Baked sausage

A low key birthday this year, being about to set out on our travels west. But marked with a suitable balloon. Resting in an antique salad bowl in the form of a crab, derived from BH's family. Accompanied by a handsome glass bowl right, once part of a wash set, the sort of thing which came in five or six pieces and sat on top of a wash stand, this last often with a white marble top. With such sets and such stands running between the functional and the ornamental, not to say luxurious. This one derived from my family.

We have the salad servers which go with the crab, but I believe it only becomes collectable when you have its lobster companion.

Neither Bing nor ebay were much use at all in running such a bowl down, Google rather better, suggesting that I try etsy, which got warm but did not hit the bullseye. While I failed to work out how to remove the white spots.

The sausages sourced in the margins of the cheese hunt noticed at reference 2 were baked entire, a proceeding which worked well enough the last time that we had them.

For some reason a strong sense that mashed potato was the appropriate accompaniment, along with seriously green cabbage, rather than the boiled rice we usually take with roast beef. Plus a glass or two of Waitrose's Fleurie. We did about one and a half of the sausages and, for once, I don't think we finished the Fleurie. Both being polished off a little later on.

In the meantime, I took stewed plums from the various desserts on offer. One of which was some curious dates from Sainsbury's, said to be luxury dates, but actually dates reconstituted from frozen from Saudi Arabia. For everyday purposes, I still prefer the brick dates we get from Cullompton (via Grape Tree), while for festal purposes, the dates from Jordan featured at reference 3 are the thing.

PS 1: since penning this, a minor domestic disaster. That is to say, I have just lost the second of two Scrabble games running. Both by substantial margins. Must do better.

PS 2: and now, by 19:00, both Bing and Google are doing much better with the search key 'crab and lobster bowls art deco'. Perhaps they have been looking around in the interval. With the bowl snapped above said to be German and sporting very much the right kind of servers. Bit more silver left on theirs than ours.

PS 3: Saturday morning: had another go, to see if things had improved still further, using the same search key as above. Both Bing and Google performed quite well, but Bing took the prize of the morning with the bowl snapped from Pinterest above. What on earth would such a thing have been used for? Was it part of a set? Two points occur. First, search is clearly very dynamic, with the results changing each time, sometimes by what seems quite a lot. Second, the orange target bowl is a rather coarse sort of ceramic. A lot of the stuff turned up by search is rather higher grade: maybe a proper ceramacist would be able to come up with a sharper key. Assuming, that is, that the appropriate jargon had been fed into the search engines.

References

Reference 1: https://www.etsy.com/uk.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/10/cheese.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/12/two-pounds-of-dates.html.

Reference 4: https://www.westerncommodities.com/. The date supplier from Cullompton. A place I have a soft spot for, having worked on the M5 there at a time when a baker in Cullompton sold very good dough cakes. Especially good toasted on the office heater and taken with butter. Long gone.