I’ve been thinking a great deal about flatware, which I called “silverware” until about five minutes ago. According to the dictionary, silverware only refers to flatware covered in actual silver, which means that I’ve eaten with “silverware” only a very few times.
On special occasions and holidays, some families still pull out their silverware and a few pieces of the good china, but the effort involved is something most of us agree to only once or twice a year. Early family meals at my grandparents’ house were like that, formal table settings and clothing and manners, but these ended in my early teens and I never had the opportunity to sit at the adult table where all the silverware was. I wasn’t even allowed to touch the plates and fancy glasses because they were a set and I was a fumbly child-person.
Everyday flatware, not coated in semi-precious metal, is something we see so often that we most likely don’t notice it anymore. I was introduced to the idea of it in the crib, when Mom told me that the dish ran away with the spoon.
Really? Where were they heading? What were they running from? The situation was a delicious scandal.
Of course the entire rhyme could have been a metaphor… with the full scene of laughing dogs, feline violinists and astronaut cows, this rhyme could be the loose poetic rendering of a wild laudanum party.
In the 1940’s, the word “dish” was a slang term for an attractive female person, but there isn’t a comparable definition for the word “spoon” as an adventurous lothario, though the words fork, knife, and spoon are both nouns and verbs in American English. The pointy ones are mostly aggressive (“Fork over that money! Don’t make me knife you!”) leaving the spoon to represent comfort, protection, romance. I suppose that’s true in function as well; forks impale, knives separate, but spoons hold and support.
Spoon has quite a few meanings actually. Beyond engaging in the popular sleeping position, it has referred to “making out with a date”, a definition popularized in the turn of the century song “Shine On Harvest Moon”. That was my favorite song when I was six years old after I learned it at a Shakey’s Pizza™ from a black and white movie they showed there, an animated short with a bouncing ball over on-screen lyrics, so you could sing along.
My love of the tune confused both friends and passers-by, and it turns out that entire song was indeed about the joys of kissing and so forth outside in autumn, because in the winter it was just too cold – the equivalent of punk rock for 1908. It was amazingly radical, but as there wasn’t any radio back then, I suppose one just played the song on their upright piano and censored themselves as they went along.
Of the three major pieces of flatware, it is the knife that I feel is the most maligned. When asked to think of a spoon or a fork, most of us will also envision a plate, but the word “knife” never leads us directly to the dinner table; more likely a vision of a poorly lit alley and a ne’er-do-well in a dirty pageboy hat attempting to steal our jewels. You can’t soften the word “knife”… little knives are worn strapped to the ankle, big ones are swords, medium ones the favorite of cinema villains. But within American culture there was, once, a kinder knife, not used in anger or conflict, but to enhance the sweetness of life itself.
In 1977, The Pillsbury Company wanted to prove the smoothness of their pre-made canned icing, and someone (who I hope got an incredible bonus that year) came up with the idea of frosting a cake with a paper knife. Where would one obtain such an object, you ask? In the 1970’s paper plates were all the rage: first invented in San Francisco in 1904 when folks were tired of losing good dishes to earthquakes, the modern realities of dual income families had turned them into household essentials. In these commercials, a simple knife shape was cut from the middle of a paper plate (not a fancy rigid one, just the normal flopsy type), and that was used to scoop the frosting from the container, then artistically and evenly decorate a cake.
So smooth.
My mom actually did this once. It was like a science experiment. It worked pretty well, but we never used a full can of frosting all at once, and realized that once refrigerated the substance couldn’t be manipulated by any object less sturdy than a screwdriver.
So as it turns out, I do not own any “silverware”. Our most elegant dining objects, beyond the Williams and Sonoma gravy boat, are my MARVEL™ napkin rings, each of which appears to contain an Infinity Stone™. If, this year, I am allowed to place those on our table (I wouldn’t bet on it) it is my hope that they will become part of our Traditional Holiday Table Setting, an interdimensional addition to our everyday flatware; neither silver nor even probably very good plastic, they will nonetheless sparkle and glisten, somewhat jewel-like, in the celebratory candlelight of the year’s most important meals.
All That Shimmers.