Dish+Queen


 * // Dish Queen //**

From the term "**//Dish Queen,"//** nothing is meant to be inferred about a person's sexual tastes.

A Dish Queen, broadly speaking, is a person belonging to a rarefied and sometimes loopy group for whom food is infinitely more appetizing when beautifully framed.

After all, as the writer Suzanne von Drachenfels asked in the lively social history and primer **//"The Art of the Table,"//** what is dining without dishes?

The answer should be obvious. Dining without dishes is eating.

It is standing at the kitchen counter with a shiny, white cardboard box of Kentucky Fries of chicken, stuffing the hole in one's face.

There are those who would argue otherwise, but it is a personal conviction that one of the crucial advances in Western civilization took place around 1770, when Europeans began applying the alchemy of heat to clay (or kaolin) to create the porcelain vessels that remain the basis of a food-delivery system still in universal use.

Before that time, many in the West ate off planks of flour or barley called **//Trenchers//**, from the French verb //trancher,// meaning to slice.

The crust of a trencher, as von Drachenfels points out, formed a palisade that secured the sauces. The slab itself also found use as a hot pad, a napkin and a hollowed-out dish for salt, or candles.

Often enough it reverted to food as it was collected, along with the scraps, in a wicker container called a **//Voyder//** and recycled into a meal - a fine organic cycle.

Unsalvageable trenchers were routinely tossed to the dogs, a fundamentally civilizing distinction by which the soul of every dish queen is forged.

Frederickthe Great was a famous Dish Queen. So was François I, who in 1536 ordained that a separate plate be made for every course.

There were six in those days, the precursor to the standard five-piece place setting that is the bedrock of the colossal bridal-registry industry.

Catherine the Great was a near-fanatic Dish Queen, as lost in the obsession as was the Prussian Frederick, whose infatuation inspired him to buy his own premises to manufacture the dishes.

The Russian Empress caught the bug when a Danish monarch presented her with a now-legendary Louis XV dinner service from Sèvres. (It is worth pointing out that Louis XV himself was a Dish Queen, one of many such kings; first a patron, then a backer, he eventually bought the Sèvres porcelain factory outright.)

Dish-Queen mania often starts innocently enough.

"It goes without saying that the table should always be beautiful," says Diane von Furstenberg, the fashion designer who once wrote a book called "The Table" to give expression to the magpie tendencies that denote the true Dish Queen.

Today sadly the majority of Europeans and Americans barely bother to notice the difference between sitting down to dinner, and eating from a bowl off the floor, this is caused by the advent of Television.

The true **//Dish Queen//** is characterized by a continuing engagement with a pork chop that has yet to be cooked - not only how it may taste but also how it should look on a plate.

Quite rightly so for the pleasure of eating is not one of eating to live, but living to eat.

The first experience should be with the aroma as it arrives at the table followed by the picture it presents on the plate which should be pleasing to the eye, and then finally the savouring of the taste buds in the mouth