The Good Silver

I think I have always been fascinated by silverware.  (Who opens a discussion with a sentence like that?)  Recently, I had a few pieces of the silverware set passed to me from my mother, made into jewellery.  I know of an artisan who specializes in making jewellery from silverware (plated as well as solid) and she morphed a couple of my inherited fork handles into a bracelet, a serving spoon into a pendant, and the fancy ends of a couple demitasse spoons into a delightful pair of drop earrings for me.  I love that I am now able to enjoy the silverware (silver-wear?) daily rather than peeking at it once a year, if that.

My Mom had cobbled her ‘good silver’ set together before she’d even married my dad.  That was the way they did things back in her time.  The pattern she chose to start collecting piece by piece, was called “First Love”.  How sweet is that?  By the time she found herself raising two unruly daughters, she had accumulated enough good silverware to accommodate a dinner party that demanded full place settings, included a soup course, for 10 well-mannered guests.  Optimistically, she/the sales staff envisioned a large slab of meat being cut at the table, berries being served, gravy that for some reason needed to be ladled out of its customized boat, and that there would be at least a dozen serving spoons required during the same meal.   

Although I can’t speak for how they behaved before my sister and I arrived on the scene, my parents not only never held a dinner party like that, but whenever they had more than 8 people over for a meal, it was served buffet style and people with overflowing plates would perch precariously on furniture crowded into every room on our main floor.  You were lucky if you remembered to grab a knife along with your fork before sitting down.  Usually, those meals were accompanied by shouts of laughter, with loud voices retelling outrageous stories.  They were memorable evenings but certainly didn’t call for any of the formality of a sit-down dinner with ‘good silver’.  Life rarely works out the way we think it will when we are young. 

At any rate, my venture into having jewellery made from the silverware that Mom must have dearly loved at one time, has provided me with a new wave of appreciation for these beautiful utensils.  My generation had already started to pull away from the more formal image of entertaining by the time we were setting up households, but some still did pick out a pattern and collect the whole set.  That wasn’t to be my path because I had had absolutely no intention of falling in love or getting married and it all happened so quickly that there was hardly enough time to find a dress and send out invitations.  When I was married, my husband and I barely had twenty dollars between us so collecting a set of ‘good silver’ of my own never occurred to me.  That was just as well, because many years later, Mom gave me her set when she and Dad were downsizing from their house to a condo. 

This set of silverware has been wasted on me.  I think she suspected it might be because she tried to talk me out of taking it at the time.  I would have NONE of that because I had so many happy memories of Christmas and Thanksgiving family dinners (for 4!) from my childhood that featured that underused silverware and I was grateful to have it to treasure.  She got rid of her good set of dishes at the same time, but she did that behind my back.  It was YEARS before I forgave her but, as always, she was right.  A full silver service and matching set of bone china was her dream, not mine. 

Women have probably handed down their utensils to the next generation throughout the history of meal preparation.  The oldest of our common mealtime personal utensils, a spoon, was uncovered by archeologists and dated back to at least 3000 BC.  The Spoon has always proven to be a useful little gadget for picking up or pushing or portioning food, along with using one’s hands.  Larger spoons were also used in the preparation of food, but so were knives and 2-pronged forks. 

I mean, EVERYONE throughout all of history had a knife that they carried around with them for any number of useful reasons, and it can be said that a personal knife or a cutting blade was the first acknowledged utensil used to accompany eating.  However, the average personal knife had a blade that was about a foot long and that knife was just as readily used to cut branches or to be used as a weapon, as it was to aiding in portioning and spearing mouthfuls of food.

Most people ate with their hands and that was considered the way to do go about things. 

The Italians are credited with inventing and implementing a fork used for eating, by the 11th century. Once spaghetti had been invented, what choice did they have?  Imagine trying to eat your pasta with a spoon or knife. 

Meanwhile in Britain, when the fork was introduced to the citizens, it was seen as unmanly or a show of vanity to use one.  The Brits eventually came around during the 1700s but it wasn’t until the reign of Queen Victoria in the 1800s that eating with a full set of cutlery was even considered.  She felt that it showed the poorest of taste for one’s hands to ever touch one’s own food and that was the end of that.  The Victorian Era was the beginning of the silverware heyday, and a new industry arose to supply the ever-increasing selection of eating and serving implements seen as necessary and stylish. 

Even though Mom’s formal silverware set never achieved its imagined potential through two generations of somewhat casual lifestyles, the reworking of some of the pieces into attractive jewellery items has at least enabled me to appreciate the simple elegance and uniqueness of “First Love” the way my Mom did.  Just…differently.