Spoon Identification 101

An assortment of egg accoutrements including eggshell cutters or breakers and a fried egg server, along with several diminutive egg spoons with ovoid-shaped bowls. Shorter than teaspoons and most about the length of coffee spoons, egg spoons are perfectly sized to fit into egg shells and egg cups. The best suited for eggs are those with gilding on the bowls to protect against the corrosion from salt.

Miss Manners on Spoons

DEAR MISS MANNERS: At home and in restaurants, I have always been given a teaspoon to eat soft desserts such as pudding, fruit cocktail and ice cream. However, when I went on a cruise with a foreign-owned cruise ship, they gave us soup spoons for such desserts.

I was amazed by this, and even asked the waiter if he made a mistake, but he said this is the way this line does it. Is the use of soup spoons for dessert a common practice abroad, and is it ever done in the United States?

GENTLE READER: Not often enough. That was no soup spoon–it was a proper dessert spoon, which the teaspoon is not.

As a dessert spoon is a large oval spoon, Miss Manners understands that you mistook it for a soup spoon, which is oval and only ever-so-slightly larger. Maybe it even is a moonlighting soup spoon. But it would still be the more nearly correct implement for dessert than the teaspoon. 

Great Spoon Debate Rages On

DEAR MISS MANNERS: What spoon do you eat with, a teaspoon or "soup" spoon? I have relatives who are doubtful, and I get teased all the time about this.

GENTLE READER: Please do not take it as adding to your torment when Miss Manners explains that soup spoons are used to eat soup and teaspoons to stir tea.

Flatware is not the etiquette booby-trap that people seem to think. Truly, we only ask that tables be set with the equipment people need to eat the food in front of them without making an undue mess, and that it be laid out in the order in which that food is to be eaten. On the whole, the nomenclature is pretty straightforward.

Perhaps the confusion you experience comes from the scarcity of dessert spoons. An oval soup spoon can easily pass for one, but because teaspoons are sold as an indispensable part of the basic place setting, people who don't give daily tea parties reach for that instead, figuring it must have some use. It would be more sensible to buy a double set of oval spoons for those who want both soup and dessert at the same meal. – by Judith Martin, Nicholas Ivor Martin and Jacobina Martin, 2010 & 2011

🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia