Mmmmmm....Bacon!

Dave Richards

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Here's a "bacon settle" from England built around 1780. Known as Bacon Settles, because the copious hanging space behind the seat was used to hang and store cured, salted and smoked meats. As the settles were invariably situated beside a fireplace, the cupboards were dry and not too humid and therefore provided perfect storage conditions for such preserved foodstuffs and such important household products such as wax for candles.

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Very nice. Would love to have one of those.

I have several questions related to the first piece and even second.

How deep do you think that middle cupboard is?

What would it hold or can be used for at the front door/in front hall. Seems very narrow for coats unless they just get hung on a hook i suppose. Our closets for coats have all had coat hangers to date. Of course this is a new concept to me :) did not have to use a coat where i came from and even if i did it never came off when visiting given no central heat. :)

Another thing would there be any support behind that huge wide panel on the first unit?

Also how would that unit be positioned i cannot visualize it in either a period house or modern house in such a way as to access rear????

Would love a dimensioned plan of these Dave ;)

Thanks for brining them to our attention. Just thinking cool thing with sketchup would be being able to change wood and looks before building. Ie all maple or walnut or all nice burl veneer panels ooooohhhh just imagine.

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Rob, these cabinets weren't for hanging coats. They were placed next to the fireplace and you hung your cured bacon and other cured meats in it. This would keep the bacon from getting quite so dusty and it would be a fairly dry place so good for that sort of thing.

I could figure out the dimensions and construction but I have several projects ahead including a presentation for 3D Basecamp in a few weeks.
 
Neat pieces Dave you really captured the look and feel of them nice.

I am also somewhat curious about how you'd place the first one inside a house.. I guess it could be placed at a 90 to the fireplace a bit away from the wall.. I don't think you'd want to directly face the fireplace because that would block the heat/light from getting to the rest of the room.

Its a somewhat interesting design because it seems like a lot of older cabinet designs like that were freestanding but really designed to be against a wall like the second one. Having it more in the open does make sense for the use case though because you'd be able to avoid the moisture/draft/temperature loss that was common on a lot of old construction (at least most of what I've lived in :D).

The second rendition would make a nice modern interpretation as a hall closet since most folks don't have a fireplace to hang their bacon next to anymore ;) Not to mention I suspect that a lot of the bacon and other cured meats from that era were likely a bit riper than the modern palate might find appealing. You could retain the look/feel of the narrow cabinet and have swing out coat hangers (sorry Dave I know we're noodling adrift on your designs again - think of it this way you're inspiring us to at least think about these designs anyway :D).

Rob: when my grandma from northern canada went to Hawaii quite a few years ago she complained that none of the restaurants had a place to hang your coat. The concept that you wouldn't need to carry your coat everywhere in case the temperature dropped below freezing at any day of the year was so foreign to her that she couldn't envision a place where people just plain didn't need coats :D
 
Thanks, Ryan.

As to capturing the look and feel, that was a real challenge. All I did was post the photos of them from the site where I found them. :D These are my designs or anything. I haven't started a drawing of the thing, yet.

Yes, that first piece would have been placed in front of the fire place and to one side, square on. Something like this:
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It would have been common to have a settle on the opposite side, too.
 
Very interesting pieces, Dave. Seems they might also work as a somewhat stealthy gun cabinet.

It would be great to have one of those full of cured bacon, too. :D

At one of the pubs where our band plays, the bartender keeps a pint glass behind the bar filled with cooked strips of bacon, for use as garnishes with Bloody Marys. Every time we play there I try to talk him into selling me a pint of bacon. :)
 
Thanks Dave - that's about how I envisioned them being placed. Hehe - I can't even tell if you've drawn it or its just a picture half the time anymore - I guess that's something :D

At one of the pubs where our band plays, the bartender keeps a pint glass behind the bar filled with cooked strips of bacon, for use as garnishes with Bloody Marys. Every time we play there I try to talk him into selling me a pint of bacon. :)

A co-worker is on one of the no-starch diet theories. They were at a steak house and he asked the waiter for a plate of bacon as an appetizer... the waiter wasn't so sure but the argument was "you have bacon there is a price per piece for adding it to blah blah, I want bacon sell me the bacon by the piece". The manager was consulted, agreed that they should humor the crazy guy who was buying fancy scotch and expensive steaks with a plate of bacon.. and everyone was happy.
 
Yeah now i get it, and i can see it in one of the old kinda small places where the fireplace was basically the center of the room and the main hang out place. When you said settle Dave it all klicked. I watched a show on TV about an antiques dealer in UK and he purchases the strangest of items and recently he purchased a couple of old settles. They looked cool. There are times when i think i could live with some of that era style of layout in a home. Watching a fireplace would be an upgrade from modern era TV now i know why our cable company literally has a fireplace channel where there is nothing else on except a burning fire in the fireplace. :rofl:
 
Sharon, I'm with you.

Rob, I'm with you. A fireplace is a lot more interesting than most TV. I've found some videos on youtube that were done by the BBC which I've been finding interesting. They are the various "Farm" videos here. The first series to watch is Tales From the Green Valley.
 
The first series to watch is Tales From the Green Valley.

Saw those a while back and can affirmatively agree that those were interesting and fun to watch. I'll have to check out some of the other ones the Edwardian series looks interesting (make sure you click the "Load More" at the bottom a few times - there is a lot more than first meets the eye there).
 
Those are fantastic series, the wartime farm is really interesting. I even bought the book and had it sent to my 95 year old mother to read about what was going on at the farms while she worked in a Spitfire factory.

TVO had the series on their website thats how i got to see them. There are books too Ryan :)
Great bunch of people that do the re enactment.

Dave i apologize somehow i missed your words on your first post, if i had read them it would have made sense from the beginning. Now i get the narrowness. I guess back in those days a hook for onee coat would have done fine. :)
Would be nice to have the space for apiece like this. I personally like sitting on a solid wooden seat. But armrests need a place to hold some form of drink even a cup of coffee.

I still wonder about how that panel which is by my guess very wide, is supported. I bet there is a shelf of some sort across the inside at a strategic point.

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TVO had the series on their website thats how i got to see them. There are books too Ryan :)

Yikes. More books!! Where shall we put them all! My pending booklist just got several books longer.

I still wonder about how that panel which is by my guess very wide, is supported. I bet there is a shelf of some sort across the inside at a strategic point.

Been thinking about that and I'm about 50/50 on it being "needed". I suspect that the assembly is panel on frame and don't actually think it would be needed to make it work since (assuming that's true) the panels are just hung from the frame more or less. However the unit is much taller than it would need to be to hang one ham/bacon/etc.. so from that perspective I'd bet a small doughnut that there is some sort of frame/rack in the middle (not sure if one or two) to hang stuff from and since they need to be there anyway it seems like it'd be silly to not make it part of the support assembly. So from that reasoning - I'm going to claim you could build it without but it would be likely that they were built with.
 
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