My Very Own Rice Bowls!

Rice-pattern ceramic ware (a style in which grains of rice set into the clay become translucent windows when the pottery is fired in the kiln) apparently originated in China over 1,000 years ago during the Song Dynasty.

My first encounter with these "rice bowls" (as we called them) was in the mid-1980's, when my family lived in Belgium. The local Seca gas station was giving away rice bowls for a while, and my parents assembled a good collection. (This was a much more useful and interesting customer reward system than Seca's ill-fated sock giveaway; they would give out just one sock at a time, as I recall, and a different color each week. So it was difficult to get a pair.)

Since then, I have always admired rice bowls -- but have seldom seen them. I actually went looking for some at the beginning of October. Neither Crate & Barrel nor Target carried them. (It was an unproductive foray into the stores, because I was also looking for fancy crystal goblets, of a particular type that probably does not exist anywhere other than my imagination).

Now I own a complete set! It was a gift from my parents for my birthday: rice spoons, rice cups, and rice saucers. The cups are for tea, but they are perfect for a shot of o.j. in the morning.

This is the same cup, from another angle (which makes it look more like a bowl):


The design inside is my favorite: a dragon.
And they also go well with the rice plates my grandfather gave me last year. It's clearly time for another mahjong party!!