Pottery has always played a crucial role in Nigel Slater’s cooking, both for the way it elevates a meal and also for the calm sense of fragility it brings to a room. Here, he reveals some of his favourite pieces – and the rising pottery stars to look out for
In the mid-1960s, my parents abandoned their dark blue Willow Pattern tableware, inspired by a Japanese fairytale, for the more minimal Sienna by Midwinter, a graphic design by Jessie Tait made by William Robinson in Stoke-on-Trent. Considering the design of bare, black twigs and stripes of buff and orange as if we had traded in our staid family saloon for a fast sports car.
After years of trying to find my food among the Chinoiserie trees, birds and cherries of the classic Willow Pattern, I could now actually see my dinner in all its meat-and-two-veg glory. Production of Sienna stopped in 1987 when the company became insolvent, but the design continues to get cameo parts in 1960’s television dramas as the prop stylists’ go-to tableware of the era. What I took away from this was that food looks better, more comfortable, on the right china.
