The Doctor's Pie-Plates

The Doctor's Pie-Plates by Alice Morse Earle

"The Doctor's Pie-plates" by Alice Morse Earle is a personal essay recounting the history of a set of dark-blue Staffordshire china plates decorated with humorous scenes from the Dr. Syntax series, illustrated by Thomas Rowlandson and published by William Combe beginning in 1812. The narrator explains that while the plates are artistically notable for their rich color and witty designs depicting the comic character Dr. Syntax in various absurd situations, their true interest lies not in their artistic merit but in a remarkable family story attached to their past. The plates once belonged to a New England physician, the son of an American gentleman and his English bride, who had brought considerable wealth and English goods, including an elaborate travelling-coach, to America in the late eighteenth century. The Doctor inherited from his father not only material possessions but also an extreme reverence for all things English and a deeply stubborn, overbearing temperament. He imposed his Anglophile tastes tyrannically upon his household, banning distinctly American foods such as pork and beans, Indian pudding, and, most consequentially, pie. Having once overindulged in mince pie and suffered for it, he declared pie forbidden at his table, insisting instead on English plum pudding as the only acceptable dessert. This decree caused his New England wife, for whom pie was central to proper hospitality, considerable ongoing grief and humiliation. His daughters, growing into young women, were less willing than their mother to submit entirely to his domestic despotism. In 1830, with thirty relatives invited to a Thanksgiving dinner, the women of the household secretly prepared twenty-six pies of various kinds, including mince, pumpkin, apple, cranberry, and the prized Marlboro pie, arranged on a new set of English blue-and-white stoneware plates. They feared discovery but dared to hope the Doctor, walking through the kitchen in the fading November light, had not noticed the forbidden pastry stored in the pantry. He appeared to ignore it, and the women went to bed believing they had succeeded. On Thanksgiving morning, they discovered that every pie and every pie-plate had vanished overnight. There were no footprints in the fresh snow, no sign of an outside thief, and nothing else had been disturbed. The Doctor said nothing. The family searched for weeks and then years, checking barns, cellars, attics, closets, barrels, and even the roof, but found nothing. The missing plates became an enduring household mystery, with the daughters eventually half-persuading themselves that a thief must somehow have entered despite all evidence to the contrary. The Doctor died in 1866, having maintained his silence on the matter for thirty-six years. His daughters, now elderly women whose resentment had never faded, immediately set about destroying several of his most cherished English possessions. The first to be demolished was the old English travelling-coach, which had sat unused and deteriorating in the carriage house for half a century. When the first blow of an axe struck the coach, a loud rattling of crockery was heard. Investigation revealed a hidden compartment beneath the driver's seat, originally built for dispatches or jewelry, in which were found all twenty-six of the long-lost pie-plates, dirty but intact. The truth became immediately clear: the Doctor had risen in the night, carried the pies out to the pigs, carefully packed the plates into the secret compartment, and spent the remaining decades of his life watching in silent satisfaction as his family searched fruitlessly and endured pieless Thanksgivings. Among the recovered plates were the Dr. Syntax pieces, half of which eventually came to the narrator. The other plates bore English views including Windsor Castle, Blenheim Castle, and the City of Liverpool, reflecting the Doctor's refusal to allow any American imagery in his home. The narrator concludes with a note of wry satisfaction: the Doctor's spiteful act of concealment had, ironically, preserved the plates in perfect condition for his descendants, and in return for this unintentional favor, the family commemorates his pettiness whenever the plates are displayed. They named the set the Doctor's Pie-plates as a deliberate and gleeful insult to his memory and his gastronomic tyranny.

By Alice Morse Earle · First published 1909 · Genre: Essay, Historical Fiction, Domestic History · 2,180 words

First lines

Many of my cherished china treasures, having no historical association and being of comparatively coarse ware, would be of little value on the shelves of a collector, and also of little interest to the general observer; but they are endeared to me by the remembrance of the circumstances under which they were found, or by some story connected with their past owner or their past history.

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The Doctor's Pie-Plates is listed on Textopian as a short story by Alice Morse Earle, dated 1909 CE.

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domestic life · household management · cooking · kitchenware · tableware · American history · 19th century · social history · food culture · domestic economy · material culture · decorative arts

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