Size matters: why choosing the perfect plate isn’t just for chefs

“What these choices show us, is that food is never catering only to our physical needs, but always to our artistic and human needs as well.”

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Most of us have more important things to think about when we’re hosting than selecting the perfect serving dish. More often than not, we grab whatever’s to hand, heat it up if we can, and get it to the table. But what if the bowls, dishes and boards on which we serve our food have the power to make or break our guests’ enjoyment of our food?

Food stylists know this to be true. We eat first with our eyes, and this has given rise to thousands of articles offering photographers advice on how to ‘style a cheeseboard’ or ‘make your salad camera-ready’ for a photoshoot. In reality, crockery isn’t simply a vessel to store our food on its way into our mouths. Instead, it acts like an art frame, hinting at us how to understand and enjoy the food we eat. But which kinds of foods should we put in which crockery, and why do these unwritten rules matter?

The first kind of food we could consider is foods that signify abundance. This covers natural and farmed products such as salads, cheeseboards, charcuterie and in general anything we could consider part of ‘a spread’. These tend to look best when presented tightly packed, like a summer garden or the image of a medieval feast, otherwise they look can ungenerous and meagre. A dish with sloping sides is perfect for creating the sense of the food overflowing the sides of the bowl.

The second kind of food we could consider is homely foods, foods that fill us up. Foods of the back burner in the kitchen. This particularly applies to soups, stews, and casseroles. Porridge. Just right. We don’t want it to seem like we’ve got less than we intended to have. Anxiety central. 

The third kind of food we might think about is rare foods and delicacies. Foods to be savoured and tasted. (this incidentally is what so many high-end restaurants are up to that can infuriate diners looking for a hearty meal) This covers amuse bouche, rich and decadent desserts, rare or expensive products (caviar, iberico ham). Its the opposite of the spread. (ham can be presented two ways: as if you bought it from the shop, or as if you went on a sourcing trip to Italy hunt it down from a local supplier who won’t ship abroad. Present truffle as if you went searching around the forests of southern italy yourself, with your nose to the ground. Choose how you want your guests to eat it, or how they’ll best enjoy it and go with that. This applies to every engineered foods as well. Foods of artistic labour. Keep these to a minimum for god’s sake. And not if people are hungry. 

We experience things best within the right context - but also we understand foods with a lot of baggage attached and even though some will say ‘food is all about flavour’, we experience food more widely than that.

A separate rule form the field of food styling is include cutlery in your serving. Serve it with a spoon embedded that says ‘help yourself’ 

If in doubt - serve it in the smallest pan it fits in. 

It would be easy to dismiss all this as superficial, and to some extent thats true. What these choices show us, is that food doesn’t cater only to our physical needs, but to our artistic, creative and human needs as well.