Kitchen Symphony

I wrote briefly a while back on words that end in "-ery", and as I was washing the dishes today, I began thinking of the word "cutlery". Is there such a thing as a cutler that gave its name to those implements, just as there is such a thing as a baker that gave birth to the word "bakery"? I figured there must be, and there is: a cutler is a knife-maker. Perfectly logical.

(By the way: if you Google "cultery", you will get almost ten thousand hits. Now, a number of people, I am sure, have made a simple transposition error: it happens all the time. But I wonder just how many people honestly think it is spelled, and therefore pronounced, "cultery".)

Naturally, once I had begun considering "cutlery", another "-ery" word popped into my head, a nearly disused one, as far as I know: "buttery". No, not the adjective; that will be with us as long as we have popcorn. I mean the noun. Yes, "buttery" is also a noun: it means "a pantry in which wines and spirits are stored"--that is to say, a "bottle-ery". Its source is (as is true of virtually all our "-ery" words) French, whence the word "bottle"--from "bouteille"-- and the combining form "-ery" ("-erie" in French) come. But not, as it happens, "bakery"; that one's German (currently "Bäckerei", and you can clearly see the influence).

It may interest you to know that both the adjective and the noun "buttery" are the same age: their citations in the OED are only nine years apart, the noun ("boteri", still showing a strong French influence) from 1389 and the adjective ("buttry") from 1398.