As you stroll through the Salt and Pepper Museum in Guadalest, on Spain’s Costa Blanca, you can’t help but smile at the display of twenty thousand pairs of fat chefs, ruby red tomatoes, guards in bear skins, The Beatles, Santa’s feet that sticking out of a fireplace, pistols and potatoes, a copy of the twins of salt and pepper shakers worn by Lady Diana, which are fortunately sealed, or their contents would have been scattered everywhere by shaking hands.
Andrea Ludden’s collection of more than forty thousand pairs, half in Guadalest and half in the family museum in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, began with the simple purchase of a pepper mill at a yard sale, shortly after he the family moved to the US, but they did not. It works!
“The first one didn’t work, so I bought a couple more. I used to put them on my kitchen window sill, and the neighbors thought I was building a collection. Nothing could have been further from my mind! Beautiful, and eventually I had about 14,000 on the shelves throughout the house, even in the bedrooms. So we decided to create a museum. “
It wasn’t until the 1920s, when Chicago-based Morton Salt added magnesium carbonate to their product, that it was possible to pour salt into a sealed container. “Morton’s development was the beginning of the salt shaker, but interestingly, it was the car that led them to become collectibles,” says Alex, Andrea’s son. “It was because people were able to travel more freely, whether for work or on vacation, that the souvenir industry emerged. Salt and pepper shakers were cheap, easy to transport and colorful and made an ideal gift. Imagine you live in a isolated town somewhere and your son or daughter brought you a set in the shape of the Golden Gate Bridge when they attended their annual home visit. It would not be used, it would be carefully stored away as a decorative item. This is how, in general, many of the first collections began “.
There is almost nothing you can imagine that has not been copied as a salt and pepper shaker, and many of them reflect the designs, the colors, the concerns of the time. For example, a kitchen from the 1940s will look totally different than kitchens from the 1990s, and it is by using these differences and the materials they are made of that we can get a sense of how people lived in a given moment.
But the world of salt and pepper shakers and wineries knows no borders; from the Cellini Saliera, cast in solid gold (and sometimes known as the ‘Mona Lisa of sculpture’), insured for $ 60 million, to the prosaic plastic red pepper, a robbery for just 75 cents at the local bargain shop , there is something for everyone.