posted 10-26-2006 12:41 PM            

From what I have been told, this story appeared as part of a segment for the CBS Sunday Morning show recently. An interesting silver fact was stated during the segment that a former President of the United Stated limited production of the number of flatware pieces to a sterling pattern to no more than 55 due to the deficit in silver at that time.

I turn to the board for help...

Is this fact true?

posted 10-26-2006 01:36 PM            

For more info on the subject, please see William P.Hood,jr,with Roslyn Berlin, Edward Wawrynek: Tiffany Silver Flatware 1845-1905, When Dining was an Art, Antique Collector's Club, Suffolk 1999, page 40.

posted 10-27-2006 11:03 AM            

Many early Americans considered forks to be a European affectation until the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Morgans and others of wealth & prominence popularized forks in the 1800s. Ensuingly, flatware became so fashionable that each food seemed to have its own implement.

The number of pieces in a dinner pattern grew and grew; some estimate the average size of a complete dinner pattern could have as many as 101 to 146 pieces. There were utensils for raw oysters, fried oysters, fried chicken, lemon slices, poached eggs, bonbons, nuts, buckwheat griddle cakes, pickles, berries asparagus tongs, lobster forks, cheese knife, chipped beef and etc. The large number of pieces was the result of smart marketing by the silver companies. Sometimes the companies would introduce the same piece but label it for another use. Then the manufacturers found they could easily reuse dies to combine pattern and pieces which allowed for near countless variations in handle sizes, bowl, tine, blade sizes.

In 1925/6, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, responding to a silver shortage, ordered the Bureau of Standards to limit the number of pieces in a flatware pattern to 55. Arbiter of manners Emily Post approved of the restriction, declaring, "No rule of etiquette is of less importance than which fork we use." Elaborate silverware has been on the decline ever since.

posted 10-27-2006 12:35 PM            

quote:

---

The Evolution Of Silverware
An Exhibit At The National Design Museum In New York City Explores The History Of Knives, Forks And Spoons

(CBS) Since they were first used, utensils have evolved a great deal. The spoon came first, then the knife and the fork as we know it today, existed mainly for spearing things It wasn't widely used as an eating utensil until the 16th century, partly thanks to the devil.

"It reminded people of the devil's horns," Darra Goldstein, the co-curator of "Feeding Desire," an exhibition of tableware at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, told Sunday Morning correspondent Martha Teichner. "Even apart from the association with the devil, the idea was that God gave us hands and God gives us food, and we as humans should take that food that was given by God with our god-given hands and convey it to our mouths, and so there was tremendous resistance by the Catholic church to the introduction of the fork."

The fork made its way to Britain and France from Italy. In those days, if you were invited to somebody's castle for dinner, you had to bring your own tableware. Artisans made clever and often beautiful travel cutlery kits. That's when the custom of turning your knife blade in toward your plate got started.

"A knife, it is really a weapon or a potential weapon, and so you don't want the blade facing your neighbor, your dining partner, because that's a hostile gesture," Goldstein said.

The first fork positively identified in America belonged to the famous Puritan, John Winthrop, founder of the Massachusetts Bay colony, who arrived in 1630. You had to be well-off to have even one fork and downright rich to have enough to serve your guests - which most of the founding fathers were.

"This is one of the most exciting pieces in the exhibition," Goldstein said, pointing to a fork that belonged to George Washington. "He had a set of 12."

In 1800, according to the exhibition catalogue, probably not even 1 percent of American households owned even a single silver spoon, let alone a fork. Silver was desirable because it was hard enough to hold up and didn't poison people like lead, but it was expensive. So how, then, by 1900, did tableware services end up as lavish displays of conspicuous consumption? The answer is the Comstock lode.

In 1859, several prospectors, including one named Comstock, made a huge silver strike in Virginia City, Nev. Silver suddenly got cheaper and so did silver utensils and silver plates.

"There was this tremendous proliferation of implements for every conceivable dish that anyone ever thought of," Goldstein said.

The Museum displays a silver macaroni scoop and a silver ice cream hatchet. It all got so out of hand that the federal government stepped in.

"There were thousands of pieces in a silver service if you wanted every piece available," Goldstein said. "It got to such an outrageous degree that in 1926, Herbert Hoover, who was then secretary of commerce, actually decreed that there could be no more than 55 different pieces in a silver service, because too many materials were going into the production of these services."

Hoover must have been a hero to America's servant-less housewives, faced with the task of cleaning all that silver, but silver was often one of the few forms of wealth that a woman could possess in her own name and pass on as she wished. Of course, times have changed.

"Many of us have silver services but they feel too ponderous for everyday use and yet we want something that's appealing at table - it's wonderful to have playful things. Plastic is really a beautiful, beautiful material," Goldstein said.

Today, we live in a world where too many meals are eat-and-run, and a lot of our most novel flatware is disposable. Where all that minimalist, stainless steel airlines designed to look futuristic has become a thing of the past, because the Department of Homeland Security and hosts of the Middle Ages had the same thought - that your knife or your fork could hurt somebody. Plastic cutlery made for the New Mexico corrections department is designed to break if used as a weapon.

