le pense-bête pour ne rien oublier …

The pense-bête à curseurs

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An enamel board with the household's shopping painted on and a cursor beside each line, slid across to mark what is needed. Curseur is that board, on a phone.

A pense-bête is a reminder: the word means, more or less, a thing that makes the mind think. A pense-bête à curseurs is one with cursors. It is an enamelled steel plaque for the kitchen wall, with the things a household buys painted on it in a column and, beside each line, a small slider that is pushed across when the thing runs out. Whoever goes to the shop reads the board, buys what is marked, and pushes the sliders back. Nothing is ever written down, and nothing is ever crossed out.

What it is

The plaque is sheet steel under vitreous enamel, fired at around 820 °C, which is why a good one is glassy, heavy and cold to the touch, and why the lettering has outlasted the kitchens it hung in. The list is the shop of its day, pain, lait, beurre, œufs, sucre, café, sel, savon, sometimes under a heading such as Ne pas oublier, Commissions or Liste des courses, with a few blank lines for the things the maker did not think of. The cursor varies: a slider in a rail, a tab that turns to show red, a hook that flips. The idea is the same in every case. The list is permanent; the state moves.

When, and where

Enamel plaques of every kind had their great period in France in the first half of the twentieth century and the decade after it, into the 1950s and 60s, and the kitchen boards belong to that span. The works that made them made everything else in enamel too. Japy, whose enamel began in 1824 around Montbéliard, and the Émaillerie alsacienne at Strasbourg-Hœnheim, founded in 1923 and closed in 1992, are two of the names behind French kitchen enamel of the period. Which works made which board is harder to say: many carry no mark, and a board sold today as ancien may be from the 1930s or from the 1960s. The honest listings say so.

The idea was not only French. In Britain a tin Household Wants Indicator was sold in the 1930s, with tabs that switch to show a red side when something runs low, a list that runs from almonds to wines, and on some the name of the Good Housekeeping Institute on the back; Charles Letts & Co, the diary makers, put their name to one. In Germany the Merktafel had its Schieber; in the Netherlands the boodschappenbord had its hooks, and Dutch and Belgian examples turn up lettered in French. Between the wars, it seems, every kitchen in Europe wanted the same thing: a list that did not have to be written.

How it was used

The board hung where the cooking was done, and the cook ran it. The last of the coffee went into the pot; the coffee cursor went across. The list was read on the way out of the door, and the marked lines were the shop. Back home, the sliders went back as the things went into the cupboard. Two people could keep the same board without a word between them, because the board was the word.

Why “curseur”

Curseur is the French for a slider: the runner on a slide rule, the pull of a zip and, later, the pointer on a screen. On the board it is the only moving part, which is why it gives the object its name. Curseur the app takes the name, the cursor and the notch. Its cursor is drawn rather than photographed, and it has two positions either side of a fixed notch: the notch is the mark the cursor's travel is read against, and it is the same by day on the ivory enamel and by night on the charcoal. That travel is the whole interface. You flick an item on when you need it and off when it is in the trolley, and the board keeps the rest. Why that matters is the subject of Toggle, don't retype.

What survives, and what to look for

They turn up at brocantes and on the auction sites, usually with the marks of a working life: enamel chipped at the corners and around the screw holes, rust where the steel shows, a slider or two gone.

  • Real enamel is glass on steel: cold, heavy, and it chips rather than scratches. A board that scratches is painted tin, and often a reproduction.
  • Reproductions are common and sometimes charming, painted boards lettered Le marché du jour, ne pas oublier with an arrow to flick to red, but they are decor from the last few decades, not the object.
  • The list dates the board better than the seller does: what a kitchen bought changes by the decade.
  • Every cursor present, and moving, is worth more than a perfect surface. The board was for using.

If you have one on your wall, we would like to see it: support@curseur.app.

Sources

Also

Toggle, don't retypeA shopping list you keep, not one you write: every item you buy has a state, and a shop is a set of flicks. Nothing is typed twice; the list never empties.