A lathe-turned bowl is a bowl shaped while the wood spins. The turner mounts a block of wood on a lathe, sets it turning, and holds a steel cutting tool against it, taking away wood until the outside and the hollow inside are formed. It is one of the oldest ways of making a kitchen bowl, and in America it runs from the spring-pole lathes of colonial turners to the studio woodturners whose bowls now sit in art museums.

Every round wooden bowl in a kitchen drawer, from a salad bowl to a small salt dish, owes something to that history.

Turner’s ware

In the American colonies, timber grew in abundance, and wooden household things, or treenware, were part of daily life. The Smithsonian American Art Museum notes that most treenware was made by woodturners, craftsmen respected on a par with coopers, chairmakers, carvers and cabinetmakers. Their bowls and plates were known as “turner’s ware.”

The earliest colonial pieces copied English originals, because many turners had learned their trade in England or from someone who had. The museum describes New England and Virginia woodenware as sturdy and simple, often made to serve several purposes, while Pennsylvania treenware, linked to the Quaker settlement of Philadelphia, was more refined and often carved or painted.

Writing in 1898, the historian Alice Morse Earle called the colonial period “emphatically a wooden age,” and noted that “the dish-turner and cooper were artisans of importance in those days.” The dish-turner is the woodturner under an older name.

Treenware: The Wooden Kitchen Before Plastic covers the wider family of wooden kitchen things those turners supplied.

The spring-pole lathe

The first lathe used in the colonies, according to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, was the pole lathe. A cord was wrapped around the wood and tied at the top to a flexible sapling overhead and at the bottom to a foot treadle. Pressing the treadle spun the wood; releasing it let the springy pole pull the cord back and reverse the spin.

That back-and-forth motion shaped the work. The turner cut only while the wood spun one way and eased off while it spun back. The museum calls the work tedious and tiring, but it needed no power but a leg.

The pole lathe is older than America. Between 500 and 1500 AD, turned wooden vessels were the everyday bowls and cups of most people in Europe, and much of that ware was turned from green wood on a spring-pole lathe. Seventh-century examples survive from waterlogged ground at the island monastery of Iona, off western Scotland. Green wood, cut fresh from the tree, turns well and makes less dust than dry wood.

In the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the mandrel lathe came into use. It turned continuously in one direction, driven by a treadle and powered by water, people or animals. The museum notes that its products were called “hand-turned,” a phrase that later set them apart from factory-made goods.

How a bowl comes off the lathe

The basic method has changed less than the machines. For a bowl, the turner mounts a block so that the grain runs across the axis of spin, like a plank fixed flat to the lathe, rather than along it.

Many turners still work in two stages. They rough-turn a green bowl to its general shape, leaving the walls thick, then set it aside to dry. A roughed-out bowl dries faster than a solid block and is more likely to distort than split. Once dry, it goes back on the lathe to be turned true and finished.

The waste can be saved, too. A bowl saver is a tool for coring out the inside of a bowl in one piece, so the center becomes a smaller bowl instead of a pile of shavings.

From the mill to the studio

Turned wooden bowls never left American kitchens. Some were made in small mills. The Bowl Mill in Granville, Vermont, says it has made hardwood bowls since 1857, turning each one from a single piece of beech, walnut, maple or cherry. The wooden salad bowl in the American kitchen tells how those bowls became a fixture of the mid-century table.

In the twentieth century, a handful of turners began to treat the bowl as a form worth studying for its own sake.

James Prestini (1908–1993) was born in Waterford, Connecticut, and made rough bowls on his father’s lathe as a boy. While teaching mathematics at Lake Forest Academy in Illinois, he began turning thin-walled bowls and platters in the school’s workshop, and he went on turning bowls and plates in hardwoods from 1933 to 1953. An exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1949 was the first public attention the new movement received, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum notes that he came to be called “the father of the contemporary woodturning movement in the United States.”

Bob Stocksdale (1913–2003), raised on a family farm in Warren, Indiana, was a conscientious objector during World War II and turned his first bowl on a lathe at a camp in Michigan. Gump’s in San Francisco began showing his work, and he settled in Berkeley in 1946. He became known for bowls in rare and exotic woods, and his work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ed Moulthrop (1916–2003) trained as an architect and taught himself to turn. Working with woods native to the Southeast, he built his own lathe and large cutting tools, and turned vessels more than 40 inches wide from logs that could weigh over a ton and a half.

From the 1970s, a wider revival followed. The American Association of Woodturners was founded in 1986, the same year the Wood Turning Center, now the Center for Art in Wood, was founded in Philadelphia.

What the lathe gives a cook

A turned bowl has qualities that matter in daily use.

It is round and even. A bowl turned on a lathe can have a consistent wall all the way around, so it sits steady on the counter.

It is one piece. A bowl turned from a single block has no joints to open in the sink.

It can be light. A turner can leave the walls as thin as the job allows, as Prestini’s thin-walled bowls showed.

It also shows its grain well. Because the blank is mounted with the grain across the axis, the growth rings sweep across its sides in arcs, a record of the tree it came from.

Caring for a turned bowl

The care is the same whether the bowl came from a museum shop or a flea market. Wash it by hand in warm, soapy water, rinse, and dry it straight away with a towel. Never soak it and never put it in the dishwasher, where heat and long exposure to water can warp or crack wood.

When the surface looks dry and pale, rub in a little food-grade mineral oil, let it soak in, and wipe off the excess. A bowl cared for that way can outlast its maker, as the turned bowls in American museum cases show.

The same habits keep every wooden tool in good condition, from the bowl to the rolling pin.

The short version

A lathe-turned bowl is shaped while the wood spins against a cutting tool. Colonial turners made “turner’s ware” on spring-pole lathes, and later mandrel lathes ran continuously by treadle, water or animal power. In the twentieth century, Prestini, Stocksdale and Moulthrop made the turned bowl an art form. In the kitchen, a turned bowl is light, even and seamless, and with hand washing and a little oil it lasts for generations.

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