But, just in case, it is proudly described as "Highland Water". With such a delicious ingredient, it seems pointless to add such superfluous elements as chicken, rice and vegetables. It should be served pure and unadulterated in the form of a highland consomme.Could any broth be more Scotch?. Back in 1934, Harrods organised an exhibition called Modern Art for the Table, featuring ceramics and glass designed by leading artists of the day, including Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland and Eric Ravilious. Their creations, which consisted of jolly, hand-painted designs for pottery, and quirky, cut and engraved patterns on glass, were produced by leading tableware manufacturers such as Stuart Crystal and Clarice Cliff. A year later the merits of this collaboration were vaunted once again, this time in a high-profile exhibition at the Royal Academy, called British Art in Industry. Critical response was fairly negative, though, and in commercial terms the venture was a flop.

After the war a fresh attempt was made to promote the involvement of artists in industrial design. This time the chosen medium was textiles, and the sponsor was a forward- looking trade magazine called The Ambassador. The project was launched at the ICA in 1953 with an exhibition called Painting into Textiles. Henry Moore and John Piper were two of the heavyweights who participated, along with several up-and-coming abstract artists, including the young Eduardo Paolozzi and William Gear. The initiative attracted the attention of leading manufacturers, notably the design-conscious David Whitehead and the firm Horrockses, who put several printed furnishing and dress fabrics into production.Having spent my formative years in a house adorned with some bold painterly abstract curtains by the artist Donald Hamilton Fraser, I can vouch for the success of the Painting into Textiles initiative and its impact on everyday homes Not that I realised that at the time, of course. It was only recently, on flicking through an old copy of The Ambassador, that I began to wonder why I was experiencing such a powerful sense of deja vu. Sadly, by the time the penny dropped the curtains themselves were long gone, replaced during the late Seventies by an insipid Laura Ashley design.But all good things come round again.

Here we are at the end of 1999 with a new exhibition about to open at the Tate, called At Home With Art. Sounds spookily familiar, doesn't it? That's because it's founded on the same basic premise of forging an alliance between fine art and domestic design. Except that now the moral fervour prompting the original initiatives has been abandoned, and instead, it would appear, the exercise is being undertaken as a sociological experiment. The cast list of nine top British sculptors - including Tony Cragg, Alison Wilding, Antony Gormley, Richard Wentworth, Richard Deacon, David Mach and Anish Kapoor - is just as starry as it was back in the Thirties when Modern Art for the Table was conceived. The present-day collaborator, Homebase, seems a sensible choice in this DIY-dominated age, while the imposition of a pounds 50 upper limit on the price of the finished objects demonstrates a genuine commitment to affordability to all. At Home With Art was dreamt up by Professor Colin Painter, an artist and curator with a long-standing interest in the way "ordinary people" relate to works of art in the home - be they original or repro. Contemporary art rarely finds its way into people's homes, he realised, yet people surround themselves with images and objects that perform aesthetic roles."The exciting thing about this project," says Painter, "is bringing leading contemporary sculptors together with householders, to generate mass-produced objects that people can live with and enjoy."To kick-start the scheme, each artist was paired up with a surrogate family, which they visited and spent time with, a process recorded in a documentary shown recently on television.