Still room

Stillrooms were used to make products as varied as candles, furniture polish, and soap; distillery was only one of the tasks carried out there.

As practical skills fell out of fashion for high-born women, the still room became the province of poor dependent relations.

[3] Other products included pickled vegetables and fruit, laundry recipes, remedies, and perfumes,[4] and home-brewed beer or wine was often made.

Herbs and flowers from the kitchen garden and surrounding countryside were preserved for flavoring food and processed tinctures, distillates, and syrups.

[5][better source needed] Other products included ointments, soaps, furniture polishes, and a wide variety of medicines.

Stillroom recipes were more commonly written down (along with other information, like general food recipes, family medical histories, unit conversion tables, and encyclopedic lists, often all in the same book), by women and men of the houhold, including nobility and some literate servants, and bequeathed.

Central in the still room would be a gas or electric water boiler and separate coffee brewers.

A stillroom in a household manual of 1742, with hanging herbs, mortars and pestles , alembics , sealed jars, many drawers, a small library, a stove near the door, and a row of bee skeps outside.
A still, A.D. 766, illustrating Jabir Ibn Hayyan .
A woman at work in a stillroom, from The Accomplished Ladies' Rich Closet of Rarities , or, the Ingenious Gentlewoman and Servant-maids Delightful Companion , 1691.
A still room of 1670, from The Queen-Like Closet . Filling and stoppering bottles of distillate.
Still room at Tatton Hall , England, 1770s-1810. It contains a cake, a jelly, the china for afternoon tea, and beverage-making apparatus.
Canning jars full of preserved vegetables, fruits, and pulses. Canning in glass was invented in 1809, and was often, like earlier food-preservation work, done in the stillroom. Tin cans and steel cans were invented soon after, and became commercially significant mid-century. World War I drastically boosted steel can production and cut costs.
"The Still Room", by Averil Burleigh , 1928