Everyday Systems

We had two Christmas dinners this year: one on Christmas Eve and one Christmas Day.

The Christmas Eve dinner was prepared by my daughter and it was the larger of the two meals. She's collecting a holiday pattern of dinnerware and doesn't have the dinner plates yet, just the salad plates. She prepared a large variety of food and we ate from the salad plates. While half the people took seconds, half did not. We were all pleasantly stuffed.

The surprise was that we were all satisfied eating a holiday meal on smaller plates.

The bigger surprise was that we each made two desserts and none are gone!

That pleasantly stuffed feeling is nice. Even better when you can achieve on just a salad plate.

Sounds like you had a lovely holiday.

Is she considering forgoing the dinner plates?

oolala53 wrote:Is she considering forgoing the dinner plates?

Not at all. And actually, I thought the plates looked pretty silly on the table. Especially for a holiday meal.

I've read that the average dinner plate was 9" in the 60's. Seems almost impossible now. I have this size that I've taken to using but I think they'd look awfully small for a dinner party, not that I entertain that much.

oolala53 wrote:I've read that the average dinner plate was 9" in the 60's. Seems almost impossible now. I have this size that I've taken to using but I think they'd look awfully small for a dinner party, not that I entertain that much.

I remember the dinnerware my mom had when I was growing up and the plates were definitely smaller. I also remember buying my mom a new set of dishes for some occasion (this would have been before 1965) and the plates were huge; I think even larger than most today.

I don't think the dinner plates were as small as the salad plates we used, but many sets of dishes used to have a luncheon plate available to buy from open stock. I think the old dinner plates were the size of the luncheon plate. -- about 9".

I talked with a friend and she found that her dinner plates would not fit in the kitchen cabinets of the childhood house she moved back into as an adult. This dovetails with the experience of the author of The 9-inch "Diet", who wrote of all the influences which have driven up our expectations of the size of so many products. Just discovered this today.
http://www.amazon.com/9-Inch-Diet-Expos ... 440&sr=1-1

I'm bingeing on being online!

Between Christmas and Hanukkah and interstate travel and being sick I think I took more S-days this season than any year so far, but thanks to the dubious blessing of the last item on that list (still not quite over it), I didn't gain an ounce.

That being said, I have to give my no-s habits some credit: I definitely can't put it away like I used to.

Reinhard

In regard to the giant plate issue, I suspect it started as an affectation in high-end restaurants when they'd give you these enormous plates with a dainty little pat of food in the middle, to enhance the sense of its precious deliciosity. This was pretentious and annoying enough, but something got dangerously lost in the "trickle down" effect to rest of us: the fact that the key to the whole effect was the presentational "whitespace."