The Charming, Vintage Kitchenware To Keep An Eye Out For At Your Local Thrift Shop

Vintage items are the pieces are the best way to personalize your kitchen –  especially if you're working on designing the retro kitchen of our dreams. Even if kitchen design trends come and go, vintage treasures are never outdated. Plus, it's exciting to hunt for them — and you can usually buy them at a bargain. Lately, there's an especially charming item to add to your list of best finds for a vintage kitchen: pie keepers. But not just any pie keepers, the beautiful and artistic pie keepers from Caldas da Rainha in Portugal. 

Pie keepers are ceramic pie covers, often sold as a set with pie plates. They maintain a pie's freshness by locking out air and moisture, which will quickly turn a crust soggy and begin to spoil fillings with bacteria over time. If you make pies, you likely have some form of this, but modern pie keepers have gotten, frankly, boring. They're often plastic, clear containers with a solid-colored lid. The reason so many people are re-embracing vintage kitchen items is to find more decorative versions of the staples we need and cozy up our kitchens — and Caldas da Rainha pie keepers do just that. 

Caldas da Rainha pie keepers are a specific style known as "louça das Caldas," and they are decorative in the most stunning way: the Portuguese tradition of fashioning these ceramic sets to look like pies themselves, or collections of other fruits or foods. If you peruse flea markets, antique and vintage shops, secondhand stores, and resale sites like Etsy and eBay, you may be lucky enough to stumble upon one.

Caldas da Rainha is a beautiful spa town in Portugal, and it's a longtime hotbed of ceramic artistry dating back to the early 1800s. This sparked because of the very clay-rich soil in the area, which artisans began making kitchenware with. Over time, these craftspeople began making both purely decorative pieces and very useful pieces — but even those everyday staples were gorgeously sculpted and vibrantly hued. The pie keepers are a shining example. Meant to keep pies fresh, these beautifully glazed dish-and-cover sets come shaped as cherry, strawberry, blueberry, and apple pies, while others are shaped like giant apples, pumpkins, and other fruits. 

In the mid-20th century in America, colorful accent pieces to liven up kitchens became in-demand, as they are again now. From the 1960s on, these elaborate pie keepers would have been popular — both useful and perfect for displaying — and by the '90s, people were especially interested in country-chic pieces, a bill the Caldas da Rainha ceramic pie keepers also fit. Today, if you regularly peruse secondhand markets, shops, or sites, you may come across one — but there are some things you should look for to make sure its the real deal. 

When you come across a piece that you suspect is from Caldas da Rainha, you'll want to check to see that any keeper you find was actually made in Portugal; they're usually stamped on the bottom. They may have come from individual shops or artisans, but one brand to look for is Sanor Ceramica – which resell online for more than $100. These are true statement pieces to treasure, and you shouldn't pass them up if you find them for a bargain.