Lettuce Entertain You!

Have you ever looked closely at a piece of lettuce or cabbage? The huge leaves and their gorgeous colors have deep interesting veins, and their shape makes a perfect container for a green salad or a composed salad.

For decades, potters have thought so, and have been making lettuce or cabbage ware. Wedgwood is one of the earliest makers of this, and you can find pieces of it at Halcyon House Antiques, along with more contemporary pieces. The Wedgwood pieces don’t look exactly like iceberg lettuce or even cabbage, but they’re called lettuce ware or cabbage ware nevertheless. They are such a beautiful shade of green, and would be perfect for a summer place-setting.

At Halcyon House Antiques, we recently received a shipment which included some more contemporary pieces of lettuce ware. This serving dish will become a summer favorite, as it has two compartments to use. One of the great things about lettuce ware is that you can mix and match pieces.

During the recent auction of Bunny Mellon’s estate, there were hundreds of pieces of china and porcelain shaped like lettuce, cabbage, melons, asparagus and almost every other variety of vegetable you can think of.For many years, Dodie Thayer, a potter in the Palm Beach area made lettuce ware, each piece by hand, especially for a shop in Palm Beach. It was widely collected by socialites everywhere and it still much sought after. C.Z. Guest had a particularly good collection, and she had an image of it in one of her books with her kitchen pegboard and her strainers and lettuce ware.As with anything that’s a classic, it will be in style forever. From Wedgwood in the 1800s, to Dodie Thayer in the 1960’s, lettuce ware is one of those classics.

As always, if you’re interested in anything you see here, please contact Eric.

Adapted from The View from Halcyon Farm, a weekly column on BaltimoreFishbowl.com