Advertorial · 3 days ago · By Fiona Holt

“For 34 years I patched up knuckles that had met a grater. I wasn’t going to let my granddaughter be one of them.” Why a 69-year-old retired emergency nurse is selling her last ginger plates at a special price

Kaye Treloar spent three decades in an emergency department. The little plate she threw on her own wheel became the talk of the Burra market. Now just over a hundred are left.

Kaye Treloar (69) in the workroom behind her stone cottage in Burra, South Australia, with a Golden Sun plate from the last firing.

Burra, November. The wheat paddocks along the road out of town are turning from green to gold, the gums are full of noisy galahs, and in the workroom behind Kaye Treloar’s old stone cottage, under the corrugated iron roof, it smells of coffee and fresh ginger. On the pine shelves there are stacks of small round plates, each one no bigger than a saucer, each one with a patch of tiny glazed teeth in the middle.

Kaye picks up a yellow one, sets it on the bench and takes a knob of ginger in her hand. She rubs it in small circles, the way you would polish a spoon. In about ten seconds there is a soft little mound of paste on the teeth and a ring of juice around it. She keeps going until the knob is a stub the size of a thumbnail. Her fingers never come anywhere near the plate.

“People always flinch when I get down to the last bit. Then they see there’s nothing on that plate that can cut them.”

She is 69. For 34 years, from 1987 until she retired in 2021, she was a nurse in the emergency department of the hospital in Clare. Nights, weekends, every public holiday you can think of.

“I can tell you what a kitchen does to people,” she says. “Knives, oven burns, and graters. Always the graters. And always the last couple of centimetres, when the ginger or the cheese gets small and your knuckles take its place.”

The plates started as one plate, made for one little girl. Less than a year later, strangers ask her about them at the supermarket. And because the kiln she fires them in has been fired for the last time, this is the first time they are for sale online.

Thirty-four years of Christmas shifts, and the one injury she saw every single December

Every nurse in that department knew the pattern. The fortnight before Christmas, when half the district was cooking for a crowd in the heat, the waiting room filled with the same small injury: a sliced fingertip, a knuckle with the skin scraped off. “Box graters, those little rasps, mandolines,” Kaye says. “People cooking in a hurry, tired, the ginger getting smaller and smaller. A grater doesn’t care that you’re tired.”

Most of them were not serious. But she stitched, glued and bandaged hundreds of them, and she noticed something. Nobody ever got hurt on the first half of the ginger. It was always the end.

That is the part every grater in your drawer gets wrong. A metal grater has edges, and edges cut whatever comes near them: the ginger, and then you. And fresh ginger is stringy. The fibres wrap around the blades, clog the holes, and half of what you grate stays stuck inside the grater instead of in your pan.

A box grater after one knob of ginger: fibres jammed in the holes, a stub too small to hold, and the plasters close by.

Kaye knew all that. Her granddaughter didn’t.

Isla is six. Every December she and Kaye make the ginger nuts Kaye’s own grandmother made, with real grated ginger, not the powder, and the ginger and garlic marinade for the Christmas prawns. Last Christmas Isla wanted to do “the grating part” herself. Kaye turned away for one second to check the oven. When she turned back, Isla was holding the box grater with one hand and her knuckles with the other, and trying very hard not to cry.

“It was a scrape, nothing more. But I’d seen a thousand of those, and I thought: not this child, and not at my bench.”

When she retired, Kaye signed up for a pottery class at the community centre, then bought a second-hand wheel and set it up in her workroom. Two winters later she was throwing and painting her own plates there. That night after the baking, she sat down with a pencil and drew a plate with no edges at all: a patch of small, rounded, glazed ceramic teeth in the middle, like the old ceramic graters cooks in Japan have used for centuries, and room around it for the juice.

Kaye throws every plate on her wheel and cuts every ring of teeth by hand. The height of the teeth is the one thing she won’t let anyone change.

She threw the first plates on her wheel and cut the teeth by hand, ring by ring, with a small wooden tool. It took twelve tries. Too sharp, and the teeth shredded the ginger into wet strings. Too flat, and the ginger just slid around. On the twelfth plate the teeth felt like a cat’s tongue under her thumb, and the ginger turned into paste. Her own little kiln only holds four plates, so she fired them in the big kiln of Col Dunstan, a potter in Mintaro she knew from the market.

Isla named it the first arvo. She stood on her stool at the bench, rubbed a knob of ginger on the yellow plate until her arm got tired, and announced she had made “ginger butter”. She has grated every knob of ginger in Kaye’s kitchen since, and this December she has already announced that the grating part is hers. No tears.

Kaye took two plates to her market stall that autumn, mostly as a joke. A woman bought both before nine. The next market day there was a queue.

They got around by word of mouth. Visitors took them home to Adelaide and Melbourne and wrote asking for more, so Kaye started posting a few boxes a week. Until now there was no shop and no website, just a trestle table in Burra and a shoebox of addresses on the kitchen windowsill.

What makes Kaye’s plate different

Most of us grate ginger and garlic the same way: a box grater, a metal rasp, or a garlic crusher that leaves half the clove behind in the basket. All three have the same problem. Metal edges cut, and the closer you get to the end, the closer they get to your fingers.

“A blade slices,” Kaye says. “These teeth don’t. They tear the ginger open and let the fibres go. You can rub your thumb over them all day.”

That is the whole idea. You hold the ginger or the garlic clove in your fingers and rub it in small circles. The teeth turn it into a smooth paste, and the juice runs into the little channel around them instead of onto the bench. The stringy fibres stay behind on the teeth, so they don’t end up in your tea or your stir-fry. When you’re done, you scrape the paste off with a spoon and rinse the plate under the tap.

“I didn’t invent this. Cooks in Japan have grated on ceramic for hundreds of years. All I did was make one that a six-year-old can use and her grandmother wants on the table.”

That is also why so many of the cheap copies online don’t work, she says. “The teeth are either sharp enough to cut or so low the ginger just slides. Then people say it doesn’t grate and it ends up in a drawer.” Kaye cuts every ring of teeth by hand at the same height, and she checks every plate with a knob of ginger before it goes in a box.

She is just as blunt about what it can’t do. The plate is 11.7 centimetres across, the size of a saucer. It handles a knob of ginger, a few cloves of garlic, a nutmeg, the zest of a lemon or a little parmesan. “If you’re making coleslaw for forty, keep your box grater,” she says. “This is for the small things. The small things are where people get hurt.”

And she won’t make promises about your health. “Fresh ginger is fresh ginger. I can’t make it do anything it doesn’t already do,” she says. “What I can do is get every last bit of it off the knob and keep your knuckles out of the recipe.”

Some of them came back to the market just to say thank you

Kaye keeps a shoebox of notes people have left at her stall. She pulls out a card from September and reads it out loud.

“That one is on my fridge,” Kaye says. “That’s who they’re for. Not for a shelf. For somebody’s kitchen bench.”

The plates come in five designs, all of them Kaye’s: Golden Sun, the yellow one Isla used that first arvo; Blue Vine, with its turquoise scrolls; Ripple, with loose arcs like rings on a dam; Cornflower, with blue blossoms and green sprigs; and Poppy Red, with a red centre and little blue fans around the rim.

Golden Sun, Blue Vine, Ripple, Cornflower and Poppy Red, from the last firing in Col’s kiln.

This is what’s left

Col Dunstan is 80. In October he fired his big kiln one last time and told Kaye that was it. His shoulders won’t let him lift the shelves anymore, and nobody in his family wants the pottery. Kaye’s own kiln holds four plates at a time.

So most afternoons now go to packing. The plates come down off the shelves in the workroom, each one gets a knob of ginger rubbed across it, and then it is wrapped in paper. A note on the window says how many are left. Kaye crosses the number out every evening and writes a new one.

The last plates from Col’s final firing. Every one is tested with fresh ginger before it is wrapped.

What’s left comes to just over a hundred plates. Kaye has looked for another kiln big enough to fire her plates the way Col’s did. So far she hasn’t found one, and she won’t sell a plate she hasn’t tested.

“I could keep them in a cupboard and hand them out as presents for the next ten years,” she says. “But they’d sit in a cupboard while people are grating their knuckles for Christmas. That makes no sense to me.”

So she set one flat price for what’s left: A$65 a plate, down from the A$105 they sold for at the market. “I’m not doing this to get rich,” she says. “I want them in kitchens before the Christmas cooking starts. Half the people at the market bought them as presents anyway.”

Her daughter Kristy, Isla’s mum, is the one who put them online. “Mum makes the plates,” she says. “I answer the emails.”

Small circles, no pressure. The paste stays on the teeth, the juice runs into the channel, and the fingers stay well above it all.

Col’s kiln is cold for good. When the plates from the last firing are gone, there won’t be any more.

What customers say

Where to get one of Kaye’s plates

The plates are only available through Kaye’s own little shop, which Kristy runs for her. It is the only place to get the real plates from Col’s last firing.

Col’s kiln won’t be fired again, and what’s left is all there is

“If I find another kiln that fires them properly, maybe there’ll be more one day,” Kaye says. “But not like these. These came out of Col’s kiln.” When the last plate from the October firing is gone, the shop closes.

Payment and shipping: The shop takes all major cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Every plate is wrapped by hand and dispatched within 1 to 2 business days. Every order comes with Kaye’s 90-day money-back guarantee.

Where Kaye always wanted them to end up: on the bench during the Christmas cooking, with a small helper close by.

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DISCLOSURE: The owner of this site has a material connection to the products shown on this page. Please review the full returns policy before ordering. Testimonials reflect individual experiences and results may vary. This plate is a kitchen tool for grating food; it does not treat or prevent any condition. Ceramic is breakable; hand washing is recommended. Images are for illustration; because each plate is finished by hand, the final product may vary slightly.

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