Only the Good Dishes.

When you don't want to waste time and don't know how to say 'I love you.'

Photo by Becky Fantham on Unsplash

The first time one broke, it was a chip that spread, then somewhat satisfyingly split down the middle after a long, four course mid-winter meal. Fresh from the dishwasher I plucked it, steaming and hot. That small but precise pressure from my fingertips was enough to insist on the break. I didn’t feel disappointment though, just pleasure.

This was a reasonable Christmas, only one broken champagne flute as the total sum of all costs. Sometimes at the end of a dinner party or some other celebration, I find myself doing a stocktake of scratched china plates, smashed glasses, chipped plates or lost serving spoons. It’s an accounting of life lived around a table, the wastage of a kitchen. Perhaps the habit came from annual stock takes and wastage write-offs in the professional kitchens and bars I knew so well. Perhaps it grafted in even earlier - when I was a child and my grandmother’s dinner set only came out on special occasions.

It would be easy to think I was counting impositions - the knife marks on plates adding up to some tipping point when they would be relegated to the everyday pile or worse - replaced. Are your crockery piles the same as mine? An ever-evolving pile of mismatched plates that always grow by four or eight at a time? For a while, I bought things in twos. I appreciated the natural mismatch of bowls that were generally the same size and shape, enough to fit together but not quite. It makes a kitchen feel quite functional when you are just as likely to grab a soup bowl for dishing out ingredients as you are to serve soup in it. Somehow when nothing quite matches altogether, there is always room for something a little bit unique which is how the everyday should feel. Always expanding and changing, always room for one more bowl of soup or a dash of broth to loosen a stew for five, instead of four mouths.

None of my plates are really fancy, although I took great pride in gathering that first set of pristine, modern white plates with a perfectly flat bottom and slightly raised edge. I felt grown-up and elegant all of a sudden - I had dishes that were ‘for good.’

And that was when it changed. The first time one broke, a chip that spread then somewhat satisfyingly split down the middle after a long, four course mid-winter meal. Fresh from the dishwasher I plucked it, steaming and hot. That small but precise pressure from my fingertips was enough to insist on the break. I didn’t feel disappointment though, just pleasure.

Monday night dinners, birthdays and the odd special occasion where the only times I brought out those ‘good dishes’ from their separate stack in the separate cupboard. I purchased an extra cupboard for that tiny boxy kitchen just to make room for the dinner parties. I counted 67 occasions for that first plate and thought - good service, what a fine time to retire. When you begin to do the math, even on the best of plates it doesn’t take long to count cents instead of dollars for every good service.

Breakage isn’t waste, it’s just the cost that comes with being used to show love. Glasses lifted to lips will eventually chip and plates will break. From now on, only the good dishes.

‘You’re worth only the good dishes,’ I whisper as I lay the table for my guests. ‘I’m not going to waste any time in showing you the capacity of my love.’

It applies to the meal too. Only the good dishes. Make it all good. Have the best loaves. Let me make that favourite thing you love. And if I cannot make it, I will find it. I test recipes until I find the best or add some of my own magic to it. And then I make only the good dishes. Let me feed you with my love.

Some have accused me of trying too hard, a conversation I also (sometimes) have with myself in the mirror. Is this too much? Are you being too much in this moment? Are you too much altogether? Did you really need to make two hams on Christmas Day just to ensure everyone had leftovers? But I know the answer already - it hums in me. Only the good dishes and the best of things. Everything on a plate and I wait for people to taste my love. Or one, to find their favourite thing resides amongst the banquet.

Perhaps I am trying to woo the Universe, proving that I’m not afraid to live to the extent of my means (if not above it from time to time, just to see if I can) and be found willing. I am brave with food and words, when I do not have to speak aloud the little utterings of my heart.

Perhaps everything is a little seduction and every guest is to be seduced a little. ‘You’re worth only the good dishes,’ I whisper as I lay the table for my guests. ‘I’m not going to waste any time in showing you the capacity of my love.’

Perhaps it’s really me saying, ‘I don’t want to waste any time waiting for the chance to use only the good dishes. Maybe I’m worth the best of what I have. Maybe there’s no time left for anything but the good dishes.’

Perhaps it’s the kind of bargain you try and make with the coming turn of the calendar - that meaningless and yet magical night where all things feel fresh and as yet un-wasted. This year, I won’t waste a moment. This year I’ll live with the volume dialled up to eleven. This year I’ll say it out loud instead of with dishes.

These days that stretch between Christmas and the New Year are full of sharp, stinging self-reflection each year. All days between festivals are. Too many funerals amongst them this year and people too young among the dead. Unfinished business piles up. My father is dying and I don’t know how to find my way to certainty, that he knows I love him. I count my days over and over and find too many wasted moments in them. I count days with those I love and think how we haven’t had enough days or nights yet and still I feel like time slipping away from us. I feel my heart aching and empty in ways that only cut this deep as the year turns. Another year of wasted chances, another year of unmet hopes, another year of whispered possibility and me - not brave enough to do anything but put out the good dishes in hopes they know it’s how I love them.

…so instead I count the broken plates, the chipped glasses, the stained tablecloth. I count the marks people left on the good dishes, how they ate only the good things and consumed my love even if I couldn’t say it.

Maybe it creeps up on me because I’m eating only leftovers, the remnants of what was left behind when guests departed into their next adventures and I cleared the table. On reflection, I should have planned a week of dinner parties to take up the spaces I always hope will be filled with invitation. There was one, this year - to another’s table. It was rich, sumptuous and laid out with laughter. It was my kind of table and all I brought to it were jars of flavour-packed little sauce bombs. Chimichurri and caramelised onion & fig jam. I grew the parsley, oregano and chili and picked only the good leaves. The day was sweet and long and it lingered into the next, when I returned to the delirious in-between of days and climbed a hill.

I’m counting a year of festivals and what might have been, amongst long periods of being secluded from the world in lockdowns and another year removed from the tables around the world I have called home. The emptiness is still present and I might be left with it - this echoing, billowy space usually filled with the anticipation of departure or falling into the arms of those I find it so easy to say I love you too, so instead I count the broken plates, the chipped glasses, the stained tablecloth. I count the marks people left on the good dishes, how they ate only the good things and consumed my love even if I couldn’t say it.

Unpacking the dishwasher one more time, late in the evening by fairy lights while the last cookies bake; I indulge my imagination one more time - some other kitchen, some future time when not everyone leaves to go home at the end of the night. Some people are already home.

‘I broke a plate,’ I’ll say, somewhat amused.

‘Only a good one I hope?’ he’ll ask. He knows what that means to my heart keeping account of how love was served.

‘You know it, only the good ones,’ comes my reply knowing the smile is warm on my tone, the words deep in my throat.

’I love you too,’ comes an answer from the other end of a kitchen that never feels empty.