We used to beg Grandma to tell us stories about the old country. She came to America from Slovenia as a little girl, and would tell us about growing up there, or about the old days clearing land and farming in the wilds of Wisconsin.
A favorite story, for its slightly scandalous tone, was about a butter pot. It seems there was an old woman in Grandma's village who made clarified butter to sell. She'd save the cream from her cows, churn the butter, then melt it on the wood stove and pour it into her old grey stoneware crock. Once a week, on market day, she'd go into town and sell butter by the scoop to all the housewives there.
You know what's coming, of course. The next market day, nobody bought any butter. The city women just giggled and pointed, and wouldn't tell her why. It fell to the gatekeeper at the end of the day to explain to her what a chamber pot was, and why it wasn't the best container for displaying and selling her butter.
The moral of the story: It's best to use a serving bowl made expressly for that purpose.
Well, there's platters and there's platters. The serving
size are 13 inches inches across, flat bottomed for stability, and decorated with cranes, hens or
roosters, ducks. The others are conceived as wall decorations, 18-20 inches across, with hanging
hardware built in. They're still food-safe and functional, but you'd probably need a serving trolley
to roll one, fully loaded, into your dining room.
My friend Terrie is Italian-American, raised in New Jersey. No,
she's not at all like those people on television, you know, the Sopranos. (I think she's actually
an alto.) On the other hand, when she said she wanted to order fourteen pasta bowls to give to her
cousins for Christmas, you can bet I tried really hard to get them right.
They're 12 inches wide across, and 3 to 3-1/2 inches deep. Terrie's were all painted with blue
irises; I also make them with other patterns now, especially the ever-popular rooster and hens, and
robins feeding vermicelli to their fledglings.
Sometimes it seems everybody in the world has read that story. Even I read it, it was in
the Reader's Digest when I was ten. The story of the family that bought a beautiful pitcher on
their trip to Mexico, and used it to keep orange juice in. In a few months, their hair started
to fall out, gums bleed. There was lead in the glaze, and the acidic juice was leaching it out
into solution.
I love making pitchers, so make them from tiny ones for honey or syrup through larger ones for
cream or sauce to big ones to hold milk, iced tea or, yes, orange juice.
I come from a long line of coffee drinkers, though the gene seems to have skipped over me.
Denise, on the other hand, craves strong, black tea, three sugars. She's the only person I know
who has caffeinated tea at bedtime to help her sleep.
So my teapots have to meet her standards. They steep well, hold heat, pour nicely, and have a
built in strainer where spout meets body, so work for bagged or loose tea. Some have a cane handle
on top, others an English pitcher-style handle on the side. Each holds four 8-oz. cups, and can be
topped off with more hot water to re-steep as needed.
And if you want really good tea to brew in them, may we recommend
TeaSource? It's a lovely little tea shop,
with on-line and mail-order service, based in Minneapolis and run by our friends Liz and Bill
(who's even more fanatical about tea than Denise is).
Platters......$50-200
Pasta Bowls......$37
Pitchers......$16-35
Teapots......$55-65