28 September 2018

PICARDIE

picardie

Picardie is the name of a French tumbler.  This glass has been around for decades and is the classic design that we are all familiar with, found everywhere in France.  You might get your orange juice served in one in smart hotel breakfast rooms, water alongside your menu du jour in the local café or your rosé wine at the village brocante.  They are now made by Duralex in the Loire region.

The glasses on the right are the ones we bought when staying in a couple of different gîtes where there was nothing sensible to drink a glass of water or juice from.  You can get them in most supermarkets quite cheaply.  The one on the left is from a “set” of twelve shot glasses to the same design that we got at a brocante earlier this year for 2€ the lot.

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You can get the same kind of design in stemmed glasses and we got all of these for next to nothing at different times at various local brocantes.  The ones in the front are perfect for sipping a glass of sweet wine.  The flutes make an ordinary glass of fizz seem really special and the larger ones are apparently for “cocktails” – according to the lady who sold me all eight of them at the brocante in Neuilly earlier this year, for the princely sum of 5€.

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These are our regular daily wine glasses that we bought when staying in yet another gîte where the ones supplied were enormous and very fragile and we were afraid to use them – let alone put them in the dishwasher.  Picardie glasses are very strong and user friendly, eminently dishwasher proof and cheap to replace if you happen to break one.

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You can now get the tumblers in a fine array of colours.  These were on special offer in the supermarket and I couldn’t resist them to cheer up the dinner table.

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These are a bit different.  They have the same ribs as the traditional Picardie glasses but according to the lady who sold me a set of six at a recent brocante, they date back to the 1940’s, making them vintage glasses in my book.  They are perfect for a small measure of digestif (Southern Comfort being my current favourite).  She sold me a set of six but I spotted that one of them was chipped so that made them a set of five – and she knocked a whole euro off the price, making it 3€ for all of them.  I’m on the lookout for another one to replace it and make the set back up to six.

14 comments:

  1. The last one looks similar to an English ogee Rummer.

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    1. Tom, they're rather elegant I think, and I like the idea that they could be quite old - older than me in fact!

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  2. The tempered glass process developed by Saint-Gobain, was bought in 1934 by Duralex and manufacturing of the glasses began in 1939. I remember the ones we used at school and those my mum had, which must have been some of the earlier ones as she married in 1933 and added very little to her household items subsequently, preferring to "make do". There's an interesting article https://www.independent.co.uk/property/interiors/the-secret-history-of-the-duralex-glass-range-2144130.html
    Is the one at the bottom stamped Duralex? Never seen one like it. you may have a rarity there!

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    1. Thanks for the link to the article, it's very interesting.
      There's nothing on the bottom of the last one, all I know is what the stallholder told me. Which may be correct or may be just "marketing"!

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  3. All very interesting. I knew nothing of the history. May have to steal the topic for our blog at some point :-)

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    1. Susan, you can now buy larger Picardie style tumblers in every UK supermarket, they seem to be very fashionable although I doubt they're all made by Duralex.
      You can also buy stemmed wine glasses in Ikea but they're quite chunky.

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  4. Southern Comfort still exists? That takes me back to college days.... Southern Comfort and lemonade was one that I often had to make for customers [yes, I often worked behind the bar!!]

    To read this post.... interesting to degree level "fascinating"... thanks Jean, a little bit of everyone's history

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    1. I only recently discovered Southern Comfort, having never had it before until Gail tempted me with a glass.....then I saw a bottle on the end of the aisle when walking through Tesco's and swooped!

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  5. And I like the new header picture.... works rather nicely!

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    1. As you may already know...it's the bronze bust of Charles V111 in the château at Loches, his nose made shiny by visitors giving it a sly rub! He died prematurely in the château at Amboise when he accidentally walked into a lintel and banged his head.

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  6. Interesting, I did not know the history at all. Thanks for sharing. Enjoy your week Diane

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  7. What's too bad is that the Duralex factory near Orléans doesn't have a boutique where you can buy items like these. We have full sets of Picardie glasses in two or three sizes. And as for the dishwasher, these glasses will definitely get etched and cloudy over time. Maybe it depends on what dishwasher tabs or powder or liquid you use. Oh, I just went and found a whole box of Picardie glasses in our cellar, in three sizes. I think we must have bought them in California.

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    1. That's interesting about them getting spoiled in the dishwasher. I wondered if it was because of our hard water and for years I have hand washed all our glasses for that reason. I don't mind hand washing a few things and glasses are easier than plates or pans.
      I noticed yesterday that you can get the taller tumblers made by Duralex in Intermarché. I resisted!

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    2. In San Francisco, the water wasn't hard at all, but even so our Duralex glasses and plates got etched when we put them in the diswasher.

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