Of Kettles and Cranes.

This article examines colonial revival kitchen exhibits of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the colonial kitchen motif in literature and art that informed them. Drawing from the multivolume Hostess Diary of Henry Ford's Wayside Inn, the article argues that colonial kitchen exhibits were more than mere museum spaces; they also functioned as theatrical sets that supported a variety of cultural plots: the family plot, ancestral plot, Americanization plot, local history plot, writing plot, and fiction plot. Each of these plots reflected curators' particular social and political agendas, expressed broader Victorian and Progressive Era values, and fed a more fundamental plot about what it means to be American. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]