April Hershberger is not the only collector of Le Creuset cookware who owns so many pieces that she can’t count them. But she may be the only one who built an entire house around one: the deep-red, nine-quart oval Dutch oven that she received as a gift for her 2006 wedding.
It sparked an obsession.
She had her kitchen stove, the centerpiece of her home in a restored barn in southeastern Pennsylvania, custom-made to match her collection of Le Creuset cherry-red pots, baking dishes, pitchers, plates and more. Ms. Hershberger, 42, also has pieces in mustard yellow and sunflower yellow, Mediterranean blue and Caribbean blue, forest green and lime green, which she frequently arranges and rearranges into stripes, swirls and rainbows, documenting it all on Instagram.
“I could never commit to one color,” she said.
Like Hermès and Chanel, Le Creuset (luh cruh-SAY, according to the official video, meaning French for crucible) is a Gallic legacy brand that has flourished in the modern global marketplace by becoming collectible while also remaining functional. And collectors have turned what was once a niche brand into a near-cult, perpetually entranced by new lines, colors and shapes.
Some stick to a color family, like pastels; others focus on a single item across the spectrum, like trivets or pie birds.
“As an Aries, fire and flames speak to me,” said Arlene Robillard, a purist who has one of the world’s largest collections of the company’s original color: Volcanique, an orange-red ombré sold in the United States as Flame.
Last week, to celebrate its 100th anniversary, Le Creuset released its latest color, Flamme Dorée (gilded flame). It’s close to the original hue, with a gold shimmer mixed in, like expensive makeup or a shot of Goldschläger. Months ago, a sighting of the new hue at an unspecified Williams-Sonoma store sent the Le Creuset Lovers group on Facebook, which has 97,000 members, into a frenzy of speculation.
“I have a good relationship with the staff and one showed me a DO in the new sparkle flame!” an anonymous member posted. (DO is the collectors’ shorthand for Dutch oven.)
Before Le Creuset, most cookware came in shades of gray, black and brown. But in 1925, two Belgian entrepreneurs — one an expert in cast iron, the other in vitreous enamel, made of heat-fired glass — built a foundry in the industrial northeastern corner of France to deploy their new technology: coating cast iron with colorful enamel. (The enameled cast-iron pots are all still made in the foundry, but other cookware and tableware are produced in Portugal, Thailand, China and elsewhere.)
Their Le Creuset pots quickly caught on in Europe thanks to their bright colors, durability and kitchen performance. The cookware began trickling into the United States in the 1950s, but sales swelled in this century as new items were introduced, making it clear that fans can be tempted into buying far more cookware than they actually need.
By expanding the company’s color palette from basics into pastels, neons and neutrals, and expanding the line from cookware into tableware, utensils and storage, Le Creuset has become a kitchen marketing powerhouse, with 90 stores in North America. (In 1988, five years after the first U.S. store opened, the company was bought from French owners by Paul van Zuydam, a South African entrepreneur who pushed for the new strategy. Since the company is privately held, its revenues are not made public.)
The company has produced collaborations with artists like Sheila Bridges, using her black Harlem Toile de Jouy pattern, and with brands like “Star Wars,” “Harry Potter” and Hello Kitty. (The United States is its largest market, and Japan is not far behind.) It has also staged strategic drops of limited-run items like a black heart-shaped Dutch oven that sells out as soon as it reappears, then shows up on resale sites like Etsy and eBay.
After the baker Jim Lahey’s recipe for no-knead bread baked in a Dutch oven went viral in the early 2000s (and re-emerged during the pandemic), Le Creuset produced a dedicated bread oven in 2022 that has become its most popular new piece in decades, said Sara Whitaker, the company’s head of U.S. marketing.
Pop-up factory sales, like a three-day event held last week in San Jose, Calif., generate huge lines and feverish social media posts, especially among buyers of V.I.P. tickets that come with the opportunity to buy a $50 “mystery box” that can be opened only after exiting the sale. Each box contains at least $350 (but sometimes up to $1,000) worth of overstocked and discontinued merchandise, and fans film suspenseful unboxing videos in the parking lots to post on TikTok.
Outside the factory sales and outlet stores, the pots can be very expensive: retail prices go up to $750 for the biggest, a Dutch oven called the “goose pot,” large enough to roast a 15-pound bird.
Last month, when Netflix debuted a new lifestyle show starring Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, among the many reasons some viewers called her “unrelatable” were the white Le Creuset pots she used. Her cookware was singled out as being too expensive and too pristine, a criticism that some Black women said was based in racist and dated assumptions. Many of them, like Sharzaè Cameron of Atlanta, made a point of showing off their collections on social media.
