Fostoria Glass made their lovely crystal Century pattern for over 30 years, both etched or decorated and plain. It is one vintage elegant glass pattern where you can find dinner plates and place setting bowls, cups and saucers, small side plates quite easily.
Fostoria made two sizes of Century dinner plates, the 9 1/2 and 10 1/2 inches across. You don’t have to get both sizes, although you will find it useful to do so. (We have Franciscan Apple dishes in both sizes and we use both.) Gene Florence suggested the typical price in 2010 was $15 for the smaller and $25 for the larger, but today Replacements has both for about the same price, about $28. If you can get only one size then I suggest the larger if you intend to use them for dinner service.
You can get 8 1/2 inch luncheon plates which are great for sandwiches, and 7 1/2 inch salad plates which hold a good piece of pie. The 7 1/2 inch size is good for breakfast although a little small for lunch use, but you could skip the luncheon plate if you are pressed for storage space.
The 6 1/2 inch bread and butter plate is the size we refer to as a “sherbet liner” in the older patterns. It’s also a useful size, good for a roll or cookies or a very small salad.
If you wanted a little different look, try the crescent shaped salad plate. It curves so it fits around the dinner plate and takes up less room on the table than the round salad plate.
Most china patterns today have a dinner plate and salad plate in their basic 4-piece place setting, adding the bread and butter plate if they sell 5-piece place settings. Personally I find many sets lack bowls, both the smaller sauce dish size for vegetables and the larger size for salad, soup or cereal use. Fostoria produced only two of these in Century.
You can get a 5 inch bowl, perfect for coleslaw or vegetables, and a 6 inch cereal bowl which is not real deep but there is no specific soup bowl.
You would have to use the cereal bowl which is rather small. The small serving bowls are the wrong shape for soup bowls.
Of course there is a cup and saucer too.
I hadn’t realized until researching to write this blog that Century has so many accessory and serving pieces, yet lacks soup bowls. Next post we’ll start a tour of the serving pieces. There are so many we may need two posts!