered on the property. Wild game, including deer, turtles, ducks, birds of all types, fish and seafood augmented a diet dependent on beef.