Plates, I’ve seen a few. Smooth porcelain, noisy stoneware, glossy melamine, sustainable bamboo. From silver salvers on ceremonial duty to bendy paper plates for picnics, they’re there at every stage of our lives. Not just a platform on which to serve dinner or a way of framing food to make a visually compelling composition, plates are part of the rituals and rites of the art of dining.
Before plates, food was placed on leaves, bark and stones. At the fine-dining level, many restaurants now seek to break up the long procession of plates that form the drawn-out tasting menu by sending food out on – guess what? – leaves, bark and stones.
What goes around, they say, comes around. But my heart stubbornly belongs to the plain, round plate. It sits there silently, not screaming “Look at me” but ready and willing to go into service for the food. The foot soldier of the table. The canvas ready for the art. The blank sheet of paper awaiting words.
The best thing about a plain, round plate is that it isn’t square. A square plate has sharp edges and corners, whereas round plates take a more natural form.
The circle is a symbol of wholeness, unity and completion, the square a symbol of stability and permanence. The circle, therefore, is more fun. Besides, I only just survived the 1980s with those great big, black, glossy square plates, whose shiny rims recorded more fingerprints than the police department.
It’s not just square plates that have little appeal. It’s square food – although a square meal is always acceptable. The first use of that term, by the way, has apparently been traced to an advertisement in a Wisconsin newspaper in 1804, which announced “25c buys a square meal at any time of the day at the City Bakery”. So much for my theory, now discounted, that it was inspired by the square plates issued to the sailors of the British Navy in the 18th century.
As with round plates, there’s a strong case to be made for round food: meatballs, dumplings and arancini, to name but a few.
Growing up in Victoria, my pie of choice was round, not square: the Four’N Twenty, created in Bendigo in 1947 by Leslie Thompson McClure.
Then there’s caviar, Jaffas, Terry’s Chocolate Oranges and even ordinary, non-chocolate oranges. All accompanied by a round of drinks, of course.
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Terry Durack is the former chief restaurant critic for The Sydney Morning Herald.
