I picked up these 7 coin silver spoons made my William Moulton for $2. They are not that special, but I think its super cool that you can find 200 year old spoons thousands of miles from where they were made at yard sales.
Something that occurred to me....I've found at least 15-20 of these over the years, but they are all spoons. I've never found a fork. I know they existed, but I can't find one in the wild.
Paging Captain Flintlock.......Why is that? Maybe they were more easily damaged?
I'm not Captain Flintlock, but...
It’s an interesting question.
The fork as a purpose-made eating implement reached Britain from continental Europe around the time of the 14th Century but didn’t see widespread use. Anyone with a knife and fork set would have regarded it as for personal use, kept it in a special box known as a “cadena” and brought it along with them if invited to dinner.
The multi-tined fork as we know it has a relatively recent history as an eating utensil for ordinary folk. Wind the clock back to colonial times and through to the pioneer age, then the spoon was king. Folks needed a knife as well but it was usually a multi-purpose implement, not specifically designed for use as a tableware utensil. The isolated spoons we find from earlier times often represent someone’s personal eating utensil, which they would travel with. Even for home use, it wouldn't have been part of a ‘set’.
If you look at 18th-early 19th Century census records, trade directories and registrations for silver makers, the term “spoonmaker” as a profession is often seen. That’s all they made, or all that they were registered for with respect to their marks.
Hearty soups and stews were commonplace meals and consumed from a bowl, not a plate. For more solid foods the spoon was used in the left (or passive) hand to hold them down while cutting with a knife held in the right (or dominant) hand. The spoon then swapped hands for scooping into the mouth, along with gravy or whatever. For anything more troublesome, the knife was used to ‘skewer’ food on the plate and/or the fingers came into play.
[As an aside, this American “switcheroo” habit of eating, also referred to as “the American Shuffle” continued long after forks became commonplace in the United States. Emily Post called the practice “zigzagging” in her 1920s etiquette books and it’s one of the ways we in the UK can often identify an American tourist in a restaurant. It’s becoming more common as it gets adopted by hipsters and millennials copying what they see in American movies, along with “can I get..?” rather than “could I have..?” and the remark “awesome!” when the food arrives.]
By the beginning of the 18th century, knives imported to the American colonies that were purpose-designed for eating began to appear, but they had blunt tips. A European fashion that derived from the 1669 Louis XIV of France decree that knives brought to the dinner table should have a ground-down point. Such knives became the norm for upper classes, progressively spread to universal use, and that happened later in America than in the Old World. The blunt tip was useless for ‘skewering’ and, initially in Europe, led to the more widespread adoption of the fork as we know it.
The evolution of use happened more slowly in America. Despite being mentioned in the Bible, in some quarters there was religious objection to the fork as an “excessive delicacy” that insulted God having provided us with a natural fork (our own fingers). Others regarded it as a pretentious curiosity of “feminine affectation”, judged it as impractical in use, or didn’t even understand why it was needed or how to employ it. Those prejudices took rather longer to overcome in America than in Europe and the spoon remained king well into the 1800s. Even as late as 1824 the wealthy English silversmith Joseph Brasbridge noted in his memoir “I know how to sell these articles [dining forks], but not how to use them.”
By the time of the “Great Exhibition” in London in 1851, at which manufacturers showcased their wares and promoted the latest fashions, the fork had established itself as the preferred alternative to the spoon for the upper classes. Flatware was commonly being sold in sets (called ‘canteens’) including ever-more exotic variants: meat forks, fish forks, pastry forks, oyster forks, salad forks, berry forks, to name but a few. There’s no more powerful marketing tool than “this is what posh folks use”. By 1926, the multiplication of silverware had become so overwhelming that then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, struck an agreement with the Sterling Silverware Manufacturers to limit the number of separate pieces in any silverware pattern to 55.
With the new fashions came new rules on etiquette. Again, later in America than in Europe. As one American publication on table manners published in 1887 put it:
“The fork has now become the favorite and fashionable utensil for conveying food to the mouth. First it crowded out the knife, and now in its pride it has invaded the domain of the once powerful spoon. The spoon is now pretty well subdued also, and the fork, insolent and triumphant, has become a sumptuary tyrant. The true devotee of fashion does not dare to use a spoon except to stir his tea or to eat his soup with, and meekly eats his ice-cream with a fork and pretends to like it.”
