New soup bowls made by Buffalo china
I have long had a great fondness for restaurant china. It’s heavy and durable, and it’s relatively inexpensive. I bought eight soup bowls on eBay that arrived today. Somehow I have to find room for them in the cabinets with the Victor “truck driver” mugs and the Buffalo cups and saucers. They don’t match? No problem, at least to me.
A while back, I wrote about how the right mugs and cups help to get coffee to the right temperature for drinking and keep it there. With soup, something similar is going on. Serving soup from deep, narrow cereal bowls just doesn’t work for me. The soup won’t cool properly. In my opinion, soup should be served very hot, and in small servings. The hot soup should go into a wide, narrow bowl, where it will cool quickly to the right temperature for eating it. The shapes and sizes of the bowls, plates, cups and mugs that we all use reflect a cultural consensus on how food should be served. Consensus changes. For example, these days there seems to be a growing consensus that coffee should be served in something gigantic. I object.
The makers of institutional china, at least in previous decades, got it about right, in my opinion. These bowls are new old stock, probably made in the 1980s. Buffalo china is still being made. Buffalo is now owned by Oneida.
Post a Comment