From the September 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

Some of the very first cooking utensils I ever owned,’ the English cookery writer Elizabeth David wrote in 1969, ‘were orange-red cast-iron casseroles lined with white enamel.’ On a visit to Marseille in the 1930s she had bought five such pots, which seemed almost to mentor her as she learnt to cook in the ‘passage-kitchen’ of a basement flat in London. ‘Those little French casseroles did much to help me,’ she wrote. ‘Everything I cooked seemed to turn out right.’

David had, if unknowingly, been an early adopter of Le Creuset cookware outside France. The firm had started production only in 1925, at a newly built foundry in Fresnoy-le-Grand, a village in northern France chosen for its proximity to the rail routes that transported the iron, steel, coke and sand for the casting process. The centrepiece of the foundry was the vast melting pot in which the raw materials were transformed: the crucible, or le creuset.

Sand-cast iron pots had been manufactured in Europe since the early 18th century. In 1707 a Bristol-based foundryman, Abraham Darby, had patented a method for casting in iron that borrowed from Dutch techniques which used sand moulds to cast brass (his pots soon gained renown as ‘Dutch ovens’). But the innovation of Octave Aubecq and Armand Desaegher, the Belgian industrialists who founded Le Creuset, was to line iron cooking vessels with vitreous enamel. Their pots had all the benefits of iron – durability, good heat retention and even heat distribution – but they were also easy to clean and did not bequeath an unwelcome metallic flavour to your lunch.

Perhaps most significant, at least for the firm’s eventual ubiquity, was the decision to use coloured enamel. The early Le Creuset cocotte (casserole dish) had a red-to-orange gradient, dubbed ‘Volcanique’, as though the pot had been dipped in the very molten iron from which it was fabricated. Here was an object at once attractive and functional at a time when the kitchen was taking on a new prominence in domestic life. It could be used on the stove top or in the oven – but it could also be brought to the table.

To look through Le Creuset: A Century of Colourful Cookware (Assouline), a coffee-table book produced to mark the centenary of the firm, is to be struck by how consistent the design of its signature cocotte has been even while the brand has extended its product range and palette. Yes, the loop handle on the lid has given way to a resin or metal knob, but it is unmistakably the same sturdy, cheerful round pot. To acquire one now is to buy into the premise of a design that has endured and the promise that your own jazzy cauldron will last forever.

That said, perhaps the most interesting moments in Le Creuset’s history, at least from an aesthetic perspective, emerged from its occasional collaborations with established designers. In 1958, a few years after its expansion into the US market, the company worked with the Franco-American designer Raymond Loewy to create the Coquelle – a cuboid Dutch oven that, with its elongated form and wing-like handles, looks like a space-age cross between a punt and a loaf tin. For the Mama range, launched in 1972, the Italian designer Enzo Mari replaced the loop handles on the pots with downward-facing pommels, as though introducing an element of swordsmanship to the modern batterie de cuisine.

Ultimately, it was culinary circumstance backed up by savvy marketing that made Le Creuset a byword for cast-iron cookware. Its initial popularity in American and British markets coincided with the post-war fashion for ‘French provincial cooking’ as championed by David, Julia Child and others. An Enzo Mari cocotte owned by Child is now in the Smithsonian collections, along with the other contents of her kitchen.

By the 1960s David was one of the most influential advocates for the brand – and on the brand, too, if the legend that she persuaded Le Creuset to create its first blue range based on her beloved Gauloises packaging is true. Her shop on Bourne Street, which opened in 1965, was among its earliest stockists in London. She wrote a pamphlet, Cooking with Le Creuset (1969), that explained ‘the right pan for the job’ and offered recipes suited to the cocotte, doufeu, cassadou and other shapes of pot.

‘I could look at your kitchen,’ the food critic A.A. Gill wrote, ‘and the telltale Le Creuset pot would whisper that you sent out your wedding list in the late 1960s, that magical time when stews became casseroles.’ These days the firm markets itself not by playing on its Frenchness, or indeed Belgianness – any cuisine will do – but by releasing new colours available for a limited time. Recent colours include ‘nectar’, ‘bamboo’ and ‘nuit’ (‘inspired by the mystery of night’). They cook up storms on social media – but they still work in the oven, too.

From the September 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.