French Country · Encyclopedia of objects
Pottery and Earthenware
Village potters made bottles, jars, jugs and moulds for every task of the kitchen and dairy. Glaze colors and handle shapes tell their regions apart. (Poteries et terres cuites)
Stoneware bottles (bouteilles en grès)
Lower Normandy
Typical of the potters of Lower Normandy until the early twentieth century, their irregular profile shows their age. They held calvados, the apple brandy, and in winter some became bed warmers.
Glazed jam jars (pots à confiture)
Savoie · glazed earthenware
With deep glazes and fruit in relief, early-twentieth-century Savoyard jam pots are now hard to find. They are almost always green, more rarely yellow.
Snail pot (escargotière)
Centre of France · terracotta
A rare rustic pot once common in the Centre, used to keep snails fasting before cooking. Similar wide-based pots come from the Indre; in Provence they are taller and glazed.
Oil jugs (cruches à huile)
Mâconnais and Auvergne · terracotta
In the nineteenth century these jugs held the year's supply of oil, closed with a straw stopper wrapped in cloth. Their shape varies little; only the handles and glaze color differ. One comes from around Mâcon, the other, its glaze worn, from the Auvergne.
Alsatian cake moulds (moules à gâteaux)
Alsace · glazed earthenware
An Alsatian fiancé traditionally gave his bride small cake moulds, rarely more than fifteen centimetres across. They appear from the sixteenth century, mostly in the Hanau country and the Sundgau. The oldest, sometimes initialed, have light brown or green glazes; later ones are orange-brown.
Slip-decorated plates (assiettes à l'engobe)
Soufflenheim, Alsace
Soufflenheim near Haguenau has long been famous for pottery that potters sold at markets several times a year. Green or brown and rarely signed, the old slip-decorated plates show irregular designs and sometimes drips.
Colander (passoire)
Pré-d'Auge, Normandy
Pré-d'Auge pottery is known for a deep green from copper oxide in the glaze. It is rare to find a kitchen piece in such good condition as this colander, with its strong handle and a wide rim shaped by the potter's thumb so it could rest on a bowl.
Cider jug, the Néhou pig (pichet, « puchyi »)
Cotentin, Normandy · salt-glazed stoneware
This cider or brandy jug, called puchyi, is known as the Néhou pig for its spout shaped like a pig's head. Néhou, Sauxemesnil and Vindefontaine were famous for glazed stoneware: Vindefontaine made jugs shaped as a marquis in a tricorn, Sauxemesnil water fountains.
Cheese strainers (faisselles)
Ligron, Rouen, Puisaye
Used everywhere to drain curds before they became cheese. One has a rim cut in five lobes and comes from Ligron in the Loire country; another is seventeenth-century Rouen faience; a third, with its stand, is Puisaye stoneware.
Fish soup pot (« toupin »)
Vallauris, Provence
An oval pot with slightly flattened rims, traditionally used in Provence to serve fish soup. Its green glaze is typical of the potters of Vallauris, who also made many saucepans and skillets before the war and in the 1950s.
Plate warmer (chauffe-plats)
Quercy · terracotta
Filled with embers, it kept a plate of soup hot. Four small terracotta studs above the rim kept the plate from touching the fire. Other warmers of the same shape were filled with boiling water.
Source: Les Trésors de France: vieux métiers et objets d'autrefois (Éditions Rustica, Détours en France collection, 1995), pp. 130–135. 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.