Joan Didion once said that she used her “good” silver every day, because “every day is all there is.”
That line, which was uttered to a reporter from my newspaper almost half a century ago, was brought to my attention this month, after we published the story of the 100-year journey of one family’s china, and readers poured their thoughts, and their memories, into the comments section. The use of fine china — and of other accouterments associated with formal supper, like silverware — has been on a downward slope for over a century, and in a nosedive in recent decades.
The forces that are causing the decline are numerous, including that eating now occurs at kitchen islands, on couches and in office cubicles. Data collected by the Hartman Group, a market research firm, concluded that nearly one-third of dinners last year were consumed by people eating alone. When friends and families gather, they do so on the back patio or in the living room, for barbecues or Super Bowl Sunday, with food served on plates that can be microwaved and stacked in the dishwasher afterward.
The fancy china — if families have it at all — remains locked behind glass. One way to fight the trend, readers said, was to do away with the formality and use it every day — “use the china until it breaks,” Paul Sheldon wrote.
On a peninsula in Maine, Elisabeth Paine, 66, told me that she inherited a distinctive set of dishes that are themselves nearly a century old. In 1918, her great-uncle was killed in the trenches of World War I. In 1928, his mother went looking for his grave in France and found herself at a cemetery with rows of white crosses as far as the eye could see. She returned with a set that can serve dinner for 18. It made its way through a line of relatives before arriving at Ms. Paine’s home.
She has no children. And she decided right then and there to use it every day.
Recently she used the porcelain, which has a pattern of a pink rose with a thorny stem, to serve slices of pizza to her friends. “On an everyday basis, I, too, enjoy it, sharing my quiet meals with lovely china and family ghosts,” she said.
Owners of decadent china sets described using them to eat everything from their breakfast yogurt to Chinese takeout.
“My son and daughter are not interested. My granddaughters either,” wrote Beth Fitz Gibbon, 77, in Kansas, who used her set to eat a breakfast of yogurt and berries on the day I reached out. “So I will enjoy making every snack a feast until I die.”
The attachment to pretty plates lies at the intersection of two things. For generations, china was a major investment, out of reach for all but the country’s wealthy, and acquiring it marked one’s arrival in a new social stratum. But for decades, fine china has been in decline, with fancy sets lining the shelves of thrift shops and languishing at estate sales. What was once valuable is no longer valued. Among the families that are most attached to their fancy tableware today are those for whom the experience of emerging from poverty and adversity is still fresh.
“Me, I always wanted to have what everybody else had,” said Dolores Owens, 90.
She served iced tea in glasses the color of the inside of a conch shell. The liquid made the glass radiate pink and peach, depending on how the light hit it.
Born in the mid-1930s in segregated Virginia, Ms. Owens was raised in a log cabin. The toilet was an outhouse. One of her chores was to get pails of water from a well. She and her siblings were bathed in an aluminum tub in the kitchen, with hot water added from a kettle. Her mother worked as a housekeeper. It was only when she got to high school — the first to serve Black students in the area, and now a museum — that she realized the extent of her family’s poverty.
The first four glasses in Ms. Owens’s collection were inherited from an aunt. Then, in the 1950s, after working in a factory, she learned to type. The clerical jobs that followed allowed her to use her early paychecks to buy matching glasses to fill out the set.
“When the family comes, everybody has the same glasses, the same plate, the same flatware,” she said, adding: “Ain’t it pretty?”
Ms. Owens now lives in a lovingly maintained subdivision in Elkins Park, Pa., where a security guard asks the name of each visitor before lifting the gate. Her home is small but immaculate. The china cabinet shows off her colored glass. Her granddaughter Cassie Owens hopes to inherit the glasses — a physical documentation of their family, a lineage that includes at least two enslaved ancestors, a history that has been passed down orally.
“For Black families like mine, the relationship is such a layered one,” said the younger Ms. Owens, 37. “It’s a relationship where you are actually telling a century-long arc of having to care for things that were considered so above you.”
“For my grandmother,” she added, “it means victory.”
But for many more, the meaning of these dishes and the memory of the difficult circumstances in which they were acquired have long faded.
Such is the case for Ashley Dumulong, the fifth generation in her family to own a set of Haviland and Co. china made in Limoges, France — the very brand that graced the White House during the 1800s, including in the administrations of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.
The china is stored in boxes under the stairs in Ms. Dumulong’s home in San Antonio. After her family’s story was featured on Page A1 of The New York Times, she bought copies of the paper and laid the newsprint in the boxes alongside the dishes, in the hopes that someday, when they are unbundled by her sons, the dishes will be valued.
Days after the publication of the Times piece, she texted that one of her sons had a change of heart.
“It really just changed my mind about how important it is to my mom,” Benjamin Dumulong, 17, explained. “I was just like, ‘Oh, yeah, this means a lot,’” he said of his inheriting the china one day, ensuring that it continues to be loved by a sixth generation.
