The soup mug with dish is usually sold with an enclosure for the mug when set down on the dish. The dish made for the soup mug has a rounded partition usually on the side of the dish to fit the mug. The rest of the dish can hold food items. The cleverness of the soup mug and dish must have been thought from someone invited to parties that served foods and soups in buffet fashion. With a soup mug and dish set, the guest could fill his cup with soup, take a sandwich and probably eat standing up, if there were no places left to sit down, without much difficulty.
Convenience and thoughtfulness for one’s guests was a Victorian tradition that in some ways broke with traditional etiquette of the two handled soup bowl set on its own dish. The need for a sit down place setting and each place setting being removed before a new course could be served made the traditional two handled soup bowls clumsy when trying to feed people from a serving table where they could help themselves. The one handled soup mug with its own indented plate was an ingenious idea and might have led to other serving chinaware inventions like the Lazy Susan.
Soup mug and dish sets are easily found in antique stores and there are modern counterparts being sold in most places that offer products for parties and casual or even formal dining. These soup mugs and dish sets can be found in china or decorative glass or even in heavy, heat resistant plastic. The high end of soup mugs and dish sets can be as expensive as fine bone china or turn of the century decorative glass made in place like West Virginia. The fact that specially made soup mugs and plate sets come in different materials merely adds to their properly being used in either formal or casual dining.
For formal buffets, fine china or expensive decorative glass soup mugs and dish sets makes serving soup and accompaniments simple. For casual dining, inexpensive heat resistant plastics made into soup mugs and dish sets makes serving guests or letting guests serve themselves an easy chore especially when eating out of doors. The soup mug and plate set idea was not only ingenious in assisting guests to enjoy the food being proffered but also ingenious when it came to cleaning up and needing only to clean one plate instead of two per guest served soup and solid food items.
Novelty items like Campbell’s soup mugs and dishes add color and a motiff to place settings for parties and for casual use. These specialty soup mugs and dish sets can sometimes be collected and saved as antiques. Of course, for the most part, shopping for soup mugs and dish sets can be interesting if one goes to specific sites of manufacturers who make soups, Campbell being only one of them.