I was glancing through a recent issue of "Real Simple" while in a doctor's waiting room recently, and found myself staring at a full-page spread of vintage forks with specialized uses. Lemon forks, pickle forks, oyster forks, fruit forks -- forks of all kinds. Forks I'd never seen before.
And then today's Miss Manners
column contains the acerbic commentary:
"[I]t is unfortunately true that there was a nasty time during the 19th-century Industrial Revolution when guessing the uses of peculiar flatware served as an entrance test for moving up into the middle class. This is no longer the case. The table has become simplified, to put it delicately -- possibly because so few people sit at it. But the sting of the old days has a peculiar afterlife. People still speak with mysterious pride of "not knowing which fork to use" as if nearly all those specialized Victorian pieces hadn't been melted down to finance World War I, and now they would be lucky to get a metal fork instead of a plastic one."
Intrigued, today I Googled "vintage flatware," and found a vast panoply of specialized, archaic forks, knives, spoons, and other paraphernalia from SilverQueen in Florida.
I'm used to seeing some of these. Tongs? Sure. An ice scoop? Not unusual. The cheese graters, the cheese plane, the gravy ladles and punch ladles and butter knives and suchlike implements are all familiar to me. I own a sugar spoon or two.
But ah, the other exotic things on this page. Check it out!
In "forks," we have the Individual Fish Fork, the Cocktail / Shrimp Fork, the Ramekin Fork ("For those puddings & Desserts that need a little help coming out of the bowl"), the unnaturally elongated Individual Strawberry / Fruit Fork, the Olive / Pickle Fork, and the Baked Potato Serving Fork ("Also great for holding down a cheese ball on your buffet").
In "spoons," there is the Bouillon Soup Spoon, the Gumbo Spoon, the tall and delicate Iced Beverage Spoon, the Salt Spoon (a tiny, cute little scoop!), the Berry Serving Spoon, the Relish Scoop, the Olive Spoon, and the Cracker Scoop, which looks suspiciously like an oversized Sugar Spoon.
And an entire new class of flatware to me -- the Server. Pierced servers for tomatoes; small servers for bon bon nuts; a slightly concave, pointed server just for jelly. Ornately pierced servers for jelly roll cakes, hooded servers for asparagus or petit fours, servers for spaghetti, waffles, sardines, potatoes, or pâté.
I had no idea there was such a thing as an
angel food cake breaker. That would come in very handy for times I find myself compressing the angel food cake with the unwarranted force of the knife, when all it really needs is a very long, very fine, sterling silver comb to part its delicate structure like the Red Sea.
Also on display: The lobster pick! The
butter / nut pick, which I totally want! An individual
corn butterer! It's all too much. I need to lie down and have a cold drink, which I will make and then stir only with the appropriate, Victorian-era sterling silver implements.
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ratmmjess is on my friends list, even though I've never met him. He writes encyclopedias, including The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana, which I totally want but which is out of stock. 
