The Craftsman’s Review ✦

Stories of Midwest Craft & Home

Advertorial · 2 days ago · By Tessa Kuehl

“He stopped asking for soup because he was tired of spilling it.” Why a 71-year-old Minnesota potter is selling her last soup bowls at a special price

Luetta Kranz has made dishes for other people’s tables for 49 years. The one she finally made for her husband turned into the most-asked-about piece at her market table. The market is closed for the winter, and about 240 bowls are left from what was her last big firing. Her shoulder won’t allow another. She is selling them until the end of November.

By the first week of November the cottonwoods along the Minnesota River are bare, and the Saturday market in New Ulm has packed up for the year. Luetta Kranz’s folding table is back in the old garage behind her house. The garage hasn’t held a car since the 1980s. Now it holds two potter’s wheels, a kiln and shelves that run to the ceiling.

She takes a bowl down from the top shelf. It is two dishes in one: a deep, round cup on one side, a curved plate wrapped around it on the other, and a loop handle on the outside of the cup. She ladles tomato soup into the cup, sets half a grilled cheese on the plate, hooks her thumb through the handle and walks the length of the studio with one hand.

The soup barely moves. The sandwich stays where she put it. She sets the bowl down on the workbench without a sound.

“People always grab it by the plate first. Then they try the handle, feel where the weight goes, and they get very quiet.”

Luetta has been at the wheel since she was 22. Forty-nine years of mugs, pie plates, casserole dishes and the odd wedding platter, most of them sold from the same folding table at the same Saturday market. By her own rough count she has made more than twenty thousand pieces.

“I’ve made dishes for half the kitchens in Brown County,” she says. “And I had never once made one for the man I’m married to.”

The soup bowl started as exactly that: one bowl, for one man. Eight months later it is the piece people stop her about at the post office. And with the market shut for the winter, this is the first time anyone can order one online.

What half a century at the wheel teaches you about a handle

Ask Luetta about handles and she will talk longer than you expect. “Everybody thinks the handle is the pretty part,” she says. “It isn’t. The handle is where you tell the weight to go.” A good mug carries well because its handle sits right beside the heaviest thing in it, the coffee. Put the handle in the wrong place and the mug tips toward your wrist every time you lift it.

Soup never got that treatment. Most soup bowls have no handle at all, or two little ears you pinch with your fingertips. The sandwich goes on a separate plate. So lunch means two dishes, two hands and usually a tray to carry them on.

“And a tray just gives everything room to slide,” she says.

Verlyn Kranz is 74. He carried the rural mail out of New Ulm for 33 years, and for most of that time he ate his lunch in the car with one hand on the wheel. A few years ago his hands started to shake. Not badly, he says. Just enough.

This past March, with snow still on the ground, Luetta watched him make the trip from the stove to his recliner with a bowl of chicken noodle in one hand and a plate in the other. Halfway across the living room the soup went over the rim and onto his wrist. He didn’t say a word. He set the bowl down on the end table, picked up the sandwich and said, “I’ll just have this.”

After that he stopped asking for soup.

“Forty-nine years I made dishes for other people’s tables. And my own husband had quietly given up on soup because he didn’t want me to see him spill it.”

She went out to the studio that same night. She threw a deep, round cup with a high wall, then a shallow plate that curves around one side of it like a crescent moon, and joined the two while the clay was still soft. Then the handle: a wide loop on the outside of the cup, big enough for a thumb and two fingers, set right beside the soup so the heaviest part of lunch hangs straight below the hand.

It took her twelve tries and most of April. On some the handle cracked off in the kiln. On others the cup was too shallow and the soup sloshed, or the plate was too flat and the bread slid off when the bowl tilted. “Forty-nine years at this, and that bowl still sent me back to the wheel eleven times,” she says.

Verlyn carried the twelfth one to his recliner the afternoon it came out of the kiln, thumb through the handle, the other hand free. He came back for seconds and carried those too. He calls it “the one-hander.” He hasn’t skipped soup since.

When the market opened in May, Luetta put two at the end of her table, mostly to see what people would say. A woman bought both before nine o’clock and came back the week after with her sister. By July there was a waiting list on a yellow legal pad.

Word got around the way it does in a town of 14,000. Lake people from the Twin Cities took bowls home and wrote asking for more, so Luetta started mailing a few boxes a week from the post office downtown. There was no shop and no website. Just the folding table, the legal pad and a coffee can full of addresses.