There are some pretty strange utensils out there. But the last word on the subject goes to baseball legend Yogi Bera: "If you come to a fork in the road, take it."

---

If you have never seen the CBS Sunday Morning Show we recommend it. It may be the best weekly 1.5 hour of TV.

posted 10-27-2006 11:29 PM            

For example, pasta has become for many Americans a common food rather than something in Italian restaurants. Yet there is no innovative, or even revived, implement in better flatware. The old style spaghetti server currently is made in plastic, and maybe low end stainless.

There is nothing made now for serving or eating kiwi fruit, mangoes, individual casseroles, enchildas, pate, olives, ravioli, pizza, quiche etc. Antique shows abound in such items. This was always a staple of my business when I was active. The aspic server is perfect for quiche. The table crumber is perfect for enchildas and lasagna. Nothing surpasses the Ideal Olive Server, which should be in the public domain by now.

When visiting a gourmet shop, I am always struck by the wide variety of new and innovative china and glass designed for modern meals. And by the complete lack of any flatware of quality and imagination. There are still loads of people who cook and serve elaborate meals. They are no longer 'housewives' but rather gourmet cooks.

The gourmet cook is the market for silver today; far more than young married couple. What we see here seems to be more a failure of the imagination on the part of the silver makers than anything else. The market shifted, new catagories arose. But they clung to the old bridal registry system. Instead of an ad in Modern Bride, an ad showing a pasta server, Ideal Olive server and something to serve and eat escargot with in Gourmet would be the way to go. And sold in cooking stores not jewelry stores.

It seems that when an industry ceases to innovate it dies.

posted 09-21-2008 08:29 PM            

Thanks

Robert

posted 09-22-2008 01:31 AM            

With a maximum of 60 pieces, I'd have simplified the round soup spoons down to one and brought back the soup ladle and pea serving spoon -- items you'd need at almost any dinner party or buffet. In fact, the pierced serving spoon is a standard part of the modern "hostess set", no?

The carving sets seem easily reducible to one -- the midsized (bird) version. (I'd keep the steak knife as a separate item among the place knives).

posted 02-05-2010 09:20 AM            

I am not sure what the earliest documented SETS of forks made in the US are, but certainly upper class Americans (perhaps that is only one percent of the population--think of John and Abigail Adams) used forks in Colonial America--but these were bone or ivory-handled steel cutlery. I can't imagine there are silver forks documented by American silversmiths before the 1810s or even 1820s. But here is a progression of silver ownership as I have it in my mind after thirty years as a curator. Significant silver objects were rare in Colonial America--but rare the way, say, Rolls-Royces are today. Lots of rich people had silver, but "lots" wasn't a lot. In 1750 if you had some silver spoons, you were solidly affluent. If you had a silver tankard, you were clearly a man of importance (notice I don't mention the ladies, because they were chattel and owned nothing). If you had a silver tankard AND a silver teapot, you were mighty fancy. By the end of the 18th century you would need to have a teapot, sugar and creamer to make the same status statement. Add a coffee pot to that, you had the roots of a full tea and coffee service, which would come into real existence in the 1790s--because the idea of a whole service in silver was imaginable for the first time by normally affluent people. But average Joes still didn't own any silver--that would begin slowly in the early 19th century, and then take off after the anti-foreign tarrifs were imposed in the 1840s (see Venable). Here is the progression of silver ownership for the rising middle-class in the 1800s:

1. A spoon (for the man of the house with pretensions)
   
2. A set of six spoons (the first significant step up into middle-class gentility at the end of the 18th century)
   
3. A set of teaspoons, porridge spoons and tablespoons (6, 8, or 12 each) for a good table.
   
4. Then add forks to that (no knives routinely, really, till MUCH later--1870s or so)
   
5. By the 1830s four piece silver teasets were a necessity in upper-middle-class families. What had been a Cadillac in 1800 had become an Oldsmobile by 1830. (And we won't even talk about what electroplating did after it sets in in the 1840s).
   
6. With each ratcheting up of the middle-class access to silver goods, the upper classes (being naturally insecure, in spite of their inbred arrogance) looked for ways to set themselves above the hoy poloy--and more silver was the perfect way to do it.

Bottom line: When George Washington and George III sat down to dinner, they each got a fork, a knife and a spoon. And a teaspoon for after. All the rest is social climbing and clever marketing.

The end.

posted 02-05-2010 06:18 PM            

Thank you Ulysses for outlining the history of flatware ownership. I really enjoyed reading your post. It wonderful how a simple (yet very complicated)thing such as what we use to eat food, leads to ever greater considerations of culture, society, economics, class etc. This is in part why I collect silver and how it goes beyond just aesthetics.

Once again I am thankful for this forum!

Kelly

posted 10-13-2013 07:50 PM            

~Cheryl