What Is a Salt Keeper, Salt Crock or Salt Server?

They are the same object. Salt keeper, salt crock, salt pig, salt cellar and salt server all describe a small pot of loose salt kept within reach of the pan, and the shops selling them swap the words freely. Type what is a salt keeper into a search box and the answer comes back wearing a different word: Cole and Mason sells its Strethall ceramic jar at a web address ending in ceramic-salt-keeper, then titles that same page a salt pig.

Two things do vary between real jars, and the noun on the label predicts neither: the opening, and whether there is a lid. Read those two off the listing photograph and you will know more than any of the five names will tell you.

What is a salt keeper, and does any maker use that name?

A salt keeper is a pot of loose salt kept beside the cooker, and the phrase belongs to shops rather than to the people who make the pots. Houseland's own listing is titled a salt cellar and then describes a speckled ceramic body with a bamboo lid, which is the object rather than the label. Across the maker and retailer pages I opened for this piece, keeper never turned up as a manufacturer's product name. It turned up in web addresses and page titles, which is where a shop puts the words customers actually type.

• Cole and Mason's page sits at an address ending ceramic-salt-keeper and is titled Cole and Mason Strethall Ceramic Salt Pig, SKU H822136, at $29.95.
• Marcel's Culinary Experience titles the Emile Henry jar Emile Henry Clay Salt Pig, French Ceramic Salt Keeper, putting two of the five names in one line for a single item with a published capacity of 9.5 oz.
• Kitchen Bits lists Le Creuset item 26078 at an address ending lc-salt-keeper-sage, under the flat title Salt Crock, Sage, at $65.00.

That is search coverage, not deception: one page has to answer four or five queries, so it carries four or five nouns. The cost falls on the shopper, who reasonably assumes five words mean five products.

Is a salt crock different from a salt pig?

No, and the reason is that pig and crock are the same word in two dialects. A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue defines pig as "a vessel, as a jar, pot, pitcher or the like, usu. of earthenware; a crock", with quotations running from 1488 to 1697. The Scottish National Dictionary entry, first published in 1968, carries the sense forward with quotations dated 1701 to 1966 and gives it as "a pot, jar, pitcher, crock in gen." So a salt pig is a salt crock, spoken in Scots or in the dialect of Northumberland, which the older dictionary names as the only modern territory the word survived in.

That also settles a story you meet on half the pages selling one, where the snout explains the name, sometimes via a supposed clay called pygg. The dictionaries that record the word mark its origin as unknown and attest the vessel sense in 1488, centuries before anyone moulded a pot with a hooded lip. The animal came to the word, not the other way round.

Le Creuset chose the plain English half of the pair and sells a stoneware Salt Crock. The retailer copy on Kitchen Bits then says the quiet part out loud: Le Creuset's Salt Crock, also known as a Salt Cellar or Salt Pig. Three names, one SKU, in one sentence.

Why is it called a cellar if it never went in one?

Because the second half of the word was never the English word cellar. The Online Etymology Dictionary dates salt-cellar to the mid 15th century and calls it a redundant formation: salt, plus saler, which by itself already meant salt-cellar in the mid 14th century and came from Old French salier, a salt box. Once English speakers lost the link between saler and salt, they tacked salt back onto the front and let the tail drift towards the unrelated word cellar. Read literally, salt cellar means salt salt-holder.

Museums keep the older, shorter habit. The Metropolitan Museum of Art catalogues a silver Standing Salt of about 1700, roughly 5.9 in tall, a Trencher Salt made between 1690 and 1710, and an 1846 piece filed under the single word Salt. Standing meant it stayed at the head of the table while small ones were passed; trencher meant it sat beside one place setting.

Collectors kept a vocabulary of their own. Open Salt Collectors, a US club, states on its site that open salts is "a phrase coined by collectors to describe salt dishes that are not shakers", and that members also say salts, salt cellars or salt dishes. The same page dates the peak of individual open salts in the US to roughly 1880 to 1920, ending in 1911 when free-flowing table salt arrived and the shaker took over.

Does salt server mean a different object?

It leans towards one particular shape, but it is a hint rather than a rule. RSVP International sells the Endurance Salt Server With Spoon, SKU ALTN: a glass insert in a polished stainless steel base, a flip-top lid with a silicone gasket, a steel spoon, and a published capacity of 8 ounce. That is the shape the word tends to land on, a lidded table piece in glass and metal rather than a bare ceramic pot.

Then the maker's own page undercuts it. That product's web address ends wholesale-salt-cellar-w-spoon-4oz while the description says 8 ounce, so the URL disagrees with the title about the name and the size at once. If a manufacturer cannot keep those straight on one page, do not read either as a specification.

Which name should you search with?

Search salt cellar first, because it carries the volume and the widest catalogue behind it. Our own keyword research for this batch put salt cellar at roughly 100,000 US searches a month at high competition; the other four are side doors onto the same shelf. What each word tends to return is consistent enough to use, though nobody enforces it.

One practical consequence: if a shape matters to you, searching the name will not find it. Searching salt pig and then filtering by photograph will.

What actually differs between two of these jars?

Two things differ, and neither one is announced by the name: the opening and the lid.

1. The opening. One family has a permanent mouth cut into the side or shaded by a hood, so the salt is always exposed and always reachable with one hand. Emile Henry describes its 9.5 oz pot as having an angled opening; Le Creuset sells its crock on a large side opening. The other family is a plain wide top with nothing over it until you put something there.
2. The lid. Either the jar has one or it does not, and if it does, the questions are what it is made of and whether you can lift it with a wet or oily hand. A lid is a cover against dust and splashes, not a seal, and no listing in this article publishes a moisture rating of any kind.

Those two features decide how the jar behaves at the hob. An open mouth is built for the pinch, which is why chefs reach into a dish rather than a shaker. A lid trades a fraction of a second of access for a cover you can leave on.

Houseland's Salt Cellar With Spoon is squarely in the lidded family: a speckled ceramic body with a bamboo lid, 4.1 in (10.5 cm) wide and 3.6 in high, with a 3.2 in (8.2 cm) spoon, sold as 1 Jar, a 2 Jar Set or a 3 Jar Set. Capacity is published as about 300 ml per jar, which converts to roughly 10 fl oz. On that measure it sits at the roomier end of the shelf, since Emile Henry publishes 9.5 oz, RSVP 8 ounce and Totally Bamboo 6 oz for their equivalents.

From the shop

Salt Cellar With Spoon, Ceramic Seasoning Jar With Bamboo Lid

Speckled ceramic body with a bamboo lid, about 300 ml per jar, 4.1 in (10.5 cm) wide and 3.6 in high, with a 3.2 in (8.2 cm) spoon. Sold as 1 Jar, a 2 Jar Set or a 3 Jar Set.

View the ceramic salt cellar — 3 set sizes & current price

Is a salt dipper a real name for anything?

Of the five labels, salt dipper is the only one I could not trace to a maker or to a collectors' club. The trade word for the dish is salt dip, and the word for the utensil is salt spoon. Open Salt Collectors list salts, salt cellars and salt dishes as their generic terms and do not use dipper at all. The Metropolitan Museum catalogues its miniature spoons as Salt Spoon, with silver examples dated 1790 to 1806 and 1874 to 1878.

Where dipper does appear, it is a product name rather than a category. Totally Bamboo's item 20-8562 is titled Little Dipper Salt Cellar with Salt Spoon, 6-Oz. Capacity, at $16.99. It sits at a web address that calls it a salt box, under a shop menu heading that calls it a salt cellar, and a customer review on the same page calls it a salt box again. Four labels, one bamboo pot, and the buyer picked a fifth of their own.

So salt spoon is the word that finds the small scoop. Open salt or salt dip lands you in antiques listings for table dishes; salt cellar finds the modern ones.

What I'd do

Stop reading the noun and start reading the picture. Every one of these names has been applied to a lidded jar and to an open crock by somebody selling one, so the label carries no information you can act on. The opening and the lid do, and both are visible in the first photograph on any listing.

Search salt cellar to see the whole shelf, then narrow by shape rather than by word. For one-handed access while the pan is going, look for the hooded side mouth whatever the page calls it. For a cover on the counter, look for a lid that lifts clear in the photograph. Then read capacity from the description, not the title, because that is where the RSVP page and its own address disagreed.

Buying more than one is where vocabulary stops mattering and counting starts. Houseland sells the jar singly and in sets of two and three, which is the same arithmetic as working out how many jars fit a rack, and the same question behind whether decanting is worth the trouble. The rest sits in the kitchen and home collection.

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