Here’s Why All Dish Towels Should Be Made of Linen

Meal in and meal out, a dish towel is the tool that you’ll pick up dozens of times a day, many multiples of the times you’ll need a knife.  

This is why professional chefs strap towels to their belts and sling them over their shoulders. A red-hot roasting pan wants lifting in this second; a wine glass needs a smudge buffed before it heads to table; and you need to dump that huge pile of mashed potatoes on a serving platter, but it’s still wet.  

The kitchen towel is with us, a steadfast lieutenant in all those rushed, athletic, battlefield moments that providing food for our families and friends puts us in. The breadth of this work makes the fabric from which your dish towels are made matter all the more. One word: Linen.  

Linen’s chief rival in the household, cotton, will do in a pinch, and the absorbency of cotton is arguably greater than that of linen. But! There’s this funny thing about a fabric’s ability to manage water in the kitchen. Absorbency is only a part of it.  

It’s how the moisture is absorbed and what happens to it after it’s absorbed that matters to the cook. Cotton will hold its water. But because of the structure and composition of its longer and stronger fibers, linen has wicking properties that cotton doesn’t, which is to say, it dries quicker.  It literally makes the moisture want to go away.  

The linen-versus-cotton war has many passionate partisans on both sides of the battle line. But before we dive into that fight, in full journalistic disclosure, I’m duty-bound to report that I come from generations of pro-linen cooks. “Old-school” doesn’t begin to describe it. My maternal grandmother Minnie, who cooked and baked for us until she was well past her hundredth year, tolerated no other fabric in the kitchen. She thought there should be a body of national, if not global, law preventing the use of cotton for dish-towel manufacture. She loved cotton for other uses. Taking into consideration the fact that linen doesn’t pill while cotton, as it disintegrates faster, does pill, Minnie’s hardline stance makes even more sense.  

Two generations on, I’m not so extreme as my grandmother. But there is a ton of history and a ton of science to back up Minnie’s love of the fabric.  

In a nutshell, here’s the science: Long-staple cotton fibers are shorter than linen fibers by orders of magnitude and are structured differently on a molecular level. Cotton stretches, linen doesn’t — the composition of its long, straight fibers means that it wrinkles instead.  

Cotton fibers come from the boll, or the former flower of the plant, and are curled by the plant (as protection) around the cottonseed. Thus, even “extra-long staple” cotton fibers top out at just under an inch-and-a-half.  

For their part, flax fibers come from inside the four-foot-tall stalk of the plant, are straight, and top out at some six inches in length. Flax fibers have a hollow, almost crystalline structure, which is the source of their superior durability and water management. It’s also this structure that prevents linen from stretching.  

The extraction and weaving of flax fibers from the plant is far more complex than that of cotton, but the hollow structure and the water-repelling molecular chemistry of flax fibers are the reason that linen can wick moisture and dry quicker than cotton. Their structure also means flax fibers have greater tensile strength than those of cotton. This is why linen sheets, towels, and napkins actually get better with age. Cotton disintegrates.   

Then there’s the battle with heat. 

We need heat in the kitchen. We love it, but it has to be managed, buffered, and focused. As anybody who owns a breezy tropical linen suit, skirt, or shirt knows, linen doesn’t just wick moisture away from the body (and dry quicker); it can repel heat or insulate, as the case may be.  They’re making light-insulating bricks out of flax fiber for thermal construction in Europe. You don’t get very far trying that with cotton. 

All of these powers are why linen has traveled with us for millennia. It’s not precisely known exactly when flax was domesticated, but the oldest flax fibers known in a domestic circumstance come from excavations in a cave in the Caucasus, in today’s Georgia, carbon-dated by the delighted archaeologists that found them to be at least 30,000 years old, toward the end of the Middle Paleolithic. Here’s the detail: the fibers had been dyed, which is to say, they had been made into linen and used domestically by the people living in the cave.   

And as for linen’s superior durability: This may seem unappetizing in a discussion of linen’s uses around food, but seen another way, it’s a jolly fact of that requires only celebration. As we know from every mummy ever excavated in Egypt, natural white linen was not just used for breathable, heat-repellent dress in Egypt. Famously, the ancient Egyptians also wrapped their dead in the fabric. So revered was the power of linen in Egypt of that day that it was, also, used as a form of currency. As anybody who visits any mummy in any museum in Cairo will know, those 5000-year-old linen wrappings are still doing their fine work. 

In a word, that’s why the fabric makes such a great, strong, resilient dish towel.