| A Potters history with the
French Butter Dish (see my home page at frenchbutterdish.com) The French Butter Dish, used to prevent butter from getting rancid without the aid of refrigeration, has again become vary popular. French Butter Dishes have a variety of names; for example, the butter bell, (a copyrighted name for a manufactured dish) the french butter bell, the french butter crock, the french butter keeper, the french butter pot, the beurrier Breton, beurrier Normand, pot à beurre Breton and the beurrier à l'eau. Although I have met many people from France who have never seen one, there are authoritative sources that say the French Butter Dish was invented in Normandy or Brittany in the early 1800's. Both regions were famous for butter production at that time. One authority believes the French Butter Dish was invented in Vallauris. I have been making and selling pottery since I graduated from Portland State University with a degree in Ceramic Arts in 1973. Since then I have been selling my work at the Portland Saturday Market in Portland, Oregon and at various summer craft fairsIn the late 1970s customers started asking for French Butter Dishes. At first I had no idea what a French Butter Dish was. I found one in a local kitchen store. I copied the basics and created a hand crafted butter dish design of my own. Before long it seemed that every potter I knew was selling their own version of a French Butter Dish. My butter dishes are handmade on a potter’s wheel. They are made in two parts. The bottom is thrown into a simple crock shape. When making the top, after the clay is centered, the wall is split, the center is pulled up into a cone shape, the outside pulled out to form the lid rim. After the clay is leather hard (½ dry) both top and bottom are trimmed to form the top of the lid and the smooth base bottom. The clay is then dried, fired to a low temperature (cone 05), cooled, glazed and then fired again to a higher stoneware temperature. (cone 6 or 10). That cone shaped lid is the key to why a handmade French butter dish works best. A cone shape can hold the butter in better and can hold a larger amount of butter. It is harder to manufacture a lid with this inverse shape. The manufactured butter dishes (like the butter bell) have a open cup shape.By the late 1980’s very few potters were still making French Butter Dishes. Sometime in the1990s I realized a lot of my French Butter Dish customers were buying them as replacements for ones they had lost or broken. Many new customers said that they had been searching for a long time. As a board member of the Oregon Potters Association I was given the job of creating a web site for our organization in 1996. After building the OPAs web site www.oregonpotters.org and its sister site www.ceramicshowcase.com, I realized creating a French Butter Dish site would be a great idea. No one was selling them on the web. www.frenchbutterdish.com was created for all the people who might search for a French Butter Dish on the web. For the first 3 or 4 years my site was the only one found when searching for a "French Butter Dish"! Now the French Butter Dish has become extremely popular again. My site is joined by many others, happy to provide a product more and more people are discovering.Jim Sloss |
6/05