Kitchen Requirements

2. One can never have enough dish towels. Not the nubby sorts that knot and shed but linen ones. The classic restaurant-issue white and blue ones are very fine but look a bit sordid when stained. More presentable for a domestic kitchen are the brightly patterned ones.

Buy them in different patterns and the varying colors can also be used to signal specific uses. The French, who take the uses very seriously, even have customized dish-towel racks, with little labels above the hooks reading “glasses,” “plates,” “cutlery” and “hands”--only in French.

The important distinction here is basically sanitary--that one shouldn’t polish glasses with the dish towel that someone else just dried hands with.

However, to list all the jobs that dish towels really do, one would need a very long rack. They hold rinsed salad as it dries, they stand in as oven mitts, they polish dishes and cutlery, they line bread baskets, they dry freshly sponged counters and so on.

It may seem at once wishful and pretentious to suggest that we revert from the convenience of paper towels to a pseudo-Continental regime of laundering dish towels. So it is time to play the cost card. Paper towels do a whole lot less and cost a whole lot more. One could buy a cupboard full of the best dish towels going and still have change left over from a holiday season’s worth of use of paper towels. Moreover, the linen towels keep on working for years, slipping in and out of colored loads of laundry without notice. So how often is it that the more attractive, more versatile, more durable and downright classier option is cheaper than the “convenient” one?