I guess you could say I collect vintage household linens. I have a big basket of linen tea-towels and another of napkins in my kitchen, and somewhere in storage I have a number of table cloths too. (The table cloths don’t get much use when I’m living in a small space with just the kitchen table, but I look forward to the day when I have a table just for eating off, so sometimes I buy the table cloths when I see them.)
I love them for two sets of reasons. The first set are reasons that would apply to any household linens, and the second apply to linen in particular.
Using cloth napkins and tea-towels are, to me, a way of living simply and using fewer resources. They replace all kinds of disposable, higher-tech, or space-hogging items. Napkins, of course, are used to wipe your hands and maybe face when eating, especially messy food, and when you’re done you throw them in the wash and use them again. But they have other uses too. You can use them to strain yoghurt, or spread them on a flat surface to dry pumpkin seeds, or wipe up spills with them. You can use them for light housework like dusting. After a meal, I like to wipe up crumbs with the napkins already used for their intended purpose.
Tea-towels, in addition to their intended purpose, make an excellent way to store bread, cakes, and similar: just wrap the bread or cake in a towel, and leave it on the counter. I’m assuming you don’t have mice or other pests, of course, but it will stop the loaf from gathering dust or kitchen spatters, while letting it breathe exactly the right amount to stay optimally fresh. If you put the cloth over the cooling rack when you take your baked good out of the oven, it’s right there ready to fold over the top when the stuff is cool. And if you like giving baked goods to other people, you can make an attractive arrangement by nestling them in a tea-towel inside a basket. Ask for it back when they’re done, or include it in the gift as you see fit.
One of the best ways to store salad greens is to rinse them and dry them in a salad spinner, lay them out on a towel, roll it up, then pop the whole thing in a plastic bag in the fridge. I first heard this suggested with paper kitchen towel, but of course I prefer a cloth one.
Sometimes, after I’ve mopped, I throw two tea-towels on the floor, bunch them up, put one foot on each, and shuffle round the room til the floor is relatively dry.
A tea-towel can also make a makeshift apron by tucking it into the waistband of your pants. But then, I already have aprons.
As for why I like linen in particular: linen is one of the hardest-wearing and most stain resistant fabrics in the universe. One year at Rowany Festival, we washed a bunch of dirty linens — covered in grime and dust and smoke and grease and candlewax and sweat and God knows what else — using old-fashioned handmade soap (from pig fat and lye, if you must know) and nothing but elbow grease. It was done much more quickly than we expected, and the linens came out looking like this:
On other occasions I’ve bled on linen and had the stains come right out. In fact, of all my kitchen textiles, which I’ve used for all the purposes described above, the only one that’s looking a bit nasty is one that an ex-housemate used to clean his motorcycle. And that particular one is a cotton/linen blend, so I’m not sure whether to blame the cotton or the oil.
Apart from that, linen just feels lovely. It’s crisp when new, soft and
drapy when older, and has a distinctive kind of wrinkling that, although it annoys people who can’t come to terms with its inherent nature, I think is beautiful. I can spot someone wearing linen from a distance just by the texture and the way the fabric hangs, and I immediately think of that person as someone with good taste.
Linen is the long fibrous stalk of the flax plant, beaten and spun and woven. Cotton, of course, is the fluffy seed boll of the cotton plant. Linen is fundamentally a better fibre for most uses (harder wearing, more absorbent, more stain resistant), but it’s also more expensive. Cotton became popular in the 18th century when slave labour made it cheap, and it remains cheap due to industrialised, subsidised, and environmentally damaging agricultural practices, but it’s not inherently a great fibre.
Most of my napkins and tea-towels are vintage, some of them second-hand, dating back to the mid 20th century or thereabouts. I expect to be using them for decades, maybe even the rest of my life.
If you want to buy linen home textiles, I recommend looking in antique stores in small towns, or on eBay. Or, if you’re a sewing type person, you can just buy a bolt of appropriate linen and cut and hem it to suit.
You could also use the amount described to serve 4, if you had another dish like a curry to go with it.
had an answer I was prepared to try, despite my dislike of oatmeal/porridge, in the form of a hot breakfast cereal with dried fruit, nuts, and orange zest.