“We have had these for years now — this isn’t new,” said Ms. Cameron, 42, citing wedding registries, outlet stores and holiday gifts as opportunities to build a collection. (In an interview at her home last month, Meghan told me it was absurd that anyone would think that modern Black women use only traditional cast-iron skillets.)
Starting in the 1960s, two aspirational domestic empires were built on a sturdy platform of Le Creuset: Williams-Sonoma on the West Coast and Pottery Barn on the East. In 1965, my parents (Hanna, 82, and Jeffrey Moskin, 83) bought the pots they still use every day.
When they married that year, both were looking to escape from their families’ culinary claustrophobia: my mother from a strictly kosher home in Brooklyn (jellied calves’ feet, margarine) and my father from a suburban one on Long Island (orange soda, frozen vegetables). His father was in the restaurant-supply business, so my parents had a good start when they wed: a giant black Garland restaurant stove and thick aluminum skillets.
But they didn’t feel they were on their way until they had Le Creuset pots, the flame-colored Dutch ovens and heavy-lidded saucepans that helped them master recipes by Julia Child, Richard Olney and Elizabeth David. (At the time, everyone in their circle wanted to be a French home cook, preferably one who lived in the countryside.)
Contraptions like a Salton yogurt maker and a Romertopf terra-cotta casserole have passed through their kitchen, but no other pots have been added to their rack, 60 years later. That’s why I didn’t know there was such a thing as a nonstick skillet until I was out of college.
The culinary historian, cooking teacher and retired podcast host Lynne Rossetto Kasper, 82, said she started using the pots as soon as they arrived in the United States, because their weight made it possible to deeply brown ingredients without scorching, and to cook at a low simmer.
“Finding something that you could braise in or build a slow sauté and get the right kind of fond wasn’t easy,” she said, because even top American-made cookware, like Farberware, was mostly lightweight aluminum. Two of her well-used Le Creuset Dutch ovens will be up for sale next week in an auction of her culinary collection but, she said, “they are only a few of the many that have passed through my life.”
Hailey Sipe, a product director for a tech company who lives in Orange County, Calif., called me from the road Thursday with a report from the San Jose pop-up sale. She and two friends from the M.B.A. program at U.C.L.A. had made the 300-mile drive north after work on Wednesday, then got up early to scope out the line and parking.
Ms. Sipe, 34, already owns some colorful pots handed down from her mother and sister, but since her marriage last year, has been building a collection in neutrals, including Oyster gray, Sea Salt pale blue and Brioche beige.
The grail item for her 90-minute shopping slot was a bread oven. (The slots are staggered in 120-minute intervals, to give the staff a chance to make order from the chaos.) “There’s a mad dash at the beginning, because the strategy is to grab everything you might want and figure it out later,” Ms. Sipe said.
To open their mystery boxes, the three friends met up with other attendees at a nearby parking lot where collectors came prepared to barter, bringing folding tables and sometimes pieces from home they’re ready to part with. The process was an emotional roller coaster, she said: The first box held a perfect set of white Dutch ovens, but it wasn’t hers. The next held mostly Chiffon pale pink, a color that none of the women particularly like for cookware. Her own box was filled with Flame pieces. “Orange is not in my color palette,” she said emphatically.
Still, for about $1,400, Ms. Sipe went home with a black braiser, a Rhone (wine-colored) pot and 10 other pieces that she’ll use, trade or give as gifts.
And the bread oven? The entire spectrum was sold out by the time she got inside, with the exception of Flame. (Ms. Whitaker of Le Creuset said Flame is declining in popularity and the company is “de-emphasizing” its production.)
Ms. Robillard, the Flame collector, has well over 1,000 pieces in the original color, including rarities like a 1955 Tostador, a kind of George Foreman Grill prototype by Raymond Loewy, the French American industrial designer who also created the original Coca-Cola can, the Barcalounger and the Shell logo.
Ms. Robillard, 73, has a contact in the Netherlands who scours flea markets for her, and a dedicated room in her home in Apopka, Fla., for the collection, stored on industrial shelving that has to be bolted to the walls to support its weight.
Factory sales and new pieces hold no interest; her current fixation is a vintage sangria pitcher that she once spotted on a resale site in South America. “The hunt is always fun.”
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Julia Moskin covers everything related to restaurants, chefs, food and cooking for The Times.
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