By Lorrie Baumann

Stoneware from La Manufacture de Digoin has now become part of the extensive range of fine European imports offered by The French Farm. While The French Farm’s product range is centered on fine foods, it also includes cutlery collections by Jean Dubost, handcrafted olive wood utensils from Berard, lavender-scented personal and home care products from Le Chatelard 1802, Jacquard tea towels from Coucke, The French Farm collection of wood cutting and service boards, and now, traditional farmhouse-style stoneware items from La Manufacture de Digoin. “Since we do very well with housewares, I decided to bring in the Digoin line a few months ago. People have seen it in gift shows in France,” said Gisele Oriot, The French Farm’s Founder. “It has been a really old-fashioned line that has had a new look by the new owner of the company.”

The new stoneware was made in a French factory in Burgundy that was founded in 1875 as a family-owned business that specialized in handcrafted pottery and made the kinds of objects typically found in a 19th-century French farmhouse kitchen – the pitcher for the milk, the jug for the cool drinking water, the crock for the pickles. “I’m actually from Burgundy, and we still have my grandfather’s farm, and there was always a brown jug and a jar, and everything was manufactured by the Digoin company,” Oriot said. “It would say ‘Digoin’ on the item. Everything was brown – no red, no yellow, just brown.” Once those farmhouses gained electric power, the need for many of those objects was superseded by refrigeration. Cheap plastics came into those kitchens, and the factory’s business declined. The company was in its last throes when it was rescued by Corinne Jourdain and a group of investors. “Her ambition was to perpetuate a historical expertise and to bring back to former glory those meaningful culinary objects,” according to the company.

For Jourdain, that meant keeping the company’s traditional craftsmanship but updating its sense of style, starting with the addition of colored glazes that would fit into the modern design aesthetic of a contemporary kitchen. “’Let’s do some blue. Let’s do some green.’ She basically took a new look at the whole line,” Oriot said. “This was in 2014. It’s starting to catch on. They’re selling to gift shops and upscale restaurants in France. She’s making it fashionable again.”

Oriot saw the new line for the first time in one of those gift shops when she went back to France on a visit to family there. Then she found out that the factory was nearby and offered tours – and also factory sales. “I went to see the old factory, and it was like magic. There was all this clay, and she had all these beautiful colors,” Oriot recalls. “I took a tour and asked her if she had a distributor in the U.S. She didn’t.”

Oriot placed an order, added the line to her catalog and premiered it at a New York gift show. “We’re shipping everywhere now,” she said. “There is interest in the line.” The collection offered in the U.S. by The French Farm includes a Large and Small Jug, Cruet, Canister with Lid, Vinegar Jar, baking dishes, salad and serving bowls, a utensil crock and terrines like those that French charcuteriers once used in their shops. “The butcher or the charcuterier would bake their recipe in those big brown dishes,” Oriot said. “They would finish the pate and clean it [the terrine] and bake another one in it and sell it by the slice.”

The stoneware is durable and oven-safe, she added. “You can cook in it. It’s very, very strong.”
For more information, visit www.thefrenchfarm.com.