Dictionary Definition
tureen n : large deep serving dish with a cover;
for serving soups and stews
User Contributed Dictionary
Translations
- French: soupière
- German: Terrine
- Icelandic: súpuskál
Extensive Definition
A tureen is a serving dish for foods such as
soups or stews, often shaped as a broad,
deep, oval vessel with fixed handles and a low domed cover with a
knob or handle. Over the centuries, tureens have appeared in many
different forms, some round, rectangular, or made into fanciful
shapes such as animals or wildfowl. Tureens may be
ceramic—either the glazed earthenware called faience or porcelain—or
silver, and
customarily they stand on an undertray or platter made en
suite.
The tureen's prehistory may be traced to the use
of the communal bowl, but during the reign of Louis
XIV it was developed from a practical covered serving vessel
into one of the most richly ornamented centerpieces of the formal
apparatus of dining. This period also saw the old practice of
dressing the dinner table with every dish at once (service
à la française) superseded by the new practice of separate
courses at meal time, each entrée entering
from the kitchens with an air of ceremony. Soup remained the first
course of most meals, from the king's table to the peasant's, and
the soup tureen on its serving platter provided the opening
ceremony. Tureens naturally tended towards the impressive; the
world's record auction price fetched for a single piece of silver
was achieved by a silver tureen made in 1733 by the Parisian
silversmith Thomas
Germain, sold at Sotheby's New
York, 13 November 1996: at US$ 10,287,500 it tripled the former
record. Thus the tureen as a piece of tableware, whether named to
honour the French military hero
Marshal Turenne or called a pot à oille—a
Catalan-Provençal soup— came into use in the later
seventeenth-century France. Most
seventeenth-century silver tureens were melted down to finance the
wars of Louis' late years and may be glimpsed only in paintings.
The ornate silver tureens of that period figure in
buffets—still life of silver and game—by
artists such as
Alexandre-François Desportes, or in more modest still life,
such as the painting by
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (illustration), which is dated
1728 but depicts a silver tureen of Baroque form of the
first decade of the century. During the mid-eighteenth century
tureens in appropriate naturalistic shapes, such as tureens in the
form of a head of cabbage, were popular. The Chelsea
porcelain manufactory produced tureens in the form of rabbits:
a Chelsea sale catalogue of 1755 advertised a "Fine tureen in the
form of a rabbit as big as life." Tureens are most practical for
serving about six people. In eighteenth-century France, a small
individual covered standing bowl on a small platter, essentially an
individual tureen, was called an écuelle. It could be lifted by its
twin handles and drunk from directly. A small covered dish for
sauce, called a saucière, could also take the form of a small
tureen; it might be integral with its platter (illustration right),
for ease in handling and to contain drips.
John T. Dorrance, a member of the family owners
of Campbell's
Soup, assembled, starting in 1966, the largest representative
collection of soup tureens, which has been donated to the
Henry Francis DuPont Winterthur Museum.
References
tureen in German: Terrine
tureen in Spanish: Sopera
tureen in Dutch: Terrine
tureen in Polish: Waza