The trouble with soup and a sandwich

Most of us still eat soup the way our mothers served it: a bowl, a plate, a spoon and a careful walk to the table. For anybody whose hands aren’t as steady as they used to be, or who eats in a chair instead of at the table, that walk is the hard part.

Trays don’t fix it. A tray needs two hands and gives the bowl room to slide. Setting the bowl on the plate is worse, because the bowl rides on the rim of the plate and tilts at the first bump. A mug keeps the soup in, but there is nowhere to put the bread, and the crackers end up in your lap.

Luetta’s bowl does what a good mug does, for a whole lunch. The cup and the plate are one piece, so nothing slides against anything else. The handle sits where the weight is, so the bowl hangs level instead of tipping toward you. The high wall of the cup keeps the soup on its own side and the bread stays dry. And the wide, flat foot sits still on a lap tray, a TV tray or a side table.

“I didn’t invent soup and a sandwich,” she says. “Every diner in Minnesota has been serving that for a hundred years. I just put them on one dish with a handle you can actually hold.”

That is also why the cheap copies you see online let people down, she says. “They copy the shape from a picture. The cup’s too shallow, the handle is a little ring you can’t get your thumb into, or it’s on the wrong side and the whole thing pulls out of your hand.” Luetta lifts every finished bowl by the handle before it goes in a box. If it doesn’t hang level, it goes on the seconds shelf.

She is just as plain about what it can’t do. “It won’t fix his hands,” she says. “Nothing I make will. It just means lunch is one trip again, and he carries it himself.”

And it is still a hot bowl of soup. “Fill it a finger’s width below the rim and carry it like you mean it,” she says. Like everything she makes, it goes in the microwave and the dishwasher.

The bowls come in four glazes, each one dipped by hand: Prairie Cream, a warm speckled white; Barn Red, the color of the old barns on the road to Sleepy Eye; Minnesota River Blue, deep and glossy with a pale rim; and Sweet Corn Yellow, the color of August. Every glaze runs a little in the kiln, so no two bowls come out the same.

The notes that came back to the market table

Luetta keeps the cards people leave for her in a shoebox under the workbench. She pulls out one from September and reads it out loud.

“That one I keep on top of the pile,” Luetta says. “That’s why I make them. Not for a shelf. For somebody’s lunch.”

What’s left after the September firing

The market ended on the last Saturday of October. Luetta fired one more big kiln load in September for the fall crowds, and then the weather turned early. Two of the last Saturdays were snowed out before the pumpkins were even gone.

So most afternoons now go to packing. Each bowl comes down off the shelf, gets lifted once by the handle and is wrapped in brown paper. On the wall above the wedging table hangs a calendar with November 30 circled in red.

What’s left comes to about 240 bowls, and they are the last ones. Luetta’s right shoulder has been bothering her for two years; forty-nine years of centering clay wears a joint down. In October her doctor told her plainly: no more big firings and no more long days at the wheel.

“I could argue with him,” she says. “But it’s been worse every night since August. I’d rather these bowls go to people’s kitchens than sit on shelves I can’t fill again.”

So she set one flat price for what’s left: $49 a bowl, down from the $89 they sold for at the market. “I’m not trying to get rich off this,” she says. “I want them in kitchens before Christmas. Half the people at the market were buying them for their folks.”

Her daughter Marit is the one who put them online. “Mom makes the bowls,” she says. “I pack the boxes and answer the emails.”

She is selling what’s left until November 30, or until the last bowl is gone, whichever comes first.

What customers say

Where to get one of Luetta’s bowls

The bowls are only sold through Luetta’s own shop. It is the one place to get the real ones from this September’s firing.

On sale until November 30, while the September firing lasts

“This was my last big one,” Luetta says. “My shoulder won’t give me another.” On November 30, or sooner if the last bowl from September is gone, the shop closes.

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

Verlyn still carries his own lunch to the recliner every day at noon. “He tells everybody at church he’s the reason I’m so busy,” Luetta says. “He’s not wrong.”

DISCLOSURE: The owner of this site has a material connection to the products shown on this page. Please review the full return policy before ordering. Testimonials reflect individual experiences and results may vary. This bowl is a serving dish, not a medical or assistive device. Hot food can still spill or burn, so please take care when carrying it. Images are for illustration; because each piece is made and glazed by hand, the final product may vary slightly.

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