If you come to dinner at my house, you will find a table laid with matching plates and silverware and wine glasses and even a 10-piece set of vintage cream soup bowls, which I admit feels like I’m showboating. But water glasses? Blame the mason jar trend of 2010, but somehow I have never assembled a matching set. My collection is a hodgepodge of thrift store scores, Ikea tumblers from college whose mates have long since shattered, and the one utilitarian pint glass that my fiancée keeps trying to throw away. I can never justify spending money on something as mundane as glasses meant just for water, a beverage whose most noteworthy quality is that it tastes like nothing.
Dessert glasses, on the other hand, are irresistibly frivolous and festive, and Lani Halliday’s recipe for Candied Cucumbers With Vanilla Whip is an excellent excuse to buy some. It sounds like something out of an Edwardian children’s book and demands a presentation that my holdout Ikea tumblers cannot provide. Instead, I like Our Place’s Drinking Glasses—pleasingly curved, a little bit retro, and perfect for layering the glistening cubes of cukes, toasted flakes of almonds, and cascading billows of whipped cream. Their beveled bottoms make for easy stacking, and they have a nice amount of heft, so you can aggressively scrape every last bit of whip from the bottom of the glass without fear of shattering. I’d opt for the jade green Dawn color for a monochrome moment with the cucumbers or the amber-colored Sunset for maximum ’70s appeal.
It’s also a major bonus for me that these glasses are produced by a mission-driven company founded by Shiza Shahid, who was raised in Pakistan and cofounded the Malala Fund with Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai before turning her attention to kitchenware. Our Place works with factories around the world—the drinking glasses are hand-blown in Thailand—that are audited by independent partners to ensure that workers are paid fairly and treated humanely.
In addition to the Candied Cucumbers With Vanilla Whip, I could see using these glasses to serve an endless parade of desserts: sorbet with berries, pudding parfaits, or even individually portioned icebox cakes. And when they’re not in use for the dessert course, what do you know, I’ve tricked myself into buying a matching set of water glasses.
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