Just because I do it doesn’t mean I don’t know it: Collecting vintage bakeware is a weird hobby.
It’s an odd thing to buy people’s cast-off Pyrex casseroles and discarded dishes, I know that. But as I meticulously peruse thrift store shelves, pick through boxes of forgotten glassware and rummage through dead strangers’ kitchen cabinets, it’s more than shopping – it’s a hunt for my next piece of history.
Hidden inside the Primary Colors mixing bowls and Harvest Gold casseroles are the life stories of other homemakers who lived the life I wish to carve out and who were the kind of women I aspire to become.
Sometimes it’s a history made up in my imagination, like the Pink Gooseberry bowl I’m sure must have been gifted to a newlywed 1950s housewife. She mixed biscuits for her young husband, using her grandmother’s old recipe but burning them terribly in her new electric oven. He happily ate them anyway.
Other pieces I have come with real stories of the women who used them, like the elderly lady who sold me her rolling pin while telling me all about her life raising five children in the country, her garden, and canning tomatoes every year.
But the really special pieces come from people I know, like my friend Alyssa who gave me her grandmother’s Pyrex refrigerator dishes. They belonged to the feisty but kind and loving matriarch who cherished her family and helped shape the woman I consider a dear friend.
There is also a set of Amish Butterprint mixing bowls given to me by Joan, a remarkable woman I met through my church’s Altar and Rosary Society who has been like a grandmother to me.
Joan ended up gifting me many other fine pieces, but I cherish the Butterprint mixing bowls the most. I know she’s made some of her best goodies in them over the years for her family, and I was touched that she would pass them down to me even as she knew how much they would have sold for (she made me promise to split the proceeds if I put them up on eBay – perish the thought).
It’s special to have her bowls, especially as I delighted in reminding Joan that her nut tossies made in them clinched first place in our local newspaper’s Christmas cookie contest years back.
Rather than basking in the compliment, Joan reminisced about how her late husband helped her grind the walnuts to the perfect-sized morsels, the true secret to those delectable nut-filled pastry bites. For her, it wasn’t so much about the food as was is about the people she made them with and made them for.
What those bowls meant to Joan and in turn now mean to me is the simplicity of hearth and home and happiness.
I’m not alone in this understanding of the sweet nostalgia these simple pieces of kitchenware can evoke. My friend Samantha has her grandmother’s mixing bowls with the same pattern as Joan’s. Knowing how much I appreciate legacy Pyrex, she shared with me how she uses hers to make her grandmother’s kiffles every Christmas with her kids or to serve her mother’s potato salad for summer barbecues.
Maybe it is strange to want to have others’ glassware that comes with other people’s stories, and I’m fine with being a little strange.
But it brings me immense joy to have these pieces of history, preserved in colorful tempered glass that is made stronger only through punishing inferno. Though still breakable, they beautifully endured through decades of wear in loving service to the daily grind of family life.
In other words, they’re just like the women who once owned them — and who wouldn’t want to have a bowl that contains all of that?