Bowls are now the new plates ...
WHEN the Titanic sank, 400 asparagus tongs sank with it. Not just asparagus tongs, but 1,500 fruit forks, 1,500 fish forks, 1,000 oyster forks, 3,000 beef tea cups, 1,000 finger bowls, 2,000 egg spoons, 1,500 salt spoons, 300 celery glasses and 100 pairs of grape scissors.
Our Edwardian ancestors really did go in for cluttered tables.
But the story of the past hundred years has been one of greater and greater minimalism at the table. Apart from the odd fad — the long- handled fondue tridents of the Seventies, for example — we have pared down our cutlery and crockery to the barest essentials.
The millennial generation — born between the early Eighties and Noughties — are accomplished users of bamboo chopsticks but wouldn’t know what to do with a set of asparagus tongs.
The most recent change has been the shift in eating from a plate to spooning from a bowl. A recent Channel 4 programme, What Britain Buys, presented by Mary Portas, examined the trend for bowl eating.
Nicola Wilson, senior designer at Denby, a Derbyshire pottery and tableware company, told Portas: ‘We now produce a lot more bowl shapes than we did — totalling about 32 different shapes.’
This year, Denby has added 250 new bowls to its range.
Anna Berry, head of buying for Cooking & Dining at John Lewis, confirms this change. So far this year, sales of bowls have increased by 18 per cent, and the department store now sells 28 per cent more bowls than dinner plates.
Berry puts the change down to the more casual way we eat — bowl and spoon, rather than plate, knife and fork — and our partiality to foreign cuisines. Chinese, Moroccan, Indian and Japanese cultures all predominantly serve food in bowls.
Habitat’s terracotta Daintree bowls are just right for a tagine (from £25, habitat.co.uk).
Our yearning for bowls may also owe something to our tendency to eat al screeno: in front of the TV, smartphone or iPad. Eating with a bowl and spoon leaves one hand free for the remote or for scrolling through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
SOCIAL media is helping to fuel the trend. Search ‘#bowl’ on the photosharing site Instagram and you’ll find 54,000 immaculately styled shots of bowls filled with edamame beans, quinoa and spiralised courgettes. There are more than 11,000 ‘#breakfastbowl’ photos of chia seed porridges sprinkled with goji berries.
Nigella Lawson devotes a chapter to ‘bowlfood’ in her healthy eating cookbook Simply Nigella (£ 26, Chatto & Windus) and declares: ‘If I could, I’d eat everything out of a bowl.’ Ten of Nigella’s bowlfood recipes are for soup, and the vogue for ‘souping’ — the successor to juicing — has also contributed to the ousting of the plate.
Food writers the Hemsley sisters talk about the health benefits of bone broth (they mean chicken stock) supped from a deep bowl. John Lewis’s black ramen (a Japanese noodle soup) bowl is a bestseller, so much so that they’ve just added a teal version to the range (£6, johnlewis.com).
But before you despair that we’ve turned into a nation of smartphonegoggling soup- slurpers, there is good news. When it comes to afternoon tea, we are as civilized and dainty as our Edwardian great-great-grandmothers.
Sales of teapots are up by 23 per cent at John Lewis, sugar bowls by 25 per cent and cake stands by 9 per cent in the past year. It’s partly our mania for The Great British Bake Off, says Anna Berry, and partly a fondness, particularly among young buyers, for fruit and herbal teas brewed in a proper pot.
Emma Bridgewater’s homely teapots suit an Earl Grey (from £39.50, emmabridgewater.co.uk), Muji sell white porcelain teapots for green tea (£11.95, muji.eu), while Anthropologie’s colourful Kennerton teapot would suit a fruity rose or blackcurrant brew (£58, anthropologie.com/uk).
Traditional teacups and saucers are out but mugs are in. Sales of mugs are up 14 per cent at John Lewis.
We’re not just filling them with chamomile tea though: mugcakes are another social media foodie hit. Fill your mug with cake or brownie batter and pop in the microwave for an individual pudding portion. Le Creuset stoneware mugs (from £14,
lecreuset.co.uk) are sturdy and microwave-safe.
Tablecloths are out of favour, replaced by table runners. Try Toast for a linen twill runner (£60,
toa.st/uk) or Cath Kidston for a springy Highgate Rose printed one (£20, cathkidston.com).
We’ve all but given up on proper cloth napkins during the week, says Berry, but continue to use them at weekends and for special occasions such as Christmas entertaining.
Akin & Suri make the prettiest screen-printed napkins and their cotton-linen tea towels are lovely enough to spread across your lap to catch ramen drips ( from £ 10, handmadeinteriorsshop.co.uk).
Oh, and if you do fancy a pair of asparagus tongs, try eBay for antique sets. It is asparagus season, after all.