From Earth to Table
story by Donna Hecker & photography by Talitha Schroeder
It starts with earth. A fistful of clay slapped onto a spinning wheel and propelled outward by the force of the wheel and the steady pressure of practiced hands. We watch nascent forms take shape, destined for our tables.
Light a bead lamp and its gentle glow fills a dining room ready to receive guests. A hand-thrown charger anchors a place setting, awaiting dinner’s first course.
When Chef Ouita Michel and her husband Chris Michel opened the Holly Hill Inn in 2001, they wanted their first restaurant to be a different kind of place.
Chris and I knew we wanted to bring new life to old Kentucky traditions. We wanted crystal wine glasses and Kentucky pottery.
For Kentucky pottery, Chris and Ouita naturally looked to Sarah Culbreth and her Tater Knob studio. Sarah, who had studied ceramics at Berea College, used to exhibit at Lexington’s Woodland Arts Fair, just up the street from where Ouita’s mother Pam Sexton lived. They met through their mutual friends John Stephenson, former Berea College president, and his wife Jane. It was the late 1980s and Ouita was in culinary school at the time.
Sarah recalled making a set of dinnerware for Pam and how Pam helped her write a proposal for establishing a studio in a closing Berea storefront. The studio plans didn’t work out but the two women remained close until Pam passed away in 2014.
In 1991, Sarah and her husband Jeff Enge began building on the land that is now home to Tater Knob Pottery. They had only been settled in for a couple of weeks when folks started driving out to buy pottery in a porch turned studio. Over the years, they enclosed the porch and added a showroom.
Their son David Enge and his wife Samantha Lyons Enge also live on the property in a home David created from both reclaimed and locally milled lumber. David and Samantha are potters too and recently debuted an exuberant new collection at the Berea Craft Festival.
Pottery lovers still trek to Tater Knob six days a week. If you’re lucky, Sarah will brew you a cup of coffee before she settles in at the wheel to spin her story of transforming dirt into beautiful objects for eating and drinking. She begins by centering the clay, describing it as earth spiraling on the potter’s wheel. “All living things spiral”, she tells us. “Earth, wind, air and fire. It’s life-giving.”
To make our Holly Hill Inn chargers and bead lamps, Sarah uses a three-clay blend that she custom orders, sourced from around Kentucky and just beyond. Brown clay from Grayson County, white from Paducah, and mustard from southern Ohio. Sarah colors our pieces with several different slips – white, cobalt, copper, manganese red iron, ocher – all naturally occurring on the earth’s surface.
After the pottery dries to “leather hard”, an initial firing takes place, called bisque firing. Sarah told us how she loads the kiln up for bisque firing, filling it with as many pieces as she can. For the final firing, though, pieces can’t touch one another. Here they’re arranged littlest to biggest with the smaller ones nestled in the negative space of the larger pieces, like parents sheltering growing children. Vitrification takes place in this stage, turning the clay back into the rock from which it comes, Sarah explains.
Our finished chargers are embodied landscapes, miniature worlds of their own. An undulating design spirals from the center of each; following the contours of mountains and serpentine streams, punctuated by raindrops and bordered by the earth itself.
When we set our dinner tables at Holly Hill and lay those chargers down, we’re laying a foundation, a stepping-off point for exploring the land of Kentucky and all the ways in which we’re inspired by those who farm it, who write about it, who paint beautiful images of it.
We wanted locally-raised foods prepared in new and creative ways, hoping to define a new kind of Kentucky cooking. We wanted to celebrate history, agriculture, family, poetry and art.
Open a different kind of restaurant and others will follow from it. Serve a plate of food and connections start to form. From field to kitchen, stove to plate, plate to diner. Pour a glass of wine and watch it hoisted in a toast. Each action is the nucleus of an expanding spiral.
Toss a pebble in a pond and see the ripples radiate. Ever outward.
Related Content
Queenie’s Pickled Peaches
We’ll only have local peaches for a few weeks (if we’re lucky!) so pickling is a great way to enjoy their precious flavor in unexpected ways. Try this recipe for Queenie’s Pickled Peaches, which former sous chef Lisa Laufer used to prepare every summer.
© 2022, Holly Hill Inn/Ilex Summit, LLC and its affiliates, All Rights Reserved
