This special piece brings together two of my favorite makers in an unexpected way.

Type	Daubière with brass handles attached with three copper rivets and flat-top lid with copper ear handles
French description	Daubière avec anses en laiton munies de trois rivets en cuivre et couvercle plat avec oreilles en cuivre
Dimensions	46cm wide by 23cm wide by 23cm tall (18.1 by 9.1 by 9.1 inches)
Thickness	3mm at rim
Weight	13484g (29.7 lbs) pan only; 16420g (36.2 lbs) with lid
Stampings	E. DEHILLERIN 18 RUE COQUILLIERE PARIS; P. LEGRY 2 R. DE MIROMESNIL PARIS;  A.P.
Maker and age estimate	Dehillerin, 1890-1910s?
Source	Ebay (lazylou2002)

I love me a big daubière. As long-time VFC readers can attest, my fascination with these slab-sided copper boxes has nothing to do with their present-day utility, resale value, nor any such practical consideration. For me, the flat planes of these pieces really showcase the beauty of copper. Whether it’s a recent-era Mauviel piece with crisp and scintillating surface hammering or a warhorse softened by more than a century of use, each example brings me something to appreciate. This one brings together the best qualities of an antique French daubière: monumental size, solid construction, excellent physical condition, and what looks to be an interesting provenance.

A daubière is a peculiarly French pan intended for the daube, a dish with no specific recipe or definition, but is usually understood to incorporate beef, lamb, pork, or chicken, accompanied by similarly sturdy vegetables, left to cook for several hours in a few inches of broth or wine sauce in a well-sealed pot. This is, of course, a classic braise, and you certainly don’t need a box-shaped daubière to make it — all it takes is a cooking vessel of appropriate size with a tight-fitting lid to keep the moisture inside while the dish simmers away on the stovetop or in the oven. But up to the 19th and even early 20th century, many French families cooked with an open kitchen hearth. The daubière and its antecedent, the long-handled braisière, were designed to be tucked into the hearth surrounded on all sides with hot coals (in French, les braises) as a sort of proto-oven. With a daubière, a clever chef (or thrifty housewife) could cook a large cut of tough meat over several hours and then portion out the daube — tender meat and succulent vegetables fused with a deeply-flavored sauce — over the course of the following week. The high walls of the daubière kept kitchen ashes away from the food inside and created plenty of interior space for the cook to make the most of expensive meat and the time-consuming process to prep it. Every mid-19th century French cookbook I’ve looked at simply assumes that the chef has at least one daubière at her disposal.

But towards the end of the 19th century, kitchen hearths began to give way to cast-iron stoves. It was no longer necessary to half-bury the daubière in the fireplace — a stove’s oven delivered clean and reliable all-around heat such that any lidded pan could do the job. But the style did not vanish: I see braisières and daubières designed for hearth cooking — look for long handles and lids with raised rims to hold coals — giving way to more compact designs with side handles and flat lids. And as far as my research informs me, daubières have been in continuous production since the 19th century, and a daubière made in 2024 by Mauviel is unchanged in design from the same item in Jacquotot’s catalog in 1925.

Why the persistence? My theory is that the daubière and its fellow bulky single-purpose vessels in the French batterie de cuisine en cuivre such as the turbotière, poissonière, and jambonnière evoke the rectitude of French cooking technique. We are more accepting of expediency in the present day, but I think we maintain a reverence for the archaic discipline that requires, for example, that a sole meunière that is not drawn perfectly cooked and intact from its poaching broth be discarded as ruined. With this mindset, a dedicated oblong poissonière with its civilized lifting tray is much to be preferred over, say, my own experience of delving with a fish spatula within the opaque depths of a broth-filled sauté pan, accidentally severing the last filet, and then hastily camouflaging the break with some artful arrangement on the plate and an extra layer of sauce.

But the value of a good copper daubière is not simply nostalgic: while it is no longer the only way to achieve a good braise, it is just as functional today as it ever was. The core elements of a braise are simple and, I would argue, not uniquely French: meat, vegetables, and flavorings, gently cooked, given time to fuse together without drying out. That’s just good cooking. If you can find the space in your kitchen for a daubière, I would love to hear how you’ve used it.

This beautiful daubière is a special one — it’s quite large and well-made, measuring 3mm thick at the rim. The body of the pan weighs almost 13500g, just under 30 lbs. I bought it for its heft and also because it carries the stamp for Legry, one of my favorite antique chaudronneries active in Paris from 1896 into the 1930s.

At 46cm (18.1 inches) along its long access, this is a restaurant-scaled piece. The photo above provides some scale — this piece could accommodate an entire chicken, a leg of lamb, or a haunch of pork. This piece was beautifully restored and retinned by Erik Undiks at Rocky Mountain Retinning and the interior showcases his excellent technique.

Daubières are not complex pans. The body of the pan is just two pieces of copper: a rectangular base piece and a long strip of copper bent into four corners to serve as the sidewalls. The only change in construction over time is that while antique pieces such as this one are joined with dovetails (more correctly, cramp seams) that appear as yellow jagged lines around the base as shown below, more recent pieces are welded together with invisible seams around the sidewalls about an inch or so above the base. A welded seam is inherently stronger than a cramp seam, but a well-made cramp seam can nevertheless survive in fine watertight condition to the present day.

 

The side handles on this piece are classic French handgrips with copper rivets. The handles are cast brass that show some file marks that I believe indicate some finishing work to remove roughness from the casting. The interior rivet heads are flattened against the interior.

 

The lid is a classic couvercle à emboîtage — a cap-like lid that slides down over the top of the pan to create a tight seal. This is essential to braising, which needs to keep moisture inside the pan so that the food does not dry out. Note also that the lid has an indentation about an inch or two around the perimeter — this is a condensation trap to ensure that moisture on the inside of the lid drips back down onto the food.

 

The lid has two side handles in a style that in French are called oreilles — ears. To make an oreille handle, a piece of metal with a 90-degree bend is fastened with rivets to create a protruding flange. This is a compact style of handle that I see on smaller pieces such as pommes Anna pans (in brass) and ice cream bombes and the like. The downside to these handles is that they do get quite hot during cooking and you need a side towel or pot holder to handle them. Oreille handles are rare on daubières in my experience — this is the only example I have seen.

And while they are perfectly serviceable handles, the craftsmanship is quite rough. The bottom edge of each oreille is irregular and unfinished — the copper looks like it was clipped with shears. This is… odd.

 

A close examination of the lid reveals what’s going on. The lid has a lovely clear stamp for P. LEGRY. 2 R. DE MIROMESNIL PARIS, but there is a second maker’s mark towards the center of the lid reading E. DEHILLERIN 18 RUE COQUILLIERE PARIS. Both stamps are shown below, outlined in red. And when I scrutinized the lid more carefully, I noticed something else: four faint marks in the surface of the lid, shown below outlined in black. Those, my friends, are four patched rivet holes. This lid used to have a top-mounted handle.

Below at left is the inside of the lid and you can see the holes more clearly. At right is a closeup of one set. The repair work is quite well done.

 

With this discovery, I was inspired to look more closely at the Legry stamp on the pan body. It has been applied at least three times in the same spot, and beneath it, again faintly, is a Dehillerin mark, the same version as on the lid.

 

 

At last this piece reveals its story to us! This is a Dehillerin daubière intact with its original lid. I believe the stamp in question was used as early as 1890 (when Eugène de Hillerin opened the store at 18 Rue Coquillière) into the 1910s or so, when I assess the store changed its text stamps to an oval cartouche style. Please note, this is a rough guess on my part — there are many Dehillerin stamps that, based on the craftsmanship of the piece, seem to me to be from the 1890s to 1910s, but that is the best estimate I can make. During this period, Dehillerin’s house-made copper and that of other makers all carried a Dehillerin stamp and I have not found a way to distinguish the work of one chaudronnerie from another. (It is even possible that Legry was one of those suppliers — Paul Legry purchased the extant chaudronnerie Duval in 1896, which suggests to me that he would have immediately had the means to begin producing copper under his own name.)

At some point, the owner of this piece took it to Legry to have the top-mounted lid handle removed and replaced with two side oreilles. Why? One possibility is that the original lid handle was damaged, but I do not think that was the case. If the cast brass lid handle experienced enough torque to damage it, I would expect the relatively soft copper of the lid itself to have experienced some deformation as well, but there is no sign of that. The patched rivet holes are perfectly smooth. Another possibility is that this adaptation was an attempt to give this daubière a couvercle formant plaque à rotîr, that is, a lid that could be inverted and used on its own as a roasting pan. However, the lid itself is not the right style for that — the condensation trap would never provide a flat surface, and furthermore, the oreille ears are not positioned correctly to be grasped when the lid is inverted.

The most likely explanation to me is that the owner of the pan went to Legry to retrofit side handles onto this pan’s lid for some practical purpose, and the most likely scenario to my mind would be to make this very large pan slightly smaller. With its lid it’s about 24 cm (9.4 inches) tall, and a protruding top handle would add another 4 to 5 cm (about 2 inches). Below is a photo of this pan just barely fitting into my conventional U.S.-made wall oven, and while I don’t have measurements of the oven compartments of French ovens of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I think it is safe to say they were smaller than the ovens we have today. This piece with its handle would have been a very tight fit.

The one remaining mystery for me about this piece is why the patching of the rivet holes on the lid was done so beautifully and seamlessly while the oreille handles are so roughly made. I would have expected more finished craftsmanship from Legry.

I bought this piece for its weight and for the Legry mark but my near-certainty that it is in fact Dehillerin does not diminish my appreciation for it. Dehillerin was formed in 1890 and Legry in 1896; my amateur research and speculation suggests that the Dehillerin stamp in question was in use from the 1890s until the 1910s or so, which therefore is my best guess for when this piece was manufactured. However, the three-line Legry stamp on this piece is a mystery to me. It is the only one of its kind I have seen; the version below on the right is the more common Legry mark, which I believe was in use from 1896 until the company incorporated as “Cuivrerie Legry” in 1922 and adopted a circular cartouche mark. I think it’s safe to assume the stamp on this piece was also prior to 1922, but I do not know exactly when.

 

So there you have it. Some mysteries are solved while some remain about this lovely daubière, which turns out to be mostly Dehillerin but also a little bit Legry. This is one of the things I love so much about this copper hobby — every piece has its story, sometimes told across its surface. I hope you enjoy finding that story as much as I do.