As Shax Riegler points in his introduction to Dish "Today, when a meal is often more likely to be served in a cardboard container than on a porcelain plate, we hear complaints that the family meal is a thing of the past, but there is still a longing for beautiful dishes to serve and eat from whenever possible."
Tableware sets the stage for Thanksgiving and other Holiday meals as well as special occasions or days when you want to make dinner extra special.
With Dish '813 Colourful, Wonderful Dinner Plates' (Artisan Books, Fall 2011), Shax Riegler takes us on a trip through centuries of the dish history.
His timeline starting in 1454 educates and entertains us. I was amused-bemused to read his entry on 1518:
'So his guests are assured that no dish is used twice during a banquet at his villa, super-rich Roman banker Agostino Chigi has his servants toss all the plates used during each course into the Tiber River. ( After everyone goes home, his servants fetch the pieces from a net that secretly had been lowered into the river earlier.)
The holiday season gets its opening salvo with Thanksgiving so I chose Thanksgiving themed plates as an illustration.
Top illustration is a Royal Staffordshire dish using a turkey drawn by Clarice Cliff. It is a 'so called go-along for the long popular Tonquin pattern, in which the usual center motif has been replaced by the turkey.
Bottom plate is 'part of Johnson Brothers' Windsorware Native American also known as the Standing Turkey Pattern, it was manufactured from early 1950's through the early 1970's.'
( Excerpted from Dish: 813 Colorful, Wonderful Dinner Plates by Shax Riegler (Artisan Books). Copyright 2011. Photographs by Robert Bean.)