Necessity may be the mother of Invention, but Fashion is often the wanton mother of Necessity. That’s how we end up with so much stuff. How many of us have rummaged through a drawer at Grandmother’s house, come across some bizarre silver doodad and asked “What on earth is this?” Maura J. Graber has lovingly compiled many of the answers in her new book What Have We Here? using oddities from her own extensive silver collection. Anyone interested in Victorian dinner parties will want to give this a look.
Nineteenth-century silversmithing innovations and middle-class aspirations brought highly specific service pieces, from bonbon spoons with wide, pierced bowls, to long narrow marrow spoons for bone marrow. Mrs. Graber lobs these at us, and much more: mote spoons for afternoon tea, macaroni servers with short wide tines, three-tined corn forks, enormous bread forks like Neptune’s trident, sugar sifters, butter servers with shark-like tines, and on and on. The most unusual, a manche a gigot, is a French fork used to steady a leg of lamb while carving. One has to wonder why an ordinary carving fork wouldn’t work as well.
We think of the Victorian era as being very solid and forthright, and yet its fashions changed — albeit slower than ours. Tableware “fashion victims” Mrs. Graber shares with us include the celery vase (the vogue for only 20 years), special asparagus plates, when that estimable vegetable was more honored than today, and silver orange cups for breakfast service of halved oranges.
Odd bits of china also come up for inspection and interpretation, including the once-fashionable crescent side plate. This 19th-century innovation got started in England to keep the salad separate from the meat (whether roast or game), but eventually also got used for salad or bread and butter. China terrapin pots have their own lids because turtle soup had to be served very hot. (Etiquetteer wrote about turtle soup earlier in Volume 20.) Etiquetteer had never heard of a “true trio set,” a saucer that came with both a teacup and a larger coffee cup — so that only one saucer was needed.
To Etiquetteer’s delight, Mrs. Graber includes a couple pages on mustache cups. Fashion decreed exuberant facial hair for gentlemen Back in the Day, which resulted in tea and coffee cups with built-in guards to protect them from liquids. Her collection includes a lot more mustache gear, from spoons (“noiseless soup spoons”), tiny mustache combs, a curler (like a very small curling iron), and even — Etiquetteer just could not believe this — little silver mustache clips for a gent to keep his facial hair completely out of his dinner! But Etiquetteer can’t conceive of this being Perfectly Proper when dining out; it would be like a lady leaving the house with her hair in curlers.
Throughout the book are sprinkled period (and current) bits of manners and trivia, but Mrs. Graber’s “napkin burrito” is worth special mention. In a brief section on glove etiquette, she revisits Emily Post’s advice to ladies at dinner on how to secure gloves, bag, and fan on their laps so that they wouldn’t slip to the floor. Etiquetteer considers identifying this as a burrito a colorful bit of genius . . . but it still leaves the problem of not being able to use your napkin as a napkin.
Etiquetteer takes mild issue with the frequent use of “spork” in What Have We Here? because it’s not of the era. While today we describe spoons with tines as sporks, the word spork really did not come into common usage until the 1970s, decades after these items were invented. The utensil identified as a spork with the terrapin pot is properly a terrapin fork, though it is decidedly sporkish.
Reading this book is like rummaging through the dining room with a favorite neighbor, and all that’s needed is a good hot chocolate (served in a trembleuse) and a dish of bonbons (with bonbon spoon). Certainly when you get to the last page, you’ll want to say “I can’t wait til we do this again!” It’s a wonderful addition to an etiquette library.