Cellars
I grew up in a hilly neighborhood and like a lot of houses in that area, the house I lived in looked like one story from the front and two stories from the back. One of my best friends had a similar house built into the hillside with internal stairs and a walk out basement finished as living space.
We didn't have that. We had a dirt basement where a small section could be walked into by an adult but most of it was crawl space.
And that's basically an old fashioned cellar. It's just underground storage similar to that basement and stays cool because the ground stays cool.
In most modern homes, it's no longer designed to be or conceived of as food storage, but an unfinished basement or rough finished basement done as STORAGE and not finished as living space is what we mean when we talk about old fashioned cellars where food was stored.
A recent video linked on this site suggests it may be illegal in a bunch of states to build a cellar for food storage, but that doesn't stop people in Kansas from leaving extra milk in the unheated garage in winter. But those changes to the law may not be just assholery.
Old cellars probably weren't that good most of the time. We romanticize old architecture because we see stuff still standing from hundreds of years ago and think it's representative. It's NOT. It's the rare exception that is still standing.
Ninety percent of everything is crap. Most of the old stuff fell down a long time ago and we are seeing the best of what they built, not what they typically built.
So actually look up the laws in your state. Without looking it up, I'm going to guess some of them say something like "You cannot build a primitive shed with dirt floor for food storage." because it attracts vermin. But you may be able to install a small shed built to modern building standards up against a hill where the backside is against dirt and the sides are partially covered.
A MODERN shed built into a hillside may be superior to what they had and may still be legal to build, especially if you are off grid or what gets routinely called "in the county." If you aren't in city limits, the building restrictions are typically lax.
Thermal mass is the key. That's what building it partly underground provides.
The German word for basement is Keller. I remember that from my childhood and double checked with Google translate. And the Internet gives me these definitions for cellar and basement:
cel·lara room below ground level in a house, typically one used for storing wine or coalbase·mentthe floor of a building which is partly or entirely below ground level
And here is an article about root cellars (which I only skimmed a little).
So a cellar is a storeroom in the basement. I grew up with the idea that the basement was storage space.
We had an unfinished dirt basement and we stored things like rakes and shovels and the lawnmower in the basement and the fact that a cellar and basement were basically the same thing was reinforced by my American father routinely using the German word Keller for the basement. Keller is closer to cellar in sound and spelling, but it translates as basement.
My impression is that cellar gets associated with things like old fashioned food storage and basement gets associated with things like tool storage. But other than that, they both mean the space below ground level in your house.
And the space below ground level stays relatively cool in summer and relatively warm in winter. In winter, it remains cool enough to store food but doesn't typically freeze.
Thermal mass is one of the things routinely used in passive solar design (no, this has nothing to do with solar power) to keep a building comfortable with minimal use of energy inputs.
Historically, daylighting (placing windows to provide light), placement of windows to create a cross breeze, thermal mass, use of deciduous trees to provide shade in summer and allow warming sunlight to hit the house in winter, use of evergreens as wind breaks and use of walls or floors designed to absorb heat during the day and radiate it into the house during the night was a typical part of home design, so much so they didn't really talk about passive solar design.
That was just what made sense before we had air conditioning and relied heavily on commercial insulation plus a powered HVAC system. This modern approach doesn't allow a building to breathe and actively promotes problems like mold growth because of it.
Vernacular design was also the norm. That's a design that locals who are not professionals come up with using locally sources materials and features that accommodate local weather, climate and lifestyle.
Again: What doesn't fall down stays. I read anarticle by an educated American guy who felt intimidated by the prospect of building a garden wall at home because he didn't have an engineering degree, then went on vacation and saw uneducated peasants in a Third World country building walls with local stone and had an epiphany.
So local culture and local architecture grows out of local people using local materials to build stuff that works adequately or well for local conditions, including local weather and climate.
Shotgun houses were typical for poor neighborhoods in the Deep South because it's cheap and small and has adequate airflow to stay not excessively sweltering. More upper class homes in the hot, humid, rainy Deep South trended towards deep wrap around porches so you could leave windows open on two sides of the house in the daily afternoon downpour you can almost set your watch by in summer.
Plantations in the old South had a summer kitchen because, before AC, cooking in the house meant it never got cool enough to sleep. We no longer have a summer kitchen a hike down the hill where the slaves work, but upper class homes do sometimes have an outdoor kitchen for summer cooking and everyone grills outside when it gets hot.
If your house is even a few decades old, it likely has some of these features and you may not recognize what they are all about. Victorian staircases are perceived of as decorative details by modern people, but one article I read made a strong case for the fact that they look an awful lot like Iranian cooling towers.
They are tall, which allows heat to rise, and they have windows you can open for establishing sir circulation. Their height isn't just a cutesy decorative detail. It provides a means to cool the house in an era before AC.
People living in a comfortable house full time frequently are oblivious to the details that make it so comfortable. If you weren't specifically educated in something like engineering, you may have no idea why one house is never really a comfortable temperature no matter how much you run the AC and another is almost always comfortable though you run the AC a lot less.
Plus age and lack of proper maintenance or lack of appropriate usage of those features may impair performance. If you don't know that your staircase is probably a cooling tower and didn't grow up in a house like that and weren't taught to open the windows in hot weather, you may not be getting as much benefit from the design as they did back in the day.
For something like six years or so, I lived in two buildings that were a hundred years old and other residents would open the hall door and window and run a fan and complain about the heat in summer because there was no AC. I never did that and I was rarely too hot.
I had very few possessions. Other residents looked like they were sleeping in an overstuffed walk-in closet.
No matter how poor Americans are today, they typically have more clothes and other stuff than people typically had a hundred years ago. So even if you move into an old building with passive solar design features, you probably aren't really living the way the original occupants lived and this is likely a source of frustration that you blame on the building rather than on your mountain of possessions and modern lifestyle being a poor fit for the intended use.