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A Book About Butter for Potters

At a recent show, a tall middle-aged man came into my booth and, picking up one of my dome covered Brie bakers asked, “Is this a Canadian butter dish?” I had no idea what he meant by a Canadian butter dish, but assured him that he could use it however he wished. He explained that in Canada, butter comes in round discs, not sticks as in the U.S.

In Butter: A Rich History by Elaine Khosrova, Khosrova tells us that during the Middle Ages and later, butter was often shaped into long tubes by the dairy maids who were responsible for butter making. Purchasers would bring a tube home, and slice it into rounds as needed. So, my Brie maker would have made a perfect butter dish not only for Canadians but also for fifteenth century peasants. The book is full of similar fascinating tidbits and facts. Though it is not specifically for potters – I exaggerated a bit in the title – if you are a potter interested in food and food history and the relationship of particular foods to pottery, it will be a fun read for you.

Khosrova, a former pastry chef at the Culinary Institute of America, takes us on a world tour as well as a historical tour. The first butter, she tells us, was made from the milk of sheep, yak and goats. To make butter, she explains, the milk, or if it has been separated, cream, is agitated until it thickens and clumps. She writes, “The Sumerians of 2500 B.C.E. used special terra cotta jugs for holding the milk and a plunger-type tool (called the dash or dasher in English) for churning.”

Early churns were made of animal skins.  Khosroba traveled to Bhutan and describes the making of Yak butter in similar leather bags. But, as with the Sumerians, pottery has always had a place in butter making. Pottery jugs and pancheons were also important. Pancheons, which are one of the most beautiful pottery shapes that I can think of, were large, wide mouthed pans, with flaring straight sides, used for settling the milk so that the cream could be skimmed off the top. Churns were commonly made of wood, but glazed stoneware churns kept the cream cooler than other materials, which helped with the process, and was cleaner.

Curiously, Khosrova does not discuss butter dishes, French, which preserve the butter’s freshness with a water seal, or the various lidded ceramic dishes popular today. She does, however, conclude her book with a wonderful collection of recipes for pastries and sauces, each of which cries out for a pretty handmade serving dish. Or so it seems to me.

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Pots with Recipes

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.

Flameware by Cook on Clay

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.

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Soup Tureens and Other Important Matters

On Sunday during the Potters Market at the Coventry Regional Farmers Market, a fellow came into my booth and, upon seeing my soup bowls, told me a story about his cat and the tablecloth that she pulled off his table during a soup party he was hosting. His soup bowls, each with covers, smashed as they landed on the floor, but his tureens (yes, plural) remained intact.

That got me thinking not only about the possibility of hosting a soup party, but also about soup tureens. In Elements of the Table Lynn Rosen tells us,  “The soup tureen holds about three quarts and is one of the largest serving pieces on the table. Its many beautiful shapes and designs are a very dramatic and lovely complement to your table décor.” She speculates that the tureen may have had its origins in the large communal bowls of the Middle Ages. The showy, lidded tureen as we know it today, was perfected by French potters in the seventeenth century.

There are, Rosen assures us, rules for soup tureens. For instance, if when you set the table, you put soup bowls out, then you are to serve the soup at the table from a tureen. You must never bring a pot from the stove and pour soup into the bowls. Horrors. If however, you do not set the table with soup bowls, then you must fill the bowls from the soup pot while standing at the stove, and serve your guests with the filled bowls at the table. In this case, you are not to use a tureen at all.

Not many home cooks bother with soup tureens today (one more dish to wash?), but they are appealing to make. Tureens give us the opportunity to throw larger than we throw other tableware. We can make the domed lids higher than we might for a casserole, and we can have interesting knobs. Most potters, and I count myself in this group; make matching ladles, though in reality, a ceramic ladle is a ridiculous idea. We should I suppose, make two, so that when the first breaks, our customer has another.

