Medium plates

A medium plate is never the one thing you need, but the table stops working without it. This is the plate you hand food around on. It does not take the lead, and that is exactly why you reach for it more often than anything else.

These run roughly five to six sun — a little larger than your palm. Some are drawn in a single blue, some built up in layers of colour, some carry no drawing at all and are given their character by the glaze alone. Round, square, oval, and rims lifted into petal-like waves. They come from different regions and different hands, so two plates of the same size can differ a good deal in thickness and weight.

Five sun is about 15cm, six sun about 18cm. Five sun suits a single portion passed around; six sun takes a main dish. The conversion is set out in sun to centimetres, and which size to use when in choosing a medium plate.