Dinner parties were a frequent occurrence during the holiday season. When trying to rise into higher levels of society, a family’s social standing could be made or broken by the ability to conform to all the conventions associated with these formal events.
Continue reading →Luxury foods demand the luxury treatment! Take a look at the ice cream cups and other special serving vessels for ice cream. If you’ve been reading Random Bits of Fascination for a while, then you may remember talking about specialized china for luxury dishes before. If not, you might want to check out these posts on Chocolate Pots vs. Coffee Pots, and Chocolate cups vs. Tea cups. Since ice cream was (during Austen’s day) a … Continue reading →
What makes a chocolate pot different from a teapot or coffee pot? Because anything induced by chocolate MUST be a good idea, its time for another chocolate-induced dive down the research rabbit hole! Just to refresh your memory a bit, during the regency era, there were three particular luxury drinks: tea, coffee and chocolate. (I talked about tea recently, you can find that HERE. The first chocolate article is HERE.) They were in high demand, but expensive … Continue reading →
What makes chocolate cups different from teacups or coffee cups? It’s been a rough month around here. My father’s had a major health crisis that resulted in three hospitalizations in as many weeks. He had surgery, then had complications and his complications had complications, literally. How does one cope with such things? Chocolate. In frequent, therapeutic doses. It can’t possibly surprise you that somehow chocolate lead me on a trip down the research rabbit hole … Continue reading →
