Have You Heard Of "Treen"?
from Italian Traditional Food

Treen is now collectable

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Many cooks not only enjoy the cooking itself, but also like to collect useful and decorative objects to have about the kitchen. If you enjoy browsing through junk shops, there are many fascinating things to find, especially in the field of treen.

The word "treen" is used to describe those small household objects that are turned and carved from wood - from bobbins to butter pats and salt boxes to Welsh love spoons.

What is treen?

The pleasant thing about treen is that it is largely a peasant art. Most of the implements belonged to kitchen, farm and cottage and were designed for use rather than ornament, though ornamentation followed naturally as the scope and the skill of the woodcarver grew. The charm of the early treen lies in the fact that no two pieces were ever exactly alike and there is no hard and fast rule about dating these objects, though some knowledge of contemporary styles in silver and pottery will help. The true treen collector must be constantly amazed at the variety of things it is possible to find. Some items, custom-made by cottage craftsmen, remain a puzzle as to what exactly they were for, the reason for their use has passed - like so much of the early woodware - into the dust of ages.

Collect and use

However, there are still a good many identifiable objects worth the search. Lemon squeezers, for example, all carved from close-grained hardwood - one 17th century type looks like an outsize nutcracket.

Potato mashers, wooden spoons and steak beaters still follow the traditional pattern, and are still made of best quality beechwood. Sycamore is another harw wood often used for chopping boards and bread boards. Look out, too, for double egg cups of different sizes joined base to base. The larger size was for a duck's egg, while the smaller one took a hen's egg. There are grounds, though, for believing that the larger ones are not egg cups at all, but old "dry" or spice measures used in grocery shops.

Butter prints, too, often beautifully decorated, are to be found in country districts, as are cheese moulds. These look like an ordinary bowl, but have straight sides and "weep" holes for the cheese near the edges.

You might find a salt box, straight-sided and possibly with the original leather hinges. But if the box is tall and looks like a child's pencil box standing on its end, it will be a candle cox. The earliest recorded use of mahogany in this country was in fact for one of these.

Folk lore

Though candle boxes have gone out of use, egg timers haven't. Hour glasses, too, can still be found in antique shops, though they tend to be expensive. Wooden spoon racks are useful as well as ornamental, and some have a cutlery drawer below. Seventeenth-century ones had pierced ledges to hold the spoons, wheras later ones usually had notches instead.

And Welsh love spoons? It was the custom for a man to announce his intention to court a lady by presenting her with a spoon, carved of course from a single piece of wood and decorated with love tokens to the best of his carving ability (hence the origination of the term "spooning"). A flighty lady could collect quite a few fine specimens before committing herself.

Nutcrackers, trivets, spice mills, drinking vessels and trenchers - all these can be yours once you become fscinated by the beauty of wood, the skill of the carver and a slice or two of domestic history.

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