A Garden of Eden where luxury is no sin

To some, a spoon may be a shovel used to scoop nourishment through a hole in one's face. But in my eyes a spoon is never less than an elegant tool, a utensil cited in Exodus, crafted by the Egyptians of ivory, with pointed edges by the Romans (for spiking the tips of eggs, where evil spirits were believed to dwell), made from silver as early as the fourth century, and of rock crystal for the rich of the Middle Ages, the poor being forced to use horn.

The spoon of today, with its elegant bowed profile and elliptical bowl, is substantially an innovation of the 18th century, according to Suzanne Von Drachenfels, the author of "The Art of the Table" (Simon & Schuster, 2000). It was then that the elaborate ceremonies of dining began to call for a complex etiquette and the use of ever more elaborate props. It was then, in the West at least, that craftsmen developed specialized shapes for the spoon, to serve new purposes and tastes: a strainer for tea leaves, a serrated saw for the membrane of grapefruit, a probe to excavate the succulent marrow from a bone.

There are plenty of people, like the writer Jesse Browner, the author of "The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down: An Informal History of Hospitality" (Bloomsbury, 2003), who are apparently happy to serve food on chipped plates and wine from glasses bought at restaurant supply stores. Browner and his wife have no need to impress guests with fancy linens and china, as they assert in the December issue of Food & Wine magazine, before serving up a meal in which the main course requires 17 separate and costly ingredients.

Pretension is in the eye of the beholder. As Browner does, I think of the dining table as a garden of Eden, where a benevolent presiding spirit -- or else Grace's Marketplace and Garnet Wines and Liquors -- provides abundantly. Unlike Browner, however, I do not think of ostentation as a vice in the garden. I enjoy fine food as well as the next man; it happens that I like it better when served on a beautiful plate.

By preference, that vessel will be porcelain, manufactured by the Koenigliche Porzellan-Manufaktur in Berlin, in a pattern called Arkadia, designed in 1938 by Trude Petri and Siegmund Schuetz to honor the 175th anniversary of the manufacturer, whose patron, Frederick the Great, was not the first royal to have been what a food writer friend calls a "big dish queen."

The Prussian monarch gave KPM its name and his imprimatur, which still appears in the form of a royal blue scepter faintly stamped at the underside of each piece. The plates themselves are lunar white and equally severe; the unusually broad rim is designed to accommodate an unglazed medallion depicting the gods of Arcadia. Marsyas plays a flute on an oval platter. Nymphs cavort on the gravy boat. Diana plucks an arrow on the salad bowl.

There may have been more than an element of the perverse in the choice by Arkadia's designers to invoke peaceful Hellenic uplands at a time when Germany was steamrolling Austria and invading the Czechs. Had I known Arkadia's history before I began buying, I might have made a different choice. But by then I was invested in these plates, whose motifs, a salesman once told me, were meant "to invoke a region where happiness and simplicity reigned supreme." By invested I do not mean figuratively, either: A five-piece place setting costs $420 at Moss, available by special order only, delivery time four months.

This may be the place to note that my habits are not spendthrift and that, as many parents do, my own forgot to provide for a private income. Yet, like the man in the proverb, I consider myself too poor to buy cheap. Which is how, on a reporting trip to Berlin, I have found myself spending spare time hunting down a KPM salesroom, and how, in Paris, I tend to head straight for Baccarat.

Customs officers would be the first to tell you that it makes sense to buy luxury products in their country of origin; prices are typically half of those in the United States. Customs officers can also point out that that Prada coat you claim has been in your closet for years is from the current runway season. Agent and drug-sniffing beagle alike can smell a cheat trying to sneak through the Green Lane. Therefore, I simplify matters by filling out declarations when shopping and sending my purchases home by UPS.

From Paris I ship glasses from a Baccarat pattern called Perfection, a crystal created in 1933 to suit the banqueting requirements of the vintners of Bordeaux. These included a medium-weight glass of great clarity with a full but not exaggerated bowl and a slender stem equal in length to the breadth of an average man's palm. "People like it because it is simple," said Jeffrey Tauber, a salesman at Baccarat in New York. "It enhances the wine drinking as opposed to making a glass statement."

Referring to William Shawn, the late editor of The New Yorker, the novelist and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala once remarked that he possessed an "ostentatious humility." One could make a similar claim for Perfection, adding that it has what experts call a lovely "hand feel" and walls so durable that they flex. Shawn's particular quality of steely transparency allowed him both to stand up to and to keep out of the way of the main event. In The New Yorker, that meant writers. Over dinner at my house, it often means the same. And the last thing anyone needs at a table of scribblers is a wineglass with something to say.

"When a gentleman entertains his friends and acquaintances, he has only two goals," write John Bridges and Bryan Curtis in "A Gentleman Entertains" (Rutledge Hill Press, 2003), a plain-spoken series on reviving the arts of masculine courtesy. Those goals are "to enjoy the pleasure of their company and to make sure they enjoy his."

To that end, I prefer a table set with low candles and a minimum of floral interference; unornamented napkins the size of a jib in a toy-boat regatta (the 28-inch squares I use come from the Irish Linen Co. in London, where they are made on looms created for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II); dead plain decanters designed in 1974 by the American decorator Van Day Truex; and James Robinson silver I inherited from my mother.

That the silver is made by a workshop in England founded in 1510 is not a fact that a dinner companion need ever note. That it is hand-forged in a Fiddle Thread pattern dating roughly to the 18th century probably matters less to any guest than it does, pragmatically, to me. "People say, 'Isn't it wonderful, it's handmade?' So what? Who cares?" said Edward Munves, the proprietor of James Robinson Inc., who then proudly pointed out that his silver is tough enough to toss into the dishwasher.

"There are important things that happen to silver when it's worked by hand, a compacting and compressing that comes from being hammered on all sides," said Munves, referring to the technique of forming a hunk of metal into a tool that gleams and functions and balances beautifully in the hand.

The prongs of the forks are filed to a point, the U at the bottom of each tine polished in a way that I find uncommonly pleasing, and not because these utensils can be taken as evidence of my fat purse or fine discriminations.

I value it for the same reasons that people have always liked appointing tables well, because to do so adds narrative layers to the pleasures of dining, histories composed in objects that form a civilizing scenery for the theater of a meal.