I Love This Simple Kitchen Tool So Much, I Bought a Drawerful

Cutlery is many things to many people. Yes, it is a set of tools to dismantle your food and convey it in manageable pieces to your mouth, but it’s so much more than just functional. Cutlery is often a class indicator: Think about the number of forks you went through at the last fine dining experience you had, or a fully set formal table in the Victorian era, which would have included a salad knife, a fish fork, and a teaspoon meant for actually stirring tea. It’s also an expression of individual taste and mannerism; just ask anyone starting up a restaurant how much thought and care they put into selecting the right forks and knives. 

Outside of a restaurant or fancy dinner party, cutlery is also deeply personal. I was reminded of just how personal by a wonderful comic by Lucy Knisley — who you may also know as Condiment Racoon — about her most beloved and favored spoon, or the “good spoon.” Knisley’s is the 1948 Oneida Community Morning Star Sugar spoon, “perfectly balanced between a deep faceted bowl and an elegant stem to delight the hand of a true devotee … the silver plating burnished to a glow from use and age — the platonic ideal of spoon!” It does look like a very good spoon. 

In the food world, we talk a lot about knives, particularly chef’s knives. We understand knives to be an extension of a cook’s hand and therefore something extremely suited to an individual. It’s almost the same category as a musician’s instrument, so much reverence gets heaped upon particular use and care of knives. Even my granny, not a chef in any respect, had a favorite knife for peeling apples, and she kept it separate from the other knives for just that purpose. Knives matter, for sure. But they aren’t the only tool that matters. 

What makes a spoon good (or fork good or knife good) is also so ineffable and so personal it can be difficult to explain. My personal favorite spoon is a gold Korean spoon, one with a generously long handle and a wide, shallow bowl. It is ideal for scraping the last bit of yogurt from the giant containers of Fage that I go through once a week, or for savoring a soup. The larger, shallower bowl means that very hot bites of soup cool more quickly, so I’m less likely to burn my mouth. I got the first one in a mailer with a cookbook and I became deeply intent on finding a dupe. After scouring my local Koreatown and several H Marts, I found a passable set on Amazon, of all places. Now a good percentage of the spoons in my household are the perfect gold spoons.

Even within my household, cutlery is personal. I prefer the smallest forks we have instead of the larger, normal-sized guys. I have smaller hands and I like that the smaller forks mean I take smaller bites, which lets me savor my food a little longer. My husband likes the largest forks we have and will fish them out of the dishwasher and hand-wash them if none are available in the cutlery drawer. His family has a set of forks I find mysteriously threatening, since they have three prongs instead of the usual four. In my opinion, those are tridents and best left to Poseidon. We have a spoon shaped like a shovel that my husband loathes using, but it absolutely delights any toddler who comes to visit, so we keep it around. 

It feels mildly embarrassing, how attached I am to cutlery. At museums, I’m drawn to the ancient cutlery settings, the esoteric servers and the ornate chopsticks, the gorgeous intricate carvings on old sugar tongs. Our current era has Alice Waters' infamous egg spoon, but so many pleasing, precise objects preceded it, like grape scissors and asparagus tongs. Favorite spoons come from a long lineage of obscure and beautiful cutlery.

When I work out of someone else’s kitchen I always pay attention to the cutlery drawer. I ask my friends about their favorite spoon — the one they reach for and get a little disappointed if it's already in use. The array is dazzling: little bite-sized spoons and deep soup spoons, a trusty fork with a sharpened side that doubles as a knife, a travel spork that fits on a keychain for office use. Good spoons are all around us, you just have to look.