The Craftsman’s Review ✦

Stories of American Craft & Kitchen

Advertorial · 2 days ago · By Marla Tipton

“My shoulder’s done after 26 years. These are the last ones I’ll ever make.” Why a 72-year-old Kentucky potter is selling her last dip bowls at a special price

Soggy fries, ketchup on the tablecloth, a custard cup on its side: for 51 years that was supper at the Burchett table. Then Oleta made her husband a bowl with the dip cup built right on. About 270 are left, on sale until the end of November.

The craft market on the square in Berea packed up for the year in the last week of October. Oleta Burchett’s folding table is back where it spends the winter, leaning against the wall of the old stripping room in her late father-in-law’s tobacco barn. Nobody has stripped tobacco in there since 2000. That was the year Oleta moved in with a secondhand wheel, and it has held a potter’s wheel, a small electric kiln and a lot of shelves ever since.

She takes a bowl off the nearest shelf. It is about the size of a cereal bowl, cream-colored, with a toasted brown rim and a small round cup sitting right up on the edge, joined to the bowl like a sidecar. She tips a basket of hot fries into the bowl, squeezes ketchup into the little cup and slides it across the workbench.

Then she tilts the whole thing, a lot further than anybody would tilt a plate. The fries shift. The ketchup stays in its cup. Not a drop of it gets anywhere near a fry.

“Folks always laugh at the little cup. Then they eat out of it once, and they don’t give it back.”

She is 72, and she has been making pots out here for 26 years. Mugs, pie plates, spoon rests, butter dishes, whatever the market on the square would take. Her three kids were grown and gone by the time she started, and she still calls it her hobby.

“I never made a thing anybody needed,” she says. “Pretty mugs, mostly. Then I made one bowl for Dewey, and now that’s all anybody wants to talk about.”

The bowls started as one bowl, made for one man. Two market seasons later they are the thing people stop her about at the grocery store. And because her shoulder won’t give her another big firing, this is the first and only time they’ve been sold anywhere but that folding table.

Fifty-one years married to a man who won’t let his food touch

Dewey Burchett is 75. He ran a road grader for the county for 38 years, and in 51 years of marriage he has never let one thing on his plate touch another. Not the ketchup and the fries. Not the beans and the cornbread. Not the gravy and anything at all. He eats one thing, then the next, and he dips every bite by hand.

“Some men are particular about their truck,” Oleta says. “Dewey’s particular about his plate. Ketchup gets to a fry before he does, and that fry is ruined. He won’t eat it.”

Restaurants have stacks of little sauce cups for people like Dewey. Most kitchens at home don’t. So at home the ketchup goes in a puddle on the edge of the plate, and the puddle goes wherever the plate tilts: into the fries, under the coleslaw, into the beans. Or it goes into a custard cup that slides around on the plate and tips over the first time somebody bumps it.

Oleta has tried every fix there is. Divided plates, saucers, the little glass custard cups out of her mother’s cupboard. None of them lasted a week at the Burchett table.

So for half a century Oleta set his supper on a plate with a coffee cup of ketchup beside it. And for half a century the coffee cup ended up on its side on the tablecloth, or in his lap on the porch during a ball game.

“I’ve washed that man’s ketchup out of more shirts than I can count. And I had never once thought to make him a bowl.”

Which is a funny thing to hear from a woman who had been making bowls in the barn for a quarter of a century. She learned in a Thursday-morning class at a craft school in town, bought a used wheel from a woman in Richmond, and Dewey wired the kiln into the barn himself. Thousands of mugs and pie plates since then. Not once a bowl for the man across the supper table.

The bowl came on a slow afternoon in March of last year. Dewey came in from the porch with ketchup on his sleeve again, and Oleta went out to the barn and threw a small, deep bowl. Then she threw a little cup, cut it to fit and set it right up on the rim, so the floor of the cup sat up above the food. Sauce can’t run uphill.

The first nine cracked. The cup and the bowl dried at different speeds, and in the kiln the seam split open every time. On the tenth she joined the two while both were still leather-hard, scored them deep on both sides, and worked a thin coil of clay into the seam with her thumb. That one came out of the kiln in one piece.

Dewey named it the first night. He sat down to a hamburger with fries in the bowl, ketchup in the cup, looked at it for a long while and said, “Well, would you look at that. It’s got a sidecar.” He has not eaten a fry off a plate since.

Oleta took four of them to the market on opening day in April, mostly to make Dewey laugh. A woman from Lexington bought all four before ten o’clock. By June there was a waiting list on the back of a feed-store receipt.

After that it was word of mouth. People took them home to Cincinnati, Knoxville and Louisville and wrote asking for more, and Oleta started mailing a few boxes a week. Until now there was no website and no shop, just a folding table on the square and a stack of letters on top of the microwave.

