Christopher posted a question on our Facebook, www.DepressionGlassFun.com about an Old Café clear candy dish he had with a cutting. He wondered how rare this was. I have had a couple of these with the same cutting in the past so I don’t think they are all that rare, but less common than the plain candy dishes.
Here is his candy dish (photo is of mine which lacks the cutting). It’s pretty! HIs cutting adds to the looks of this piece.
ou can see that the candy dish is shaped like a very shallow bowl, or a dish with a sloped sides. It has two cute little handles, barely more than nubs on the ends of the ribs.
Hocking made a second candy dish. I’ve never had a complete one with the lid but here is the base. There are little ledges on the inside that would hold the lid.
My experience is that the two pieces you’ll find the most often are the flat candy dish and the this base to the covered candy dish. Apparently people bought Old Cafe candy dishes more often than they got the dish set for dinnerware!
I know we had plates, cups and saucers in stock once upon a time but couldn’t find pictures for you. (I cleaned out my photos a couple years ago when I moved to my current laptop. It’s always a mixed blessing to clean up files!)
The plates look much like Christopher’s candy except flat and no handles. The centers are pretty wide and have narrower ribs. The rim has the same scallops.
Keeping with our theory that the dinnerware didn’t sell well, the dinner plate is among the pricier pieces, even in clear. There are several bowls, both with and without handles, tumblers, two sizes of plates, the 6 inch sherbet plate and the 10 inch dinner. Hocking made a couple fun pieces that would be neat to see, a lamp and a pitcher. Here is the olive dish in pink.
The vase is a bit troubling. Hocking made an Old Cafe vase – the photo below is the real thing – but you may see more recent vases that look quite similar. They seem to be florist vases. I had several Old Cafe vases, including one I got that just didn’t look quite right. When I put all the vases together it was pretty easy to tell which were real Old Cafe. The real one had a distinctive, sharp pattern while the florist one was inferior quality glass and the design wasn’t sharp. I have not read that the vases were reproduced, but it does appear a similar design made its way to flower shops.
One of our vases had the AH with an anchor symbol, the trademark that Anchor Hocking used beginning in the late 1930s after Hocking Glass merged with Anchor Cap and Closure. Since Hocking made Old Cafe from 1936 to 1940, it’s reasonable that at least some of the vases were marked.
Some people confuse Old Cafe with Hocking’s Fortune depression glass pattern. The two patterns are similar! Hocking made them both around the same time, both in pink and clear and both had some similar pieces. Fortune has one narrow rib between one rib that look bent. Old Cafe has two narrow ribs between one rounded wide rib. This close up of a bowl shows the Fortune ribs. Fortune always looks pointier to me than does Old Cafe which looks and feels rounded.
I hope you enjoyed a quick tour of Old Cafe depression glass from Hocking!
Pictures and text: Copyright 2013 Kathy Eickholt