Plates in the Rao household each served a specific purpose: Compartment plates prevented South Indian curries from flowing into one another; those with a raised edge made it easier to pour raita all over spicy biryani; flat ones were good for liquid-free meals, such as aloo paratha with a side of mango pickle.
We kept all three types stacked high in a kitchen cabinet, a potentially disastrous placement for clumsy kids looking to set the table each night. But these weren’t any plates. They were Corelle, the seemingly indestructible kind still found in immigrant households across the country.
If the brand name doesn’t ring a bell, the Butterfly Gold pattern, especially popular in the 1980s, just might. The parents of my first-generation friends served dinner on these plates, bordered with alternating images of butterflies and flowers, when I had sleepovers at their homes. Similar ones — with different borders, often still floral — could be found in several of my relatives’ pantries, or even in the college dorm rooms of first-gen kids whose families insisted they pack the lightweight dishes from home to save money.
“I have the Morning Blue ones,” said Kevin Nguyen, the 24-year-old child of Vietnamese immigrants. “I asked a bunch of my friends about that, too, and they were like, ‘Corelle?’ Then they were like, ‘Oh, I had that one!’ They probably look generic to us because everybody had them.”