Tillie Wheeler, Business Writer
Sometime in the 90s, while on vacation in Italy, my mother discovered a set of beautiful traditional pasta plates and carefully brought them back home. They had recipes for pasta dishes hand-painted in Italian in the bases of shallow bowls, with teal or rusty red decoratively sponged around the edges. A familiar sight during my childhood meals, inevitably they broke, or with cracks and chips in them. Eventually we were left with only two of these battle-wounded plates.
So on a subsequent holiday to the Amalfi Coast several summers ago, after realizing that the small cliffside town of Vietri sul Mare was famous for this style of ceramics, it felt like fate. Surely the same, or similar, recipe plates would be easy to find? How wrong we were. Venturing into the small artisanal ceramic workshops scattered around the winding streets, every maker was familiar with the style of plate we’ve described – I believe it’s a great thing – but none of them make it anymore. The more difficult the mission became, the more we wanted to find them. Persistence finally paid off, and we found four delightful bowls, a little smaller than the original but just what we wanted, illustrated with recipes. Spaghetti with garlic and oil, Spaghetti Puttanescaand more.
We wrap them with care, in our clothes inside our cases to protect them on the journey home. Luckily they survived, all in tact, and the mission was accomplished. Sadly, however, within a year, two of them were tragically broken after falling onto cold hard kitchen tiles, leaving us again with an incomplete set. Maybe need another trip to Italy for round three?
Bella Bowes, Commerce Editor
I’m like a dog with a bone when I have a vision for something and I just can’t let the idea go. My current fixation revolves around turning two slipper chairs I picked up on Golborne Road into leopards. There are plans to re-upholster them in Claremont’s ‘Bon Marche’ fabric but, while I’m excited to see them covered in spots, it’s not enough. Naturally, chairs need claws, not legs.
And so began the search for some suitable claw feet and after days of trawling Etsy, I finally found an artisan in Ukraine who would hand carve some perfect claws for my chairs. It’s been over six weeks since I bought them, and the order still just says ‘received’. However, quality takes time and I will be patiently waiting (crossing my fingers) for my little paws to arrive. TBC on whether they will be bliss or disaster.
