A special place in her heart

A stack of place-card holders reminds Mimi Braun of all the things her family loved, writes Ligaya Mishan

AS a schoolgirl in Oakville, on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario, Emily Braun was often dismayed to find a pheasant sandwich in her lunchbox. This was not an extravagance, but her mother’s practical application of leftovers from her father’s hunts. “Sometimes there was still shot in the meat,” said Braun, known as Mimi, an art historian and longtime curator for cosmetics magnate Leonard A. Lauder. She ate the pheasant furtively, eyeing her classmates’ superior Velveeta.

Since then, she has come to appreciate game birds, or at least the ones that adorn a much-loved set of place-card holders that belonged to her mother, who died in 2007. The birds are hand-painted in watercolour on enamel and mounted on silver, most likely produced in the early 1900s by S. Mordan & Co. of Chester, England.

Braun, 57, long believed that their provenance could be traced back to her grandfather, a painter of miniatures. Then her father (who, at 95, “still has a mind like a steel trap,” she said) explained that her mother had bought them, along with a table, 50 years ago from friends who were leaving town. “It was US$5 (RM21) for the table,” he said. “Can’t remember how much for the place-card holders.”

PERSONALITY

The birds, in their tiny portraits, are more straightforward charmers. Braun noted the “illusionistic textures” in their plumage and how “each has a personality”: a red grouse with an aristocratically stretched neck, a wistful black grouse with a tail like a lyre, a woodcock criminally intent on dinner, a portly English partridge caught midwaddle. Dinner guests try to identify them; no one has named all four.

They bring a touch of the wild to the urbane dining room of her Upper East Side apartment in New York, with its flank of bookshelves. “My mother never set the table formally,” Braun said; she was too busy raising five daughters.

Braun, in turn, makes sure that even when place cards are put out, the mood stays light. She engineers seating charts with the goal of fired-up conversation, a legacy of dinners with her Braun with a set of game bird place-card holders that belonged to her mother, who died in 2007. parents and older sisters, who were always one-upping one another with quotes from Shakespeare and Tennyson.

CONNECTING ROOTS

For Braun, the place-card holders connect generations, from her grandfather’s love of miniatures, passed on to her mother, to the place cards that her children decorated with stickers and Magic Marker. (Their works remain in Braun’s private collection.)

As for her dinner-party menus, she may cook osso buco or baked sea bass, but never game birds. Not even turkey: On Thanksgiving, she serves roast beef.