Types of Spoons


Up to about 1730 spoons were designed for general use, with relatively large bowls suited to most purposes, but thereafter they tended to become more specialised, with the emergence of distinctive sizes and styles for use with mustard, salt, coffee, tea, sugar, puddings, desserts and so on up the scale to the tablespoon and serving spoons of various sizes. Small silver shovels, with deeper, flattened sides set at right angles to the base of the bowl were intended for handling salt, sugar, flour or other powdered substances.
Medicine spoons are a considerable collectable category in their own right, the examples from the middle of the 19th century onwards often bearing the names of patent medicines or pharmaceutical companies on their stems and handles.
Associated with spoons are various serving and cooking spoons and implements with perforated, pierced or fretted bowls intended as strainers and mote skimmers (for removing the scum on the surface of simmering stews). Fruit spoons were often gilded, either on the bowls alone or on the stems as well, to prevent corrosion from acid in the fruit.
Certain types of spoon, however, stand out from the earlier period and have long attracted the serious attention of collectors. Chief among these are the spoons decorated with tiny figures of Christ and the Twelve Apostles, fashionable in the 15th and 16th centuries as baptismal gifts. This custom was confined mainly to western Europe, especially in England. In most cases the god-parents would give the child a single silver spoon, the stem mounted by the tiny figure of a saint. The wealthier god-parents would give a set of 13 spoons, while those who were not so well-off would give a half-set of six. This charming custom survived the Reformation and only went into decline in the 1660s; examples with late-17th century hallmarks are therefore much sought after.