Just put it on a plate, mate
Some sixteen thousand years ago (cue music to ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’) early man discovered how to fire clay and the ceramics industry was born, ushering in the epoch of fine dining. No more making do with large leaves, no more picking your fried dodo’s wings off shards of seashells or from slivers of slate. Now one could gaze out over the pleistocene landscape from one’s cave entrance while enjoying a slab of mammoth ribeye served on a civilised plate.
Archeologists tell us that ceramics really took off big time back then with potters turning out a terracotta army of tableware; rivers of plates, fleets of gravy boats and crowds of tureens, heralding millennia of domestic disputes about whose turn it is to do the washing up.
But like the wheel, also a great new app in those distant days of disruptive technology, things appear to have gone full circle; plates have become passé. In today’s eateries the food arrives on a clip-board, a piece of MDF, in a watering can, a bed pan, a flower pot or a teapot. The teapot does not contain tea; it’s full of fish and ‘twice-cooked’ (read ‘leftover’) chips.
Waiters stagger under the burden of weirdly shaped pieces of rock. Diners burn their hands on tin cans full of scalding soup or wrestle to prevent fillets of fish slithering from bathroom tiles.
I don’t want to eat my food from a giant spoon or a little tin bucket. Call me old fashioned but I like my wine glass to have some wine in it– not sausage and mash. It’s not that I lack a spirit of adventure – I greatly appreciate it when effort has been put into the presentation of food, I even get a little frisson of excitement when I am presented with a square, rectangular or triangular plate. But whatever the shape, the plate wins every time – so much more practical than a designer hubcap or Italian walking shoe.
But sometimes one must be pragmatic; we have dinner guests early in the new year and there are a few spare roofing slates stacked at the side of the house. I may go and brush the cobwebs off them –anything to avoid taking my turn at the washing up.
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