Vintage Mid Century Egg Cups Set of Three 🥚 Green White Ceramic Dining Decor

Size: 2.5 x 2 inches ~

🥚 Break the Shell When You Finish, or a Witch Will Go to Sea in It

For centuries, people who ate a soft-boiled egg did one more thing before leaving the table. In parts of Ireland in the early 1800s, you pushed your spoon through the bottom of the empty shell, so that no witch could use it as a boat and no harm could come to the person who ate the egg. In Pembrokeshire, Wales, shells were crushed or burned, because witches were said to have crossed from Flanders in eggshell boats generations before. The idea was already old when Reginald Scot wrote in his Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584 that witches could "sail in an egg shell, a cockle or mussel shell, through and under the tempestuous seas," and older still in the first century, when Pliny the Elder noted that people broke their eggshells as soon as they had eaten.

Every one of those eggs sat in a cup like these. This is a set of three vintage mid-century ceramic egg cups, each a little tulip on a pedestal, sprayed from green at the rim to white, ready for a soft-boiled egg and a spoon.

🌷 The Cups

Each cup is shaped like a tulip bud just opening. The bowl rises in soft vertical petal panels to a scalloped, petal-edged rim, then narrows into a short stem and a flared, paneled foot. The outside of the bowl is airbrushed in a gradient: green at the rim melting into white toward the base. The depth of the green runs from a fresh apple green on one photographed cup to a pale mint on the other. The stem and foot are glazed a glossy, deeper moss green that picks up the petal ridges, and the inside of each bowl is a smooth cream. The undersides of the feet are hollow and carry no maker's mark or stamp. The same tulip mould turns up in pink, yellow and blue elsewhere, and one seller's pair still wears small red foil paper labels saying Made in Japan - a paper label comes off easily, and these have none.

The cups measure approximately 2.5 inches tall and 2 inches across the rim, sized for a single egg. The photographs show two of the three cups; all three are included.

🏺 An Old Shape for an Everyday Ritual

The egg cup has one job, holding a boiled egg upright so the top can be tapped off and the egg eaten from the shell with a small spoon, and it has been doing that job for a very long time. A silver egg cup was found in the ruins of Pompeii, buried by Vesuvius in AD 79. Since then egg cups have been made in silver, porcelain, pottery, glass, wood, Bakelite and plastic, in single cups like these and in every novelty shape a potter could think up.

Collecting them even has its own word: pocillovy, and its collectors are pocillovists, from Latin words for a little cup and an egg.

🥄 Big End or Little End

The soft-boiled egg carries literary baggage too. In Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels of 1726, the empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu go to war over which end of a boiled egg should be broken first, the big end or the little end, and the "Big-Endians" become a byword for people fighting over trifles. Computer engineers still borrow Swift's terms, "big-endian" and "little-endian," for the order in which a machine stores bytes. It all started with an egg in a cup.

🎨 Mid-Century Color

The sprayed gradient is the heart of their look. Spraying glaze let a pottery blend one color softly into another across a whole piece, giving that cloud-like fade from green to white that plain dipped glazes and printed patterns could not. Paired with a sculptural flower form and a contrasting foot, it is the look of kitchens that wanted their breakfast things cheerful and modern.