Antique gravy jugs

Gravy has been served from dedicated vessels since the early eighteenth century, and a great many of them survive. They are among the most affordable antiques in any saleroom, partly because so many were made and partly because a single boat orphaned from its dinner service has little decorative appeal on its own.

This is a field guide to the shapes you will meet, how to date them, and what to look at before buying. It is not a valuation service — attribution and worth are jobs for a specialist.

Boat, jug or argyll?¶

The vocabulary is loose and always has been.

• Sauce boat is the older and more correct term for the low, oval, single-handled vessel with a long drawn lip. Eighteenth-century inventories and silversmiths' records generally say sauce boat.
• Gravy boat came into common use later, as gravy became a fixture of the British dinner. The two words describe the same object.
• Gravy jug usually means a taller, more upright vessel with a rim-to-base handle — closer to a small milk jug than to a boat.
• Argyll (also spelled argyle) is a distinct form: a covered gravy vessel with a compartment for hot water, designed to stop gravy going cold between kitchen and table. See below.

For the shape's development and why it looks as it does, see gravy boats history.

The main forms¶

Ceramic makers followed the silver shapes closely, so a porcelain sauce boat of the 1760s often copies a silversmith's model of a few years earlier.

Materials¶

Sterling silver. The top of the market, and the easiest to date because British silver is hallmarked. Georgian examples by the well-known makers are collected in their own right.

Old Sheffield plate (roughly 1740s–1840s). Copper fused between thin sheets of silver and then rolled. It is not electroplate and should not be confused with it. Look for a seam where the sheet was wrapped, for a silver edge lapped over the rim to hide the copper core, and for warm pink "bleeding" where wear has exposed the copper beneath.

Electroplate (from around 1840). Silver deposited electrically onto a nickel or Britannia metal body. Usually marked EPNS, sometimes A1. Vastly commoner and far cheaper than either of the above.

Porcelain and bone china. The eighteenth-century English factories all made sauce boats; so did the nineteenth-century Staffordshire firms in quantity.

Earthenware. Creamware, pearlware, blue-and-white transferware and ironstone. This is where the affordable and genuinely usable pieces live.

Pewter and Britannia metal. Softer, greyer, and prone to dents and splits at the handle.

Dating from the marks¶

British silver¶

A fully marked piece of British silver carries a set of small punches, usually under the foot or on the rim:

• the standard mark — a lion passant for sterling;
• the assay office — a leopard's head for London, an anchor for Birmingham, a crown for Sheffield, and so on;
• a date letter, which gives the year once you know the office and its cycle;
• the maker's mark, generally their initials;
• a sovereign's head, present roughly between 1784 and 1890, showing duty had been paid.

Sheffield plate and electroplate¶

Old Sheffield plate is often unmarked, and where makers did mark it they were required to avoid anything resembling a hallmark. So a "silver" boat with no hallmark is not necessarily a fake — it may simply be fused plate. EPNS or A1 means electroplate, and dates the piece to 1840 at the very earliest.

Ceramics¶

Factory marks, pattern names and impressed numbers all help. Two broad rules are useful:

• The word "England" in a mark generally indicates 1891 or later, when goods imported into the United States had to show their country of origin.
• "Made in England" is generally twentieth century, as is "Bone China" used as a mark.

Neither rule is absolute, but both are quick ways to rule out an eighteenth-century date.

The argyll¶

The argyll is the most interesting object in this field and the one most often misidentified — it is frequently catalogued as a teapot, which it superficially resembles.

It is a covered gravy vessel with a double wall, a central tube, or a side compartment, filled with boiling water so that the gravy arrives at the table hot. Some versions took a heated iron billet instead of water. They appear from around the 1770s, in silver and in Sheffield plate, and the name is traditionally attributed to a Duke of Argyll — a story repeated everywhere and documented nowhere especially firmly.

If you are buying one, check that the water jacket does not leak, that the filler cap is present, and that the lid is the original and fits its seating. The same problem the argyll was designed to solve is still with us — see keeping gravy warm.

What to look for¶

On silver and plate¶

• Wear at the lip and foot rim, the two points that get handled and set down most.
• The handle join. Splits and old solder repairs are common where the scroll meets the body. Run a fingernail over it and look for a colour change.
• Erased armorials. A crest or coat of arms removed by scraping leaves a thinned patch that reflects light differently and sometimes shows a "ghost" of the original engraving. Press gently: a thinned base may flex.
• Later chasing. A great many plain Georgian boats were decorated with Victorian repoussé work. Collectors mark it down heavily. Tell-tale signs are decoration that runs over the hallmarks, or crispness inconsistent with the wear elsewhere.
• Pushed-out dents and a wavy rim.
• Re-plating, on Sheffield plate especially. It looks bright and even, hides the copper, and substantially reduces the value to a collector.

On porcelain and earthenware¶

• Hairline cracks. Hold the piece up to a bright light and look through it; tap the rim gently with a fingernail and listen. A sound piece rings, a cracked one thuds.
• Chips to the lip, the foot rim and the underside of the spout.
• Restoration. Old restoration is often invisible in daylight and obvious under an ultraviolet lamp, where filler and overpaint fluoresce differently from the glaze. A restored spout also feels slightly warmer and less glassy than the surrounding porcelain, and sounds dead when tapped.
• Crazing and staining. Fine cracks in the glaze that have absorbed gravy and tea over two centuries. Common, rarely fatal, effectively impossible to remove.
• Gilding wear on the rim, which cannot be restored without it showing.

Pairs, stands and ladles¶

Sauce boats were very often made and sold in pairs, one for each end of the table. A genuine, matched, same-date pair is worth considerably more than two comparable singles — sometimes several times more.

Be alert to a "married" pair: two similar boats of different dates or makers assembled to look like a set. Compare the hallmarks, the exact profile of the handle, and the weight in the hand.

Original stands and ladles are frequently lost. A boat with its matching stand is a better buy than the same boat alone, and a ladle should match in date, maker and pattern.

Using them¶

There is no reason not to serve gravy from an antique jug, with three caveats.

• Never put silver, plate or gilded ceramic in a dishwasher. The detergent will strip gilding and pit plate.
• Avoid restored ceramics for food. Fillers and overpaint are not food-safe and will not survive hot gravy.
• Be careful with old lead-glazed earthenware, particularly if crazed or damaged. Display it instead.

Warm the jug with boiling water before pouring, exactly as you would a modern one — see gravy boats.

Where to look¶

General salerooms and online auctions, where single boats are often lotted with other small silver and go cheaply. Antiques centres and fairs, where you can handle the piece, which matters more than any photograph. Charity shops, for Victorian transferware.

Buy the object rather than the attribution: a plain, honest, undamaged boat is a better thing to own than a distinguished one that has been re-chased, re-plated and restored.

See also¶

• gravy boats · gravy boats history · fat separators · keeping gravy warm
• history of the roast dinner · british roast gravy tradition