Pottery employed for preparing and serving food dates back to the world’s earliest civilizations, illustrating that humans have congregated around meals for nearly as long as they’ve had fire for cooking. Today, when these items—bowls, baking dishes, serving vessels—grace our tables, they carry this legacy along with them. Shards from 20,000-year-old clay pots have been discovered in China. During the excavation of Pompeii, archaeologists uncovered kilns containing unfired terra-cotta vases buried under vast piles of ash. Ceramic cooking implements discovered in present-day Ecuador, from the fifth millennium BCE, represent some of the few surviving remnants of a long-forgotten ancient civilization. Similar to those artifacts, these five culinary tools from around the world depict the tales of the creators bringing their ancestral cooking traditions into the present day. Kyūsu, Japan. Photo credited to Hugo Yu, with prop styling by Andrea Bonin. Taisuke Shiraiwa, a Japanese kyūsu (teapot) artist, refined his pottery wheel techniques under the guidance of master craftsman Konishi Yohei in Tokoname, Japan—a renowned ceramics hub. His wood-fired, salt-glazed teapots, made for New York City’s Tea Dealers, shimmer with hues like lavender blush, sea foam, and volcanic ash; features such as flower-shaped lids and fiddlehead-curved ushirode handles ground the pieces in nature’s playful motifs.
