Nothing beats the simple pleasure of a dish of ice cream (or a cone, if you’re on the go), but ice cream used to have a dressier place in the American diet, as the dessert no formal dinner could omit. “The great American dessert is ice cream,” Emily Post Herself wrote in 1922, “or pie. Pie, however, is not a ‘company’ dessert. Ice cream on the other hand is the inevitable conclusion to a formal dinner.”
Dessert service for a formal dinner includes both a fork and a spoon. Two implements? Oh yes indeed, even though it’s overkill. “There is no practical basis for this as a spoon would often suffice,” acknowledged Millicent Fenwick in her essential Vogue’s Book of Etiquette, “and it is certainly not a rule. But for some reason, when one is given two implements, as one is for dessert, it is more attractive not to use the spoon only. The fork is used for the solid part of the ice cream, the spoon for the part which has melted.”
The exuberance of 19th-century silversmiths for creating new kinds of silverware gave us the ice cream fork, which Atlas Obscura delightfully describes as a “proto-spork.” Basically a spoon with three or four short tines, in theory it could handle any aspect of ice cream consumption. Ice cream spoons came in small or large sizes — both smaller and fancier than a teaspoon — but should not be confused with sorbet spoons, which would have been used with the Roman punch to clear the palate between courses.* It’s all most bewildering.
Antique ice cream forks.
Ice cream could be made very showy by being molded into fanciful shapes. That’s one reason it was so indispensable at formal meals when one wanted to make a handsome impression. Ellen Maury Slayden once described a formal luncheon of “ten courses, all wonderful to behold, especially the ice cream — pink roses falling out of a pink sugar umbrella into spun-candy snow.” A casual internet search for “antique ice cream molds” reveals a galaxy of shapes, even a football! Etiquetteer acquired one shaped like a clamshell during the pandemic for the Dress Dinner Challenge, but the results weren’t entirely satisfactory; you can read about that here.
But Etiquetteer isn’t the only one to have had an ice cream crisis. Henrietta Nesbitt, the White House Housekeeper We Love to Hate, had a mishap at a 1937 White House dinner for the Governor General of Canada, Lord Tweedsmuir. “A White House dinner isn’t complete without ice cream, [which] was made up outside for big occasions in special molds. It was always the high minute of the evening when they came onto the tables, all fixed up beautifully, in pretty colors and shapes.”
But that only works if the ice cream has actually been delivered. “At six o’clock . . . Ida mentioned casually that the ice-cream molds had not arrived. I tried to telephone the shop that made them. It was closed for the night. I tried to reach the woman who ran it. She wasn’t home. By this time I was shaking all over. In my desperation I telephoned Mr. Hubert, a caterer we had not been dealing with at all . . . He called back his driver, packed eight forms of plain ice-cream bricks — drugstore ice cream, we call it — and rushed them over. They arrived at the White House door just as we were clearing the State Dining-room table for the dessert, and I never gave a more thankful prayer in my life. We unpacked and sliced them in record time, and from the little dining room I could see Mrs. Roosevelt’s look of shock, which she covered over fast, when the dessert plates came on with just slices of plain ice cream . . . What had happened, the storekeeper had left the molds out with orders that were to be delivered, and they were still there the next morning, melted all over the floor.**”
If you’re sitting at a table to enjoy your ice cream, standard table manners apply: sit up straight, put your napkin in your lap, and don’t gesture with your spoon. For heaven’s sake, don’t lick yourself where ice cream may have melted — or anyone else, for that matter; that’s why there’s a napkin.
*Sterling Silver Flatware For Dining Elegance, by Richard Osterberg (1999).
**From White House Diary, by Henrietta Nesbitt, F.D.R.’s Housekeeper.