Last Friday I received an e-mail from Dianne, one of my blog readers from Canada. She attached a photo of a treasured silver-plate 'spooner' she inherited from her mother.
Dianne read my post about teapoys and wondered if I had any information about her lovely piece of tea equipage. Her mom always called it a 'spooner' and kept it well-polished, and in pristine condition in her china cabinet.
I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon/evening trying to research them, but there is very little written about them on the Internet. They go by various names including: Master Sugar Spooner; Spooner Sugar Bowl; and Covered Sugar Bowl/Spooner.
To muddy the waters further, 'spooners' were more commonly known as glass vase-like containers that held teaspoons, and were kept on the table for easy access whenever a teaspoon was needed. One reference said some Victorian hostesses who weren't financially endowed, and didn't have enough teaspoons to put at each place setting, assembled what she had and put them into a glass spooner and set them on the table for use. Some spooners had handles on the sides, and some didn't as shown below.
Victorians loved having serving accessories for everything, so a glass spooner is very easy to confuse with a celery vase. They almost look like they could be interchangeable. Below is my mother's spooner.
There were also rectangular or oval porcelain dishes that were made for serving celery. Gotta love the Victorians for all their table accessories!
Back to silver sugar spooners... They were made in sterling silver, but most vintage ones for resale on the Internet today are silver-plated with a bird finial.
Imported luxuries - which sugar at one time was - required decorative containers. Refined white sugar was a symbol of status, wealth, power, and self-indulgence. S0 a combination sugar bowl and spoon rack made of silver was an optimal way of containing the luxury as well as being a beautiful piece on a properly appointed tea table. Silver flashed a beautiful message of hospitality with intentional implications of status and prosperity. One author referred to it as "Putting a Formal Shine on Teatime." Another called it "Dining in Splendor." Much more recently Alda Ellis said, "Silver is the table's jewelry."
Silversmiths lavished their artistry on every element of tea equipage, and Victorians saw spooners as a necessary tea [and coffee] serving accessory. Manufacturing of them began to decline in the 1920's and they went out of popularity after WWII when it became tiring and boring to keep them polished and shining brightly. I enjoy using silver serving pieces and don't mind polishing them. Do you use silver pieces at teatime?
For a time sugar spooners were misidentified as jam dishes and were used to serve jam at tea time or with the mealtime dessert course.
This is the extent of what I could find out via my personal library on tea equipage as well as the Internet. Surprisingly [and regrettably], there's not a lot of information available about them. If you have additional information about silver spooners to add to this post it would be most welcomed.
That is way more than I previously knew about spooners, as the term and concept are brand new to me. They are lovely and now (maybe) if I see one I'll know what it is!
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