Fire King’s Peach Lustre brings you the tea for today: smoky lapsang souchong. The earliest date I found for Fire King oven dishes, by Anchor Hocking, was the September 18, 1941 Bayard News from Bayard, Iowa, where Brideson’s Groceries advertised:
OUR FIRE KING BAKE DISHES ARE IN NOW. ASK US HOW YOU CAN GET A SET.
Fire-King Glass from the Glass Encyclopedia references the start of production as 1942, but the newspaper ad predates to 1941. One of the most popular colors was the Peach Lustre–described as
…iridized peach color with a mirror finish…
…which was a perfect foil to the dark amber of lapsang souchong. I’ve stored this tea in a glass jar, and it would have been either Harney & Sons or Steven Smith Tea. It was still delightfully smoky, due to the pine bough smoking process in preparing this tea. I was making a pot one morning, right after a fire caused by an electric arc from the power lines had burned down our fence, and all the trees along the fence line. My son asked
Why don’t you just go outside and scoop up some charred wood; it smells just like this.
It was a moment of humor in what had been a bleak occasion, and we began to joke about inventing a new use for the kudzu leaves–as the rapidly burning kudzu had spread the fire quickly: pine-smoked kudzu tea. Japan and China have used kudzu as food for thousands of years, and there are any number of recipes or uses for kudzu greens or kudzu flower jelly to be found on the Internet. It has also been the subject of much research for its health and pharmaceutical benefits. Probably the greatest danger of consuming kudzu from the wild is the likelihood someone has used pesticide on it in the attempt to kill it, so the moral of this story is know where your kudzu comes from if you plan to eat it! And it you would like to be educated about kudzu, check out the Smithsonian Magazine story by Bill Finch that really explains the vine that–in spite of the stories–did not truly eat the south.
All photographs are original images with all rights reserved. Kindly request permission prior to using.
Interesting post. Kudzu is all over Arkansas. A very invasive weed for most people. Love that cup and saucer.
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Good morning, Peggy, and thank you for stopping by. Oh, it is definitely invasive. There should be a law that if you move to a kudzu state, there should be full disclosure when you buy property. :). My grandmother also had a full set of these dishes, but she could have purchased them at their local store. I recall the coffee mugs in this design, and the saucer for the coffee mug was deeper, with a higher lip. My grandfathered “saucered” his coffee, which meant pouring it into the saucer to cool and then drinking from the saucer. My father thought that was strange, as his family had never done such a thing.
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Always nice to hear family history from others. I remember my father-in-law drinking his coffee from a saucer. He was an old farmer who grew the biggest and best strawberry patch in his area (with not one weed invading his well tended patch).
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Now that is something my grandfather the farmer could not say about weeds. 🙂
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Love the cup, but I remember your fire and the discussion on a post about the kudzu. Really all we can do is laugh about it’s persistence! I’m glad you mentioned Harney & Sons tea – I enjoy several of their bag varieties.
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Ah, yes, the debacle of the fire lives on. I do like Harney & Sons, and have purchased any number of their teas over the years, but I am getting pretty partial to Rakkasan!
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Had to laugh about J’s comment. I don’t think I’d ever heard of kudzu till you moved to MS. 🙂
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He can be pretty funny, whether intentional or not. I do not know that I was aware of kudzu either, and I certainly would have thought twice about this house if I had realized what would happen to that hillside come spring!
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LOL Foresight might have saved both of us from our housing issues. 🙂
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Okay, girl, whilst laughing out loud at that, I choked on my own spit…good for the mood, bad for the breathing. LOL
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LOL No choking! I often think about Bob/Will, though I guess we can’t blame Will for the kudzu.
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Probably not, but I will point out that had he not cut it back to build said fence, we never would have even seen this house from the road…so yeah, kind of sort of, I can blame him.
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LOL Now that’s funny!
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:). I rest my case.
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