Ten years ago, potter Clyde Gobble was pondering a problem with preparing bacon, his favorite breakfast food. It was the strips swimming in the grease congealing in the pan that bothered him, not to mention unexpected grease missiles splattering out every which way.
Gobble, who passed away in 2014, had always been admired for his ability to create functional items with an artistic flair at his Abbots Creek studio in Lexington, North Carolina. He’d already popularized a ceramic chicken roaster — a bulbous, oval-covered pot embellished with mushroom-shaped handles that not only kept the chicken from drying out but added a distinctive piece of art to the kitchen collection.
Tackling the bacon problem, Gobble gave the world the ceramic bacon cooker. It looks like an overgrown cup sitting on a large, high-rimmed saucer. Bacon is draped over the side of the cup — insiders call it a well — with one half inside the vessel and the other half outside. As the bacon cooks in a microwave, typically a minute per strip, the grease runs down into the well, passes through a hole at the bottom, and collects in the saucer. “The bacon comes out perfectly crisp,” Gobble declared when he unveiled his invention. “It doesn’t pop, and the bacon’s not sitting in grease like in a pan.”
He delivered his first 450 cookers to Asheville’s New Morning Gallery, a Biltmore Village mainstay founded by the late John Cram. “As far as I know, we were the first to sell them,” says the gallery’s current manager, Sarah Marshall. “We had carried Clyde’s work in the past, and he wanted to know if we would test this new invention of his.”
The gallery soon became the epicenter of a bacon-cooker craze. Sarah estimated that the venue has since sold close to 30,000 of the cookers, now being sourced from various potters, and sales have yet to slow down.
In the beginning, she remembers, “It was crazy. … People were so curious about how it would work, and once they tried it, we received phone orders for multiple cookers that they wanted to send to friends.” Marshall was one of the early cooker adopters, and continues to use hers at least once a week. “The bacon cooks so well in the microwave,” she says. “It’s better than pan or oven frying.”
Sue Salvaterra Hintz at Salvaterra Pottery in Weaverville is one of New Morning’s suppliers and was working one recent morning to fill the gallery’s latest order for 90 cookers, as well as 35 orders placed through her website, where the cookers are a bestseller among the more than 70 products her studio offers. “They fly out the door faster than we can make them,” says Hintz, whose website has a demo video of the cooker.
Inevitably, knock-offs have proliferated online, from Amazon to Etsy, but few have the combination of artistry and utility that marked Clyde Gobble’s creativity. He once said he liked to make items “to live with, to cook with, to eat and drink out of, not put up on a shelf to look at.”
New Morning Gallery (7 Boston Way in Biltmore Village) carries a wide selection of Gobble-inspired ceramic bacon cookers on its website and in store. For more information, see newmorninggallerync.com.