Rosen has a lot to day about soup bowls too. There are, she tells us, four kinds: rimmed, coupe, cream, and bouillon. The rimmed, “more accurately called a rim soup plate,” is about 9.5 inches in diameter, and, surprise, has a wide flat rim. If you have only one style soup bowl in your cupboards, she recommends this one. She even gives permission to use it for pasta. The coupe is rimless and used for informal settings. It can double as a cereal bowl. The cream soup bowl has two handles and a saucer but holds less than the other two bowls, because cream soup is “so rich.” Personally, I am more inclined to eat a lot of cream of broccoli soup and less of a clear broth and escarole soup, but no matter. The bouillon is actually a cup with two handles. Diners are encouraged to finish their soup by drinking from the handled bowls, but never from the others.

Rosen, who writes with great authority (no self-doubt here), has much to say about other table items, such as various types of plates. She adores the salad plate (7 ½ to 8 ½ inches) and passes on a recommendation from the French manufacturer Bernardaud that one should have twice as many salad plates as dinner plates.  Now that’s a happy thought for a potter. She also tells us that during the Victorian era, salad plates were sometimes crescent-shaped “to fit neatly with the dinner plate.” Interesting.

Elements of the Table: A Simple Guide for Hosts and Guests has only one chapter on “China” but if you make dinner sets, it is a fascinating read.

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The Plates and Forks of Alexander Calder

If you are a functional potter, you have pots in your kitchen. You probably collect the works of potters you admire, but you also likely have made things for yourself or tested works in your own home. Or perhaps you keep the slightly imperfect mugs and jars that emerge from your kiln and sell the rest. Don’t we all serve our cats their dinners on seconds? And some of us are tempted to make a few architectural things, a table or countertop, a bathroom sink, even a fireplace.

I suspect the same is true for craftspeople working in other mediums. The woodworker builds her own cabinets or doors, the weaver makes his own bed coverings, the blacksmith makes a garden gate. But meeting a fine artist, especially a sculptor or painter doing the same is unexpected.

So I was surprised to discover (while reading Calder at Home: The Joyous Environment of Alexander Calder by Pedro E. Guerrero) that the inventor of the mobile made many utensils for his own kitchen which his wife Louisa, who did the cooking, used. He also made candle sconces from corrugated sheet metal and the bottoms of beer cans, lamps from gelatin molds, and various other household items. If he saw a need, he snipped and bent and fabricated whatever metal he had at hand to create the solution. He was also fond of making toys from empty coffee cans, cigar boxes and wire for the young people in his life.

The Calders had an old farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut, which they painted black, and an old stone and brick house in France, followed by a house built to their specifications in France. In each home, Calder’s mobiles hung from the ceilings, sometimes crashing into each other, and his paintings hung on the walls. Louisa hooked numerous brightly colored rugs using her husband’s designs, which he enlarged and transferred to the rug backings for her. She spread her rugs out on their floors, close together, and gave what they couldn’t use away to friends and family.

From 1969 to 1972, Calder designed porcelain plates for Sévres, “using the same technique as his gouaches.” However, Guerrero tells us that there is no evidence that the Calders used these factory made wares on their own table.

What’s interesting about Calder at Home is it gives us a glimpse into an integrated life. Calder’s art filled his homes and the outbuildings and land that surrounded them. But as focussed as he was on creating his soaring stabiles and mobiles and gouaches, he also devoted himself to making things for the family’s domestic life. I might not want to eat from his Sévres plates either, but who wouldn’t want to try one of his forks? They invite picking up and holding in your hand. They are the antithesis of precious, thus also inviting use. In his home life, it seems, the great artist was also an excellent designer.

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The Plates and Forks of Alexander Calder

If you are a functional potter, you have pots in your kitchen. You probably collect the works of potters you admire, but you also likely have made things for yourself or tested works in your own home. Or perhaps you keep the slightly imperfect mugs and jars that emerge from your kiln and sell the rest. Don’t we all serve our cats their dinners on seconds? And some of us are tempted to make a few architectural things, a table or countertop, a bathroom sink, even a fireplace.

I suspect the same is true for craftspeople working in other mediums. The woodworker builds her own cabinets or doors, the weaver makes his own bed coverings, the blacksmith makes a garden gate. But meeting a fine artist, especially a sculptor or painter doing the same is unexpected.

