(no subject)

[which_chick]

You all remember the little indians who got lost or killed in various and sundry ways that were sure to be amusing to the tot set, right? Pretty much the same thing happened to the Mikasa china (Citation pattern) that my parents got when they got married. It was a service for eight with very plain silver trim around the edges. The pattern, called Citation, was about as plain as it could be and still include some decoration. (The Citation pattern happens to contain just the level of decoration I find sustainable in china. More decorated than that is excessive and tasteless, unless you go through tasteless by heading directly for gold leaf and hand-painted hippos. That's okay, too. Anything in between, though, is not really trying.) The Mikasa led a pretty tough life -- a lot of it was stained semi-orange by the iron in the water. Some of the plates had really gorgeous shell-shaped chips on the edges from various bouts of carelessness. Some pieces were broken by people who thought you could stack six salad plates in an already full dish drainer. (No. They fell off. They shattered on the floor. The Mikasa went from having eight salad plates to having two in one evening. It was a massacre.) Some of it went to college apartments and so forth and finally, what remained of the set became the first set of dishes at my house.

I have since upgraded to the nicer china I swiped from my grandmother Hunt's house. Hers is prettier and more complete and fancier and doesn't have iron stains or chips out of the rims or missing genres of china due to unfortunate dish drainer events. However, since it's china for looking at rather than china for eating off of, I kept the single genre of the Mikasa that I found useful -- the coupe soup bowls. There were only three coupe soup bowls when I got them -- they were a favorite piece of the set and were used hard. (Saucers for tea cups, however, existed in eight perfect and unmarred plates when I threw the rest of the Mikasa out. We didn't drink a lot of tea-with-saucers.) The coupe soup bowls aren't very good for soup because they're shallow as hell. The soup gets all cold or slops out if it's a runny soup. I do not eat soup out of the coupe bowls. I do, however, eat damn near everything ELSE out of the bowls. (For the most part, I eat out of the Mikasa coupe soup bowls, the high-sided white corning bowls, or the pan that the food was cooked in. I have plates but do not generally use them because the coupe soup bowls do everything that plates do PLUS have nice, high rims so that my food does not fall off while I'm transporting it to the couch.)

Eat semi-solid foods like curry over rice or spaghetti with a lot of sauce? Eat stuff with other stuff on top (like baked potatoes with broccoli and cheese sauce on top)? You could find the coupe soup bowl a friend indeed... more so if you eat on the fucking couch a lot because you're an uncivilized person who lives alone with a cat and doesn't have to measure up to the usual standards of civilization. Not that I am such a person, of course. Of course. :)

Anyway, I would like to point out to the world at large that I am now down to one coupe soup bowl in Mikasa pattern Citation. I had two of them for a very long time, but I dropped one on the floor right before dinner today while trying to open the fridge with the same hand that was holding the coupe soup bowl. I'm not sure why I tried that -- probably it was a low-blood-sugar-related reason. The coupe soup bowl, which was on the close order of forty years old, shattered into lots of tiny, sharp pieces. I am mentioning this because my family bitches like hell that I'm nearly impossible to buy holiday gifts for and because I really want three replacement Mikasa Citation-style coupe soup bowls and because said soup bowls are supposedly available here. They're fourteen bucks a pop. Be sure to coordinate your shopping with other family members so that I do not wind up with thirty bowls, please. I only want three.

That is all.

Comments

[not-your-real.livejournal.com]

That's a very simple pattern, even simpler than my family's Christmas (ok, not just Christmas, but that's when I see them) china.

(To my surprise, Eric turned out to be a frou-frou traditionalist with the china and found my choices too plain and utilitarian. Hence, china was not registered for during wedding planning. We stand to inherit some from one side or the other anyway.)

My family's is white banded in green and gold. One of these colors is a simple band around the edges, maybe both of them, or maybe the other color is something tasteful like a few fleur-de-lis. I don't quite remember.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

I am not certain that my life benefits from having china-for-looking-at, though I have a very nice set of eyeballing china that I didn't have to actually pay for. I really like the sort of plate-dish thing from the Mikasa set, though, and I am convinced that having four of them (three new-to-me ones and the one I already have) will improve my general quality of life.

[cousin-sue.livejournal.com]

I have no clue what type of china we have.

We have one piece of wedgewood that we got for our wedding (it's a small, heartshaped blue bowl that we have never used... too small).

We have the post WWII Japanese tea pot, sugar bowl, and six cups and saucers.

We have the set of tea cups and saucers that I bought from a junk shop for Little Foxes when I was at Kutztown, and I never put in for payment because I wanted the cups.

We have a set of china that the spouse's mother went to the movies for. We have the set of china that my mom bought (blue and white) for when she bought the big house in SC.

And supposedly there is The China, which is in the pattern by our last name. It was promised to us by the spouse's family, but they've refused to hand it over. It's nice and plain, but sitting uselessly in a cupboard at the ancestral seat. It has never been used to my knowledge since my spouse's grandparents time...

I do have an irrational prejudice against china with metallic paints...