Pair of Vintage 1970s Ceramic Avocado Dishes in Green and Yellow

A pair of avocado dishes from the decade that invented the avocado starter. Each one is shaped like a halved fruit, with a bumpy dark green skin picked out in pale flecks and a glossy yellow interior that looks like the real thing just after you have taken the stone out. They are the kind of object that makes people of a certain age go misty about prawn cocktail and Blue Nun, and everyone else simply grin.

The moulding is better than it needs to be. The skin has real texture, the rim has the slight lip of a cut fruit, and the yellow glaze pools thicker in the bowl and thins to green at the edge so the two colours blend rather than butt up against each other. They were made to hold half an avocado with a spoonful of vinaigrette or prawns in Marie Rose sauce, and they still do that perfectly. But they are also very good for olives, nuts, a pile of pistachio shells, rings on a bedside table, or a couple of scoops of ice cream on a hot evening.

Each dish measures 15 cm long, 8 cm wide and 4 cm deep, and they stack neatly together. That makes them easy to store, easy to post as a gift, and a very good present for anyone with a fondness for the seventies or a weakness for avocado on toast.

Condition is very good. There is a small glaze chip to the rim of one dish, visible in the photographs, and a little wear to the base of both from years of being set down on tables. No cracks, no repairs, and the colours are still bright. They are unmarked, as most of these were.

We photographed them with a string of dried seed heads on a white table and they looked like they had been styled by a 1974 colour supplement. If your kitchen has any green in it at all, they will feel instantly at home.