So I was surprised to discover (while reading Calder at Home: The Joyous Environment of Alexander Calder by Pedro E. Guerrero) that the inventor of the mobile made many utensils for his own kitchen which his wife Louisa, who did the cooking, used. He also made candle sconces from corrugated sheet metal and the bottoms of beer cans, lamps from gelatin molds, and various other household items. If he saw a need, he snipped and bent and fabricated whatever metal he had at hand to create the solution. He was also fond of making toys from empty coffee cans, cigar boxes and wire for the young people in his life.

The Calders had an old farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut, which they painted black, and an old stone and brick house in France, followed by a house built to their specifications in France. In each home, Calder’s mobiles hung from the ceilings, sometimes crashing into each other, and his paintings hung on the walls. Louisa hooked numerous brightly colored rugs using her husband’s designs, which he enlarged and transferred to the rug backings for her. She spread her rugs out on their floors, close together, and gave what they couldn’t use away to friends and family.

From 1969 to 1972, Calder designed porcelain plates for Sévres, “using the same technique as his gouaches.” However, Guerrero tells us that there is no evidence that the Calders used these factory made wares on their own table.

What’s interesting about Calder at Home is it gives us a glimpse into an integrated life. Calder’s art filled his homes and the outbuildings and land that surrounded them. But as focussed as he was on creating his soaring stabiles and mobiles and gouaches, he also devoted himself to making things for the family’s domestic life. I might not want to eat from his Sévres plates either, but who wouldn’t want to try one of his forks? They invite picking up and holding in your hand. They are the antithesis of precious, thus also inviting use. In his home life, it seems, the great artist was also an excellent designer.

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Dish Obsession

Like many women of her generation, my mom (she’s 85) has a small collection of plates displayed on a rail that my dad made for her many years ago. The plates are mostly souvenir plates, one with the capitol of Connecticut, another with a black and white drawing of an old church in town, one with a lattice rim and fruit in the center that she bought just because she thought it was pretty. She also has a set of “good” dishes, special brown Thanksgiving plates with a rural scene that we used only for Thanksgiving and Christmas when holidays were still at her house. These dishes were never, ever used any other day of the year. More seriously, she has a collection of flow blue in a glass front oak cupboard, but I do not recall any flow blue plates.

She was never a genuine collector. She did not have “malaldie de porcelain, or ‘porcelain sickness,’ an overweening desire to acquire more and more pieces…” the disease of moral turpitude that Shax Riegler writes about in his new book, Dishes: 813 Colorful, Wonderful Dinner Plates.

Riegler began collecting fifteen years ago, beginning with a near complete service for twelve, called Babina. Working on a PhD in Decorative Arts, Design and Culture, he is the features editor at House Beautiful. I would think the book itself would earn him his PhD. It is a sweeping meditation on plates with a timeline beginning with the 1454 entry for Isacco del Dondi of Pauda who ordered “a service of tin-glazed earthenware, including forty-eight plates, decorated with his family’s coat of arms,” and ending with the commemorative plates made in honor of Prince William’s marriage to Kate Middleton. Most of the plates are factory made, but he does include forty-one plates from contemporary potters. I l am drawn to Kristen Wicklund’s stoneware hummus plates with high sides and earthy tones.

I never particularly liked my mom’s fancy plates, and as an uppity teenager, developed a bit of snobbery against the gilt edges of a few of her pieces. Yet her small collection did make me think about how a plate should look. And the notion of special dishes for special occasions still makes an impression on me, though except for family nostalgia, I would not set a table with the Thanksgiving plates.

Plates can be made primarily to show off the food served on them, or they can be decorative and look best on a nicely set table before the food is brought out. Many plates, though functional, are never meant to be used but rather, like my mom’s, are kept on plate rails or hung with special hangers much like paintings. The challenge for a working potter is to make a plate that both looks good with food on it and looks good on its own. We each have our own ideas about this.

Perusing the book, I look at the chintz—patterned plates made by Royal Winton and, though they might look nice on an outdoor table with a white tablecloth, I cannot think of a single food that would look good on them. But there are plenty of plates that would enhance a meal, including a deep red from Red Wing Pottery and a green and brown from McCoy’s. Two plates that are particularly intriguing are about the pottery process itself and are meant for display. One is, surprisingly, a Fiesta plate from the 1939 World’s Fair depicting a potter throwing a large jar. The other, far more valuable, is from 1520 and shows a maiolica painter at work.