What makes Oleta’s bowl different

Most of us handle dip the same way. A blob of ketchup on the plate, a tub of salsa set down next to the chips, a ramekin if we’re feeling fancy. “And every one of those moves,” Oleta says. “The blob runs, the tub gets knocked, the ramekin rides off the plate. Then you’re wiping the table instead of eating.”

Divided plates aren’t much better. “The little wall is about a quarter inch high,” she says. “Tip it and the sauce goes right over.”

Her bowl takes Dewey’s rule and builds it into the dish. The cup is part of the bowl, so it can’t slide, tip or get lost in the sink. It sits up on the rim, so the dip stays above the food instead of running down into it. And it’s right where your hand already is. You pick up a fry, a carrot stick or a chicken tender, dip it, eat it. Nothing touches unless you want it to.

“I didn’t invent the sauce cup,” she says, before anybody can ask. “Every restaurant in America has a stack of them. All I did was stick one on the bowl so it stays put.”

That is also why so many of the cheap copies online miss the point, she says. “If the cup sits low, down level with the food, the ketchup creeps out the second you tip it. And if the seam is just glued, it comes off in the dishwasher.” She joins every cup by hand and checks every seam on every bowl before it goes on the shelf. Start to finish, every bowl takes her about four hours at the bench: throwing, trimming, joining the cup and glazing, before it goes into the kiln twice.

She is just as blunt about what it isn’t. The bowl is about 4¾ inches across, 6 inches with the cup, and holds about 13½ ounces. It is one person’s snack or one person’s side. “It’s not a party platter,” she says. “You want chips and dip for twelve, get a big bowl. This is for you, on a Tuesday, with the ball game on.”

And she won’t pretend it makes anybody eat better. “It’ll hold carrot sticks and hummus just as good as nuggets and ranch,” she says. “Pretzels and cheese dip, dumplings and soy sauce, strawberries and a little chocolate. What goes in it is your business. I just keep it from running together.”

Some of them came back to the market just to say thank you

Oleta keeps the notes people have left her in an old biscuit tin on the kitchen counter. She pulls one out from August and reads it out loud.

“That one’s on the refrigerator in the barn,” Oleta says. “That’s who they’re for. Not for a shelf. For somebody’s supper.”

The bowls come in one glaze, the one Oleta settled on after two dozen test tiles: Buttermilk, a soft speckled cream that thins out over the edge and fires to a toasted brown, like the rim of a good biscuit. The rings from the wheel stay on the outside so the bowl doesn’t slip in a buttery hand. Because the glaze runs a little differently on every rim, no two bowls look quite the same.

This is what’s left from the last big firing

In July Oleta’s doctor told her what her right shoulder had been telling her all summer. After this season, no more long days at the wheel. Centering clay is hard, steady work for the shoulder, and she had been doing it for 26 years, the last ten of them at an age when most people take up crossword puzzles.

So she made this season count with one last big run. She threw through most of August, fired the kiln full in September, and when the market closed in October the shelves were still lined with bowls. Most afternoons now go to packing. Every bowl comes down off the shelf, gets one more look at the seam and is wrapped in paper.

What’s left comes to about 270 bowls. Oleta will still throw a few mugs for the grandkids at Christmas. But there won’t be another firing like this one.

“I could keep them,” she says. “But then they sit in a barn while people eat ketchup off the edge of a plate. Ball season’s on, Thanksgiving’s coming. That’s when people snack.”

So she set one flat price for what’s left: $59 a bowl, down from the $89 they sold for at the market. “I’m not doing this to get rich,” she says. “Half the people at that table bought them for somebody else. I’d like them under some trees this year.”

Her granddaughter Kenzie, 24, is the one who put them online. “Mamaw makes the bowls,” she says. “I just answer the emails.”

Oleta won’t do another firing like this one. When the last bowls from September are gone, that’s it.

What customers say

Where to get one of Oleta’s bowls

The bowls are only sold through Oleta’s own shop. It is the one place to get the real ones from this September’s firing.

On sale until November 30, and after that only while the last bowls last

“This was my last big one,” Oleta says. “My shoulder made that decision for me.” Kenzie is taking orders at $59 through November 30. After that, the shop stays open only as long as there are bowls left on the shelves.

Payment and shipping: the shop takes all major cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Every bowl is wrapped by hand and ships within 1 to 2 business days, and every order comes with Oleta’s 90-day money-back guarantee.

Dewey still dips every fry by hand, one at a time. “He tells everybody at the feed store that the bowls were his idea,” Oleta says. “I let him. He did keep spilling the ketchup.”

DISCLOSURE: The owner of this site has a material connection to the products shown on this page. Please review the full return policy before ordering. Testimonials reflect individual experiences and results may vary. Images are for illustration; because each piece is thrown and glazed by hand, the final product may vary slightly in color and shape.

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