Pattern: Solid Colors
Identifiers / Alternate Names: Various color shades, but all completely solid colored on the Pyrex item. Also known as: Primary Colors, Multi-Colored, Yellow Red Green Blue
Item Type: 500 Series Oven-Refrigerator Dishes Set
Years Manufactured: 1949 - ?
Values: Check below on Ebay for approximate prices
Sizes and ID#s: #501 (1.5 cup) #502 (1.5 pint) #503 (1.5 quart)
Original Box#s: 500

The Primary Colored Oven Refrigerator Sets, like the Primary Color Bowls, are very popular with collectors although they are fairly common. Introduced in the 40s some time after the Bowl set, the refrigerator dishes were very popular for their stackable nature and clear see through lids.

The clear lids, which varied some over the years (finer lines, areas of blank space, lack of ear handles), are often the first parts to chip or become damaged. Many times you’ll see a single piece of the larger 503 size refrigerator dish that has no lid, and often it’ll be mislabeled as a baking loaf pan. They way to clearly tell is by the numbers which are 501-503.

For the primary colored refrigerator boxes, it’s interesting to note that they started the trend of having 2 smaller #501 1 1/2 cup boxes be the same color, namely red. I’m not sure if this was the case for every single set made, but for the most part they come in sets of 4 (8 pieces including lids) with the 2 smallest being the same. I might have thought they would make the medium size box green and smaller ones be blue and yellow to match the variation in the mixing bowls. As it is, the #502 1 1/2 pint medium size is blue in this case, and the #503 1 1/2 quart is yellow.

Here’s an example of the 501 reds and 502 blues that we’ve collected so far:

Update 6/07: Whew, you probably saw the top picture already - yep, we completed our set finally. Interestingly, we bought every single piece separately over the course of several years. We could have shelled out to get the whole set together but just didn’t feel like it. More pics of the complete one:

For our set, the 501s and 502 dishes have the “old” lids, while the large 503 yellow one has the “new” lid (with lines across the entire dish). Also, on the yellow refrigerator the bottom is marked “0503″ instead of “503″. The smaller dishes are marked 501-B and 502-B. This makes us think that perhaps the yellow dish we got is newer.