Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 53, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 September 1889 — The Spoon in History. [ARTICLE]

The Spoon in History.

It seems that our common table utensil, the spoon, antedated the knife in the household of prehistoric man. As the ancient Romans used round spoons, the counterpart of those which are fashionable for the salt-cellar, it would have been natural enough if the spoons of prehistoric man hac neon of the same shape. But some which have been found recently in the Lacustrine dwellings in northern Italy, were precisely the shape used by ourselves, and of baked clay. Two sizes were found, one that of an ordinary table-spoon, the other that of a pot-ladle. The question arises for what purposes ware these spoons made, and it is highly probable that it was for consumption of hasty pudding or farmety, which was a species of cracked wheat. The Lacustrlan folk were agriculturists, and possessed domestic animals, but their food was principally cereals, and their condition must have greatly resembled that of a Slavonic communistic village of the presenttime. They had milk and they had meal, and they had the wild honey of the woods, so that they did not fare very badly. One of their tables has been found. It was the round section of a tree, a foot thick, and there were boUowa in it burned out with fire, which wereplainly the receptacles for the food, whatever It was. The spoons of the AngloSaxons were made of wood, for the word means not only a culinary utensil. but it also meant a sliver of wood made for writing purposes. In the poem of Tristan and Yseult, it is expressly stated that the lover wrote verses on light linden spoon, in runes, and that he cast them in the river, and they floated down to the loverees who gathered them in.