Put Your Money Where Your Loved One’s Mouth Is

When in doubt, turn to food: at least when it comes to gift giving, that’s an infallible motto. For every person on this earth, there exists a perfect gastronomic gift—something to eat, something to eat with, something to eat near, something to remind one of the joy of eating. For every aesthete who will only be pleased by a hand-forged, sculptural exploding fruit bowl (approximately $613; four weeks’ lead time required) or leather boots sculpted to resemble a half-peeled banana ($1,903, on sale!), there’s the happy soul whose heart desires nothing so much as a jar of violently purple French mustard ($12), or a tube of pickle-flavored toothpaste ($13). These are some of the items I’ve found myself drawn to this year, a motley collection of the edible, the functional, and the absurd. I hope that at least one or two can spark some inspiration this season. (If not, try one of my previous years’ guides.)

Charles Jeffrey Loverboy Yellow Banana Boots.Photograph from SSENCE

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A Serving Platter That Gets Out of the Way

Instead of a haphazard pile on top of the cabinets or ragged library-style shelving in a forgotten closet, why do we not simply hang our vessels on the wall? This shapely, ingenious wooden tray ($75) is fabricated in Brooklyn from fine-grained, lustrous sapele-mahogany wood, and has two simple holes at one end, perfectly sized to slot onto the tines of a custom-made, U-shaped metal wall hook (included)—art, storage, and function in one.

Consider Some Lobsters

Have we, as a culture, reached peak shrimp? No, never—we will never reach peak shrimp. (For the shrimp aficionado on your list: the artist Betty Turbo’s gloriously cartoony papier-mâché shellfish, $40.) But perhaps a little love is due to their larger crustacean cousins, whose red shells connote, paradoxically, both the silver-platter opulence of yesteryear and a salt-swept, puritanical stoicism. Perhaps a linen lobster-tail apron ($76, from Maison Balzac), ideal to tie on for serving cocktails—a Martini or a G. & T., certainly, pre-batched and poured from an outrageous blown-glass lobster decanter ($695 at Neiman Marcus), with the garnishing olive or citrus skewered on a teak lobster pick ($20 for four), and a die-cut lobster-shaped paper cocktail napkin ($8.25 for sixteen), just in case. (Clip a Jenny Lemons lobster barrette—$16—in the hair, just in case the message isn’t clear.) The star of the show, of course, is the lobster itself, shipped live ($439.99 for a box of twelve) and ready to be dispatched in service of dinner. Once steamed, present them in a kingly pile with some skinny-nosed vintage Portuguese lobster crackers (about $35), reminiscent of surgical tools in a pleasingly disquieting way, and salty drawn butter individually portioned in the ceramicist Jono Pandolfi’s austerely lovely, amazingly useful little ceramic condiment bowls ($13.60 each, on sale). Keep the kids occupied with a D.I.Y. paper-lobster kit ($25), hypnotically beautiful and made from iridescent paper, while littler ones can run around with a pull-along wooden lobster (about $29), ingeniously constructed so the claws click-click-click (playfully? Ominously? Truly, who can know the mind of a lobster!).

Something Fancy Stored in a Jar: Savory

Unlike black truffles, which both smell and taste savory and earthy, the vaunted white truffle—more expensive, more rare, in all ways more absurd—tastes like nothing at all. It’s all smell: a fecund, earthy clean-sweat smell, bizarre and irresistible. Like a Zen koan made material, the truffle itself (starting at $124.95 for a half-ounce) emits its alchemical aroma whether we’re around to inhale it or not; this phenomenon can be captured, quite elegantly, by storing the truffle in a glass jar (Le Parfait’s hinged-lid, quart-size canning jars—$49.99 for four—are awfully elegant) and burying it in a mass of uncooked white rice, which will become infused with the intoxicating scent in the course of a day or so. Choose an excellent Italian short-grain variety, like Carnaroli ($10.25 for 17.6 ounces) to make a swoony truffled risotto. You can then repack the truffle in new rice once or twice more before it’s time to actually shave up the bumpy little fungus, as paper-thin as possible, over something like scrambled eggs or a plate of pasta with butter. This is an especially efficient gift if you have a lot of people to provide presents with at once, and a large budget. For your less-favored friends, simply swap in a knobbly little potato. If they express dismay, hey, you never know with truffles. Must have been a dud.

Something Fancy Stored in a Jar: Sweet

Like a white truffle, the slender, squiggly vanilla bean also happily infuses its scent into whatever you surround it with. For an ultra-simple gift (and, if you’ve waited until the last minute, one you can source from the grocery store), put two or three vanilla beans in an airtight container and cover them with white sugar. I’m enthralled by Diaspora Co.’s Kaveri vanilla, ($26 for 0.4 ounces, about three vanilla beans), sourced from Kerala, India; it’s lush and figgy, and comes in a beautiful metal tin that’s ready to be filled with whatever sugar you have on hand. For a spicier, more woody profile, try vanilla from Timor-Leste ($17.50 for an ounce, about seven beans); pack them in a retro-style glass jar adorned with minimalist tulips ($24). The aroma is slow to infuse—your recipient will want to wait a month or more for the roundest, deepest results—but what emerges is a vanilla sugar of sensuous, joyous complexity, ready to be sprinkled on a cookie, stirred into coffee, or exuberantly baked with, and entirely worth the wait.