In her book In the Potter’s Kitchen: Handmade Pots for Home-Cooked Recipes, Colorado potter Sumi von Dassow has taken the unusual step of including recipes for the various types of pots she discusses. Along with directions for making a sauerkraut crock, she tells us that three cabbages, shredded and weighted in brine, will fill a ten-inch crock. In the section on ovenware, she offers directions for making covered casseroles and various baking dishes: round, oval and squared, plus recipes for spinach lasagna, onion quiche, and pumpkin pie. Von Dassow seems especially enthusiastic about baked Brie, showing photos of three quite different bakers and giving us four recipes (oh yum! Baked Brie with Caramelized Onions and Herbs!).
Throughout the book, she exhorts potters to do the same: include recipes with the pots you make. Writing of butter and cheese dishes she suggests, “You might want to include a recipe for herb butter or cheese balls with these items.” Later, discussing olive trays, she says, “if you have a favorite canapé recipe, you could include that as well.”
The book is written for two audiences: potters who make pots, and cooks who purchase and use pots. Following chapters on the history of cooking and pottery, and extensive advice for non-potters using pottery, the book is organized by use in the kitchen: ovenware, stovetop ware, ware for the microwave, serving dishes and storage jars. There are sequential how-to photos for specific pieces such as apple bakers, juicers, and tagines and lots of photos of finished pots. Thirty-eight potters, including von Dasso contributed pots and recipes. I was pleased to see my friend Robbie Lobell’s flameware casseroles and a spread showing how she makes her rectangular baking dishes. I have one of her early rectangular flameware pots that I love to use to roast chopped carrots and onions drizzled with olive oil and topped with sprigs of rosemary.
Von Dassow’s advice for potters is extensive, practical and often opinionated. Of course she is opinionated – she has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about kitchenware. What’s the point of writing a book like this unless you have opinions? “It’s important,” she writes, “to keep the intended function in mind when making a baking dish…you can make a dish and sell it and leave it up to the customer to figure out what to do with it, but if you know what your dish is for, it will be easier to sell.” She tells us that putting a foot ring on a baking dish is ok, but not really what works best, or what cooks prefer. Oh dear! I put foot rings on my baking dishes and casseroles with the notion that they will be going directly to the table while still hot from the oven and that, when warm, foot rings are kinder to wood tables than flat bottoms. Perhaps I need to rethink?
And I never thought to include a recipe with each pot, though I have on occasion included one in my newsletter. I make a lot of round, straight-sided baking dishes that can double as serving dishes or bowls. They are perfect, I think, for bread pudding, cheesy potatoes au gratin, or a baked egg dish with broccoli and mozzarella and chunks of rustic bread, a recipe I cribbed years ago from a chef friend. That’s how I imagine my baking dishes being used when they leave my studio, but I have not actually sent them off with recipes attached. Now I think I will.
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Fannie Farmer’s Bread Pudding with Alterations
Butter the baking dish. Fill it with:
2 cups dry breadcrumbs. I like to use at least half rye bread with caraway seeds.
4 tablespoons butter
2 cups hot milk (this makes a firm pudding)
Let cool.
When room temperature stir in:
½ cup sugar
2 eggs beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
Pinch of salt
½ cup raisins, or more if you like
Place in the middle of the oven and turn on to 325F
Bake for one hour or until firm. Serve slightly warm or chilled.