What’s so useful and interesting about Dish is the opportunity to look at so many plates one after another and think about them. Robert Bean’s photos are excellent.

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French Fry Cups or Whatever

As our lives have become both more harried and more informal, table settings have become simpler. I don’t mean everyone is using paper plates, though I am sure many households use them more often than not. But there do seem to be fewer plates and bowls on the home table than a generation or so ago. Bread plates, pickle dishes, salt cellars, and sauce boats are not quite things of the past but neither are they part of our daily meals. Even we potters who love table settings probably set our tables with dinner plates and salad or soup bowls and a few serving dishes and leave it at that. After all, we have to clean up just like everyone else.

So I was intrigued when I saw French fries served in parchment paper cones in special metal and ceramic cups in the pages of a glossy food magazine, and then on the cover of – yes, believe it, a French fry cookbook – and again in another magazine, all within a few days. Fast food restaurants have been serving fries in individual paper bags or little cardboard cups forever. How classy to serve them in real dishes, specially made, on a finely set table! I was intrigued.

I decided to make some myself. I happily threw a bunch, somewhat larger than a generous mug with slightly curved sides and subtly outward turned lip, all matching. They fired nicely. They would, I thought, look lovely with golden fried potatoes held upright within their walls. The beauty of it — a bouquet of string potatoes!

But after making them, I wasn’t sure what to call these new pots. I had to call them something or no one would know that they were for fries. Google offers French fry cups, French fry holders and fry cups. I suppose fry cup is best, but it seems a bit inadequate. If we are asking cooks to serve a very humble and ubiquitous food in a special dish, that dish needs a special name.

And then there is the question of where the thing belongs on the table. To the right of the dinner plate? The left? I think the top center, which would make it convenient for the diner, but really I have no idea what Miss Manners would say. Has Miss Manners heard of a French fry cup, handmade by her local potter?

The parchment paper is an even more complicated matter. I love the stuff. Who doesn’t? It feels nice, works great for baking, and is absorbent.  It seems that everyone is using it these days. In fact, there is a whole cookbook devoted to parchment paper being published this fall. But you buy the paper in rolls.  One has to take out scissors and cut it into half circles to make those little cones that look so attractive in the Fry cups. Right. Just what the home cook wants to do after a week at the office or shop and guests at the door.

Oh, and now I understand why some Chinese restaurants have plastic food in their windows. If I had plastic French Fries, I could put them into my parchment paper lined hand-thrown cups cups and everyone would know what they are for. But I don’t have plastic French Fries and I am not sure they would look that great in my pots anyway. Real fries would look great, but they wouldn’t last long because I would eat them. And if I didn’t, they would get cold and soggy and look horrid and I would have to dump them into the compost heap.

A small sign will have to do. And I guess Fry Cup will be the name.

Conclusion: As classy as they look in magazines and on the covers of specialty cookbooks, I fear Americans will not embrace hand made fry cups. Oh, their tables would look tastefully look-at-me. Pretty. Very pretty. Guests would be dazzled. But if I have to explain what exactly these pots are for, and they have to buy one per person and cut parchment paper half-circles for each, well, no, they are not going to put fry cups on their wish list. Nice idea. Fun to imagine oneself doing. No takers.

So, I will likely end up with a party load of fry cups. I will bedazzle my guests. I have enough to feed a good crowd, each person with his or her own fry cup placed elegantly above his or her dinner plate. Oh, how impressive and lovely!

Except I don’t recall ever serving guests French fries.

I could forget the fries and call these new little pots, um,  – parfait cups! Yes, parfait cups. Or tumblers. Or, how about table vases, a little cluster of flowers at each place setting.

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Potato Salad and Inca Pots

It being the celebration of Independence Day and the birth of the US, I suppose I should have been reading about the Revolutionary War, much of which took place here in New England. However, I really don’t like reading about fighting and killing and the strategies of generals. I rather read about food and houses and domestic sorts of things from our past. So, in honor of the Fourth of July, I read Potato: A Global History by Andrew F. Smith. What is a Fourth of July celebration without potato salad? Indeed, what is summer without potato salad?

Read a book on almost any topic in history, and sooner or later you will come to a reference to ceramics. And sure enough, Andrews gets to it in the very first chapter of his book.

Potatoes originated in South America. Seven species were grown and eaten by Andean farmers probably as early as 10,000 BCE. They were easy to grow, nutritious, tasty and suitable to the rugged terrain. “Depictions of potatoes have been found on pottery,” Andrews writes, “including pieces from the Moche, Chimú, Nazca and other pre-Columbian civilizations that flourished and disappeared before the advent of the Inca.” It’s amazing how much archaeologists and historians have learned about ancient cultures from the images that potters put on their pots!

Later, writing about the Inca, Andrews tells us that, “some {of their} pottery resembled potatoes, while others showed potatoes with human faces.” What? The first Mr. Potato Head was made by an Inca potter?

The images in the book are not the best, but there are two Andean potato pots. One, from the Proto-Chimu period is of two potatoes one atop the other, with a spout and stirrup handle. The other, shown here, is an Inca pot made to look like a potato with many eyes. It has a slightly flared neck. Sadly, he does not credit these two photos, so I can’t tell where the pots are today.

I will serve my potato salad in one of my simple baking dishes. I have never made a bowl or jar shaped like a potato (at least not on purpose). But for a few fleeting moments, I imagine myself going into the studio and making a potato bowl with eyes and lumps and glazing it brown on the outside and white on the inside. But no, that would be tacky. At least anything I attempted would look tacky. Maybe, though, in honor of the Andean farmers who domesticated the potato, and the Andean potters who depicted them in their art, I will make just one. For fun.

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A True Champion of Clay Cookery Pots

“Most food,” bestselling cookbook author Paula Wolfert writes in the introduction to her newest book Mediterranean Clay Pot Cooking “— and Mediterranean food in particular —tastes better cooked in clay.” Wolfert is fanatical in her devotion to using clay pots for cooking, and has spent years traveling the globe passionately collecting pots and meeting with potters. She uses clay cookware for baking, frying, stewing, roasting, steaming, and boiling.  Indeed she calls herself a “clay pot ‘junkie.’”

Of course, cooks have been using clay pots to prepare meals for thousands of years, and in many areas of the world, they are still the prevalent vessel, particularly earthenware. Wolfert uses traditional earthenware, plus stoneware and flameware in various shapes, “tall pots for cooking beans, soups, and stews; round earthenware vessels for cooking rice and sauces; deep-flaring-terra-cotta and glazed casseroles for dishes such as cassoulets and tians; shallow, round dishes for baking pies and gratins; stovetop skillets made of ceramic for cooking eggs and sautéing vegetables; shallow glazed rounds for oven baking custards and flans; and clay forms for baking bread.” I’d love to get a glimpse of her kitchen and her collection. There are photos of the pots throughout the book, though it is published by Wiley, known for its professional level cookbooks rather than for lavish design, so there aren’t nearly enough of them. You can see more photos on her Facebook page dedicated to cooking in clay pots.

Wolfert gives practical information on caring for clay pots (they are sturdy) and using them, with a good overview at the beginning of the book, followed by specifics with each recipe. Oh yes, the recipes — this is a cookbook after all.  Well, I am a vegetarian and there is a lot of meat in this book, so I gravitated to the section on vegetables and beans. Cassolo of Spinach and Artichokes. Yum.  Green Beans with Tomatoes and Garlic. Yum. And lots of potato recipes. The most interesting is Baby Creamer Potatoes Cooked in the Devil’s Pot or diable, “a potbellied unglazed earthenware pot traditionally used to cook potatoes or chestnuts.” The potatoes are cooked dry with sea salt. You shake the pot periodically but are forbidden to open the lid, or all is lost! I can’t wait to try this.

If you are a functional potter, Paula Wolfert is your best friend and advocate in the culinary arena. If you just like to cook and enjoy handmade pots, Wolfert will introduce you to possibilities beyond (and years older than) the stoneware casserole.

Happy Eating!