French Country · Encyclopedia of objects
From the Sheepfold to the Dairy
Milk was carried, strained, churned and pressed with vessels carved or coopered from local wood. Shepherds made many of them on the spot, and their worn surfaces now read as sculpture. (De la bergerie à la laiterie)
Milk tub and wooden pail (bac à lait, seille)
Savoie · fir staves
These Savoyard pieces are built from fir staves held by hoops of bent wood rather than iron, an old method still used in parts of the East. Chardin painted a farm girl scouring a tub of exactly this kind in La Récureuse (1738). The pail has a pouring hole near the rim.
Butter churn (baratte)
Provence and Savoie · walnut, fir
Large farm churns are built of wooden staves hooped with wrought iron. Working the plunger up and down until cream turned to butter took real strength. Smaller "family" churns were hollowed from a single trunk. A Savoyard fir churn about 30 cm high, from the late nineteenth century, has a crank driving a simple paddle inside; being fragile, such churns are now uncommon.
Milk strainer (passe-lait)
Hautes-Alpes · Swiss stone pine
Carved from a single block of arolla pine, this large strainer rested by its two handles on the vessel into which the shepherd poured the morning's milk. Polished by years of use and soft as silk to the touch, it has become a purely decorative piece.
Basque milking pot (pot à traire)
Basque Country · one piece of wood
Shepherds in the Basque Country milked their ewes into pots cut from one large piece of wood. The raised front keeps milk from spilling on the way down the mountain, and the balanced handle can be held by its curve or its top. To curdle milk for cheese, a stone heated in the ashes was dropped into the bottom.
Shepherd's cupboard (armoire de berger)
Queyras · larch
The simplest kind of shepherd's cupboard, cut on site in larch in the nineteenth century. Unlike the carved chests that made the Queyras famous, with their curving rosettes, it is valued today mainly for the warm color of its wood.
Butter stamp and bread marks (marque à beurre, moule creux)
Alps · carved wood
Where firewood was scarce, as in the Briançonnais, bread was baked only a few times a year. Each family pressed its own mark into the dough with small carved pieces. Knife-carved butter stamps and hollow moulds turn up all over the Alps.
Bread slicer (tranchoir à pain, « chanestre »)
Briançonnais · larch board
Stale bread from those rare bakings was too hard for a table knife. It was cut with a blade hinged to a larch board, called the chanestre.
Source: Les Trésors de France: vieux métiers et objets d'autrefois (Éditions Rustica, Détours en France collection, 1995), pp. 99–103. Descriptions summarize the book's reportage and captions; the book was published in 1995, so workshops, people, prices and figures are described as the reporters found them then, and some workshops may since have closed or changed hands.