Past
Spoons have always been there for me, in the background, ready to serve food at whim. But thinking back, not all spoons are created equal. Some are more special than others. In my life, there have been three significant spoons.
2002 - The Squirrel Spoon
This was my favorite spoon growing up. I first became aware of it shortly after we moved to Munich in early 2002. It’s still with my family and I should be able to grab a picture of it sometime, but it was a normal-sized dinner spoon with a relatively shallow scoop that was more rounded than pointy. And there was a squirrel embossed into the handle. It was comfortable. It was very useful with its shape, and it looked great.
2002 - WMF Cromargan
My sister was born on in 2002. A few days after her birth, one of my family’s friends gifted us a 5-piece set of flatware. An elegantly rounded, yet hefty handle accompanied the most smoothly-shaped scoop. The set came with 5 pieces - dinner knife, dinner fork, dinner spoon, tea-fork (is that what it’s called?) and teaspoon. Over the years, many pieces were lost and only two pieces still remain in my family’s possession - the knife and the dinner fork. Here is what they look like.
I have tirelessly scoured the interwebs to find the exact collection these utensils were a part of, but have had no luck. All I have to go off of is the stamp labeled WMF Cromargan on the back of these