Pair silver entrée dishes

Pair of oblong, heavy-gauge, silver entrée dishes with lids.  Both covers and bases of these silver serving dishes have crisp and well defined applied bead-pattern mounts in a design that easily complements a variety of table settings. When removed. the covers can be used as serving dishes too.

Of course, without tainting the flavour of food and being an excellent conductor of heat, silver or silver plate is the perfect material to create an entrée dish; a versatile, shallow and often rectangular serving dish with a lid that keeps entrées and vegetables hot while being transported from the kitchen to the dining table. It is perfect for serving cold foods in both the dish and its upturned lid, or to keep hot food warm by using one half as the cover to retain the heat. Like this lovely pair, those entrée dishes that could hold hot water to keep the food warm even longer, were mostly made in Old Sheffield Plate.

Although the word has changed its meaning through the centuries, entrée comes from a word meaning "entrance" and was first used in dining terms in the mid-16th century and referred to the first course of a sumptuous dinner. By the 1650s, the French entrée was a hot meat dish served after the soup and it continued to have this meaning into the 1920s when it came to have its present French meaning of "a light first course."