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2 days ago | Advertorial | Philippa Hendry

“I’ve said it at my stall for 37 years: your olive oil isn’t bad. Your bottle is.” — Why a 72-year-old Cornish potter is selling her last 216 hand-glazed oil dispensers at a special price, before her workshop closes for good.

Loveday Treloar can tell within ten seconds whether somebody will take one of her oil dispensers home. They pull the cork, sniff the empty dispenser, and then out it comes: “My olive oil always tastes a bit stale by the end.”

Loveday just nods. “That’s because it’s been sitting in the light,” she tells them. She has been saying it at her stall at the village craft fair every August since 1989.

Loveday is 72. For more than forty years she has thrown and glazed pots in a converted stone pigsty at the bottom of her cottage garden in St Agnes, a village of old tin mines and steep lanes on the north Cornish coast. This October she fired her kiln for the last time.

The Sunday the potatoes tasted of cardboard

Cornwall has been dug for clay and tin for centuries, and potters have worked along this coast for almost as long. Loveday grew up two miles inland. In 1971, at seventeen, she took a job wedging clay and packing kilns at a small pottery in St Ives, and she stayed fourteen years.

Her husband Jory was a fisherman out of Newquay. Every Sunday he made the same thing: potatoes fried in olive oil, poured from a tall clear bottle that stood on the windowsill above the sink, right where the afternoon light came in off the sea.

One Sunday in July 1989 he took a mouthful and put his fork down. “These taste of wet cardboard,” he said. The bottle was barely six weeks old. That same evening he reached past it for the salt, knocked it into the sink, and it broke in three pieces.

The old pigsty at the bottom of the garden

In 1985 Loveday bought a second-hand wheel and a small kiln and moved them into the old pigsty at the bottom of the garden, limewashed the walls and laid a slate floor. For the first few years she made mugs and pie dishes for the craft fair and the chapel Christmas sale.

After 1989, people started asking for “one like Jory’s.” She reckons she has made around 5,200 since. Each one takes about three hours of work spread over ten days: throwing the cylinder, pressing the dimples into the wet clay with her thumbs, pulling the little handle, pinching the lip, drying, the first firing, dipping the top in glaze and the second firing, when the glaze runs down on its own. Then she presses a cork into every neck by hand and fills each dispenser with water over the sink to check it pours clean.

What’s wrong with the bottle you’re using now

After 37 years at her stall, Loveday has heard every complaint there is about oil bottles. They come down to five:

1. 1The light gets in. Clear glass lets the daylight straight through to the oil. A few weeks on the windowsill, and good oil turns flat and stale. Jory called it cardboard.
2. 2It’s too tall to trust. Tall, skinny bottles are top-heavy. One sleeve, one elbow, and the hob is swimming in oil.
3. 3It leaves a sticky ring. The last drop always ends up running down the outside and onto the worktop, where crumbs and dust stick to it.
4. 4It’s wide open. A pourer with no cap lets in dust, kitchen grease and, every summer, fruit flies.
5. 5It hides in the cupboard. Plastic bottles are too ugly to leave out. So the oil goes behind a door, and you reach for the butter instead.

What 37 years taught her about an oil dispenser

Each of those five problems is the reason her dispensers look the way they do. And the first thing people write after theirs arrives is almost always the same: “It’s heavier than I expected.” That’s on purpose.

“The Thick Clay Body”: Thick, fired clay, glazed all the way round. No light gets through to the oil, so it can stay out on the worktop right where you cook.

“The Short, Flat Base”: About 15 centimetres tall and 8 wide, with the weight down low on a flat bottom. “Jory has knocked it with his elbow for thirty-seven years,” Loveday says. “It wobbles and sits right back down.”

“The Pulled Handle and Pinched Lip”: A small loop pulled by hand from the same clay, just right for one finger, and a lip she pinches into shape while the clay is still soft. The oil comes out in a thin, steady pour instead of a glug.

“The Real Cork”: A natural cork closes the neck after every use, so dust, grease and fruit flies stay out. Each dispenser holds about 400 ml.

Four glazes, and she never quite knows how they’ll run

Loveday dips only the top of each dispenser. In the kiln, at around 1,260 degrees, the glaze melts and runs down the sides on its own, so no two dispensers ever come out the same.

Porth Blue is the water in the cove below the village on a clear day. Sea Thrift is for the pink thrift that covers the cliffs every May. Sea Mist is the quietest of the four, the grey of the fog rolling in, mixed with ash from their own wood burner. And Cliff Heather is the deep purple of the heather on the cliff tops in August.

The morning her shoulder said enough

What Loveday will miss most are the early mornings: a mug of tea in the workshop, mist lying over the cliffs, the first ball of clay on the wheel.

Centring clay takes your whole body, leaned in through the right shoulder. Last spring that shoulder started to ache every single time. The doctor called it arthritis and said it would not get better.

In October she loaded the kiln one last time. There is nobody to take the workshop on. 216 oil dispensers are left, 54 in each glaze. In early December she closes the workshop for good, and the wheel goes to the art department of the secondary school in Truro. Orders will keep going out after that, until the last dispenser has gone.

“An oil dispenser belongs by the cooker, not in a china cabinet”

Hand-thrown, hand-glazed oil dispensers like these sell for £75 to £110 in craft galleries in St Ives and Truro. For her last 216, Loveday could ask that much, and nobody would blame her. She won’t.

She’s asking far less. She wants her last dispensers on real worktops this Christmas, next to real cookers, being used every day.

Loveday doesn’t use a computer. Her granddaughter Kerensa, 24, a trainee teacher in Truro, saw the full shelves after Sunday lunch. “Gran, you’ll never get 216 oil dispensers onto one trestle table,” she said, and spent the next weekend setting up the page where you can order one now.

What home cooks say about Loveday’s oil dispensers

Three questions people ask before ordering

Where can I buy one of Loveday’s oil dispensers?

Only through this page. Loveday’s dispensers are not sold on Amazon, Temu or in any shop.

How long will they be available?

Only while stocks last. The kiln has been fired for the last time, and there are 216 oil dispensers left across all four glazes. Once a glaze has gone, it’s gone for good.

What if it’s not right for me?

You have 90 days to try it at home. If you’re not happy, just send a short email and you’ll get your money back. No questions, no fuss.

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