Raven and Sparrow

How much?

As I write about setting the table I frequently find myself mentioning the cost of this or that item, meaning money spent, although cost can be reckoned in other ways too. (Time and effort have big price tags these days.) Miserly feelings often attack me as I finger some bit of stuff and wonder if it will work well enough to justify its cost. The ephemeral quality of tablesetting - at least as I practice it - means that items purchased today may be total mistakes or may never be used again, and something in me rebels at that. The old standard of acquiring "good" dishes and linens and using them for all subsequent occasions would at least prevent the dull disappointment and even shame I feel when something I just spent (too much) money on fails to fit into the design like I hoped. Another part, the one seeking visual satisfaction and expression of the moment, incessantly looks for new and intriguing elements to spark the table to life, cost be damned. The tension between the look and the price can be hard to balance.

How much should a table cost? Every table and occasion makes its own demands of course - there is no formula. Figuring how much time or money to spend on any given event is a calculation made in quicksand, loaded with concrete facts like the price of those blue napkins I saw in town and the number of hours 'til guests arrive, but more heavily influenced by feelings: those underlying the occasion, those of relative poverty or affluence, and the ever-strident desire to make something I think is pleasing. I am very aware that what I am willing to invest in a table would be considered completely excessive to some and paltry and weak to others. I can only trust that my feelings will show me a true path through the forest of considerations, resulting in a table that Goldilocks would find "just right".

Quick, company's coming

On Sunday at three o'clock, Mike mentioned that his old high school friend Larne was up visiting his mother and would join us for dinner. Oh. Short notice. I love Larne and was glad he was coming but....no, this will be good; a challenge so to speak. What could I do with what I had in hand this minute? I suddenly felt energized. The menu was easy. We were already having lemon chicken so all I had to do there was defrost another package of chicken. Carrot slaw, brown butter rice and broccoli would round out the meal, and all could be made in half an hour. Now, the table....centerpiece first. Boy do I miss my garden. I grabbed some clippers and went out to see what I could find. There was a feathery asparagus plant reaching for the sky in our abandoned vegetable plot. It has never produced more than one or two spears of aspargus, but now the foliage caught my eye and I trimmed it seriously. The only wild plants actually blooming were thistles and I cut some because their spiny texture looked good with the asparagus, and the color of their flowers is pretty. When I tried to arrange them though they looked stiff and ugly in the vase, not to mention their innate meanness, so I tossed them and tried again. My only flowers are in pots and there aren't very many of them. This year I leaned heavily on petunias for their lovely color range, but I don't like their sticky foliage, and they don't cut very well. I do have a potted hydrangea that I love. It is called "The Swan" and it has huge individual white flowers and chartreuse leaves. It struggles along, waiting for someplace in the landscape to become cultivated enough to provide a place, and now it had five flower heads. I took three. The final piece beckoned from the driveway where one of my neighbor's flowers had self-sowed. I don't know it's name, I think it is a kind of phlox, but it has gray stems and intense fuchsia-colored single flowers. There were only two and I picked them. It was the gray stems that told me that the table would be greens and gray with these two phlox flowers as a complementary color jolt. And so it was. Green plates on the gray square tablecloth (same pattern as the pink one I used last week, but much simpler), chartreuse napkins with gray ribbons and my scavenged arrangement as a centerpiece. I added little hurricanes with candles, the etched white water glasses (no wine, Larne doesn't like it) and the Danish modern stainless. By good luck the napkins were already ironed and the tablecloth only took about five minutes, so presto...a tablesetting materialized, leaving enough time to run the vacuum. 

 

The importance of being earnest about napkins....sorry Mr. Wilde

The importance of napkins always eludes me. I rarely think of them when planning the overall look of a setting and therefore find myself blankly regarding my half-set table, wondering what to do. You would think I'd have figured out by now that napkins take a big share of the resources given to any particular tablesetting and budget my interest, time and money accordingly. For one thing, they are the real workhorses of table textiles. They are meant to be handled and expected to get dirty. Plates, glasses and silverware all bridge the physical needs of the body feeding itself with the social expectations of dining in company, but napkins are there to mitigate the mistakes.

Since we are messy creatures we need napkins commodious enough to protect our clothing and wipe our hands. That turns out to be a lot of cloth. Four standard 20 x 20 inch napkins can be eked out of a yard and a third of 45" wide fabric. Making eight napkins costs conservatively $30.00 just in fabric and then there are thirty-two mitered corners and the time it takes to do it. Gulp. Suddenly $4.50 each at the store doesn't seem so expensive, but spending $40. for napkins for a specific table does make me hesitate. I've spent less for whole tablecloths and that I guess is the point...napkins are not incidental items.

The next quandry is how to fit them into the table design. They can sit demurely under the fork until needed, but usually I want them to bring the colors and table theme to each individual setting. Fancy folds are a traditional way of using napkins as decoration, but just getting the things ironed at all seems like enough of a chore, so I fold them into lengthwise quarters with the hemmed edge tucked under and call it good. Now...napkin rings....I love them and almost never use them. They add another layer of expense to the whole exercise and getting napkins into and out of them can be tricky. I usually fall back on ribbon because it is cheap (relatively), re-useable and offers more variation in color than other methods. I have a box of ribbons to draw from and if I don't have what I need my local fabric store will help me out for under $5.00. The most useful color is off-white 1 1/2" satin ribbon. I got a deal on a lot of it one year at Christmas and have used it many times. Craft and fabric stores still sell that really narrow (under 1/4") satin ribbon for very little in a huge range of colors, which is a great resource.

Tucking  a sprig of something appropriate under the ribbon is a nice way to finish the place setting, but not every table calls for it. This is one of those hmm.....moments where you stand back and evaluate the work in total, think about the possibilities you have in hand, and cast an eye on the clock to see whether you shouldn't have put the main course in the oven by now. Its most satisfying when you see all elements of the table fusing into one welcoming whole, but if they aren't, I always remind myself that in a very short time the napkins will be on duty in laps, the ribbons will be cluttering the tabletop, and the event will have moved beyond appearance to the substance - people at ease, eating, drinking and enjoying each other's company, with plenty of napkins to keep them neat.

 

Prematurely Blue

My optimistic feelings about my viney checkered tablecloth were much subdued by the wax removal process. It seemed to be going well, when all of a sudden my greens began to go blue. The sodium silicate in the wax removal bath stripped out the yellow dye, leaving only the indigo. I was worried about getting all of the wax out because there was so much of it, but I should have been more worried about keeping the yellow in. The quercitron on the squares was less fast than the weld on the leaves, once again proving the superior staying power of weld over other yellows. Yellow is the most fugitive color, whether natural or chemical. In old textiles the yellows disappear first, making the fabric more and more blue as it ages. It's called "the blue disease". The Bayeaux Tapestry has blue disease, I'm told. So does my tablecloth, but this is a case of premature ageing, brought on by me. I have been thinking about what to do, and after much hesitation I have decided to repaint the leaves and squares with weld. I have to do it very carefully to preserve the wax lines and prevent a messy, over-handled effect so I am using a very tiny brush and it is going slowly. This is a step I hadn't planned on, but it does seem to be working. The green parts in the picture are still wet, so they look much stronger than the unpainted bits right now.

  

Indigo girls eat lunch

Today was a perfect day for some members of my local Surface Design Association to join me here for some indigo dyeing. We brought two pots up and dyed all kinds of fabric, yarn and roving in lovely summer sunshine. At noon we broke for pot luck lunch and this is the table I set for the occasion. I rarely entertain only women and I couldn't resist the chance to go for pink. (Maybe I should have done blue, in honor of indigo....oh well.) I used my rue patterned linen square dyed with lac and fustic, and embroidered around the edge with yellow orange. Since it was a luncheon I wanted to keep it simple. I didn't use anything for centerpieces but small arrangements of alstromeria in white ceramic sake cups, which picked up the colors of the tablecloth. I struggled a little with the napkins. I had the goldy peach ribbons which added a lot of life to the table, but missed something until I added a squiggle of thin raspberry ribbon on top. The silverplate flatware has a faint yellowy cast that made them look the best with this combination. The footed Fostoria sherbet glasses made a more feminine beverage glass than the clunkier cylindrical water glasses.

We had a tasty selection of salads, muffins, chicken and fruit and talked about fabric, dyeing, travel, and food. All of the women have extensive experience in various fiber arts, having practiced for many years, and taken instruction with some of the most celebrated teachers in the genre. One of them, Nancy, actually came here to this place forty years ago to attend a painting critique with Ruth Penington, who ran a summer art school in a nearby town at the time. Ruth was the former owner and University of Washington professor of art who built the old house and used it as her studio. I think she would have approved of our gathering today. I was thinking of her a lot.

Dinner usually includes food

I love food and I make a point of serving it at my dinner parties, although you might think otherwise from reading my blog. So many people are cooking and writing about cooking that I don't feel like I have much to contribute that hasn't been said better by someone else. It is delightful to have witnessed the explosion of interest and to have enjoyed the huge increase in quality and variety of food (and wine) since I first learned cookery from my mother and Betty Crocker. Many of today's cooks are true artists - adventurous, gifted and skilled - blazing new taste trails into the gustatory jungle. I salute them from the ranks of the everyday cook whose main focus is the continual provision of something reasonably edible to people who persist in being hungry several times a day. (True confession: now that I am working full-time I am more often being fed than feeding - lucky me!)

I do try to do something special for dinner parties. As a recipe follower, not an inventor, my cooking took a big step up when I discovered junior league cookbooks. I was wandering the aisles of a local kitchen shop one day in the eighties when I came upon a slim book with a charmingly illustrated dust jacket. It was Private Collection by the Junior League of Palo Alto and Bonnie Stewart Mickelson, illustrated by Linda Newberry. I bought it for its looks, but I fell in love with the recipes. They were mostly simple and not too exotic in their requirements, but just delicious. I grabbed the sequel, Private Collection 2, as soon as it was published and those two books have provided at least part of every company meal I have made since. Of course, other cookbooks have accumulated on my shelf over the years, and some are also very good (I find junior league books in general to be more useful than books generated by restaurants or famous chefs) but the Palo Alto books remain my indisputable favorites. I have given them as gifts many times. The fetching dust jackets on my copies fell into shreds long ago and they carry many splots and stains from heavy use. I used to note on the recipe page when I made it and for whom, but on some pages the notations eventually threatened to obliterate the recipe, so I stopped. I serve our favorites over and over, as my friends and family will attest, but I'm not tired of them and I assume everyone else still likes them too.

Here's the recipe my son always requests for his birthday dinner, from Private Collection. We call them "spinners".

Barbequed Teriyaki Steaks

2 lbs flank steak

3/4 c. salad oil

1/2 c. soy sauce

2 TB. honey

2 TB. vinegar

1 1/2 tsp. ginger

1 tsp. garlic powder

1 scallion, finely chopped

Cut steak widthwise into 1/2 inch strips. Roll up each strip and secure with round toothpicks. Rolls should be approximately 3 inches in diameter.

Combine remaining ingredients in electric blender. Marinate steak rolls in sauce for at least eight hours.

Barbecue over glowing coals about 5 minutes on each side for medium-rare, or until done to your liking. To broil in your oven, allow about 2 minutes on each side for medium-rare.

 

So, with or without the support of the Junior League, food is a basic element of a dinner party, not to be overshadowed by fancy dishes and tablecloths. We must eat to live; sharing food binds us in so essential a commonality that other differences fade into the background. This alone is worth celebrating. I see my work setting the table as doing honor to the connections we share and forge as we eat together.

 

Sunny on the mantel

A few weeks after our sweet Sunny died, a mysterious package was found attached to our mailbox. It turned out to be a painting my Aunt Myrt did of Sunny from the picture I posted here on my blog. Aunt Myrt has been painting as a hobby for several years and I always think her work is quite good. This effort really touched me. It was so thoughtful, and having an artist's rendering of our dog seems so much more solid somehow than a photograph. We set it up on the mantel where the little urn of her ashes was already residing and suddenly we had a Sunny shrine. This wasn't planned....I thought we we would scatter her ashes quickly after we received them, probably on the shore where she used to bark at seals....but now we feel no hurry. It is comforting to have her still with us this way and I think we will know when the time for remembrance has passed. Right now it seems a proper tribute to the nearly fifteen years she was a part of our family. Thank you so much Aunt Myrt!