Freshest of pepper mills

The 14th annual Wharton Esherick Thematic Woodworking Competition and Exhibition is an altogether modest and understated affair, staged in a few trophy cases in the intentionally cockeyed log cabin that, in Esherick's day (1887-1970), served as his garage.

It is situated a couple of dozen yards from Esherick's charmingly idiosyncratic studio-home on Diamond Rock Hill outside Paoli, and like everything else he fashioned, it is determinedly unstraight and original, in this case, its logs painted dark green, tipped on the ends with red like fingers dipped in blood.

To his acolytes, Esherick still reigns as the "Dean of American Craftsmen," and to woodworkers, and a legion of appreciators, his mischievous and wholly fearless melding of art and craft is irresistible: He designed the studio's swaybacked roof as an homage to the sagging barns of Pennsylvania's countryside; sculpted long-limbed monkeys to swing drolly from the rafters. His staircase is a sturdy mast, red-oak chunks fanned in big blades, screwing you upward.

Other years' competitions have invited woodworkers to craft, among other things, utilitarian kitchen objects including spoons that echoed the natural shapes Esherick celebrated, and cutting boards both plain (an almost Amish-looking slab of bird's-eye maple) and fanciful (a bloodwood and maple board fashioned to look like a porterhouse steak).

This year it was the turn of the pepper mill.

You can see the entries for yourself. The exhibition runs through the end of December. There's a satiric Dick Cheney Pepper Sprayer, shaped like a shotgun, and a feminine maple (twistable) calla lily vase, and a clever poplar mill modeled on an old hand pump.

But they are a sideshow to the curious homestead - Esherick's "autobiography" - now an intimate museum open for tours. And while they do the job (they all have working mechanisms), they don't quite manage the quiet grace of Esherick's 1945 original, a squat mahogany peasant of a mill, still on the shelf at his daughter Ruth's home next door.

The 2007 exhibition is called "Not the Same Old Grind." Which pretty much sums up the Esherick ethos - to confer whimsy and personality into everyday objects; to envision the Pinocchio in the block of wood.

His son Peter, 81, now lives in Orefield, northwest of Allentown. But he bunked for a while at the studio in the early '40s, "bacheloring with Wharton," as he calls him, who'd separated from Peter's mother, Lettie.

At his mother's near Media, he told me, the prosaic fare tended toward soups and stuffed peppers, (an excess of) canned salmon and eggplant and beans. Dinners could be heartier with Wharton - mackerel or steaks cooked in the big stone fireplace (and later a chest-level fireplace in the new upstairs kitchen). There were stews and salads and disasters: One day a pressure cooker blew its top, spraying the ceiling with applesauce napalm.

That new kitchen has a certain nautical quality, pots hanging in the rafters, the tight sink of hammered copper, a cutting board fitted to set in its mouth. There are sinuous salad forks. And a half-moon prow of a counter, still shining after all this time: Esherick had tried out a newfangled coating on it called polyurethane.

Peter did not follow his father's path. He became a mechanical engineer. But he dabbled with wood, and once made a pepper mill by recarving the sides of a store-bought one.

When that wore out, he found a new mechanism, bored a hole in a piece of cordwood, and shaped a mill that was bulbous at top, and tapered in the center "like a woman's waist."

He and his wife use it to this day: "It's an original," he said. "There's no other one like it."

A chip, indeed, off the old block.

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