| Summary: | The juice pot is a small covered cup which appeared during the first half of the eighteenth century, at a time when gastronomy was being transformed by the ‘new cuisine’, entailing a diversification of tableware. We know that these pots were presented grouped on a tray or in a bowl, but the historian of the arts of the table is confronted by the enigma of their functional role and their evolution, which transformed them in cream pots. Since the 1970s, the understanding of the juice pot, sometimes likened to the cream pot, sometimes considered as completely different, is complicated by the use of the word ‘juice’. On the basis of old recipe books, numerous authors supposed that the pot was intended for the gravies and sauces that guests drank or poured over their meal to ‘feed’ it, another term often found which also disorientates attempts at explanation. Then, the pot seems to have become a cream pot, the word ‘juice’ disappearing suddenly. But why, how and when, this was never called into question. Here we would like to clear up the misunderstanding by going back to the origins of the problem, and by explaining what the juice really was and what it was used for. This interpretation also offers the opportunity to formulate a hypothesis about the origin of the name of the ‘juice pot’, an apparently simple object but also a mysterious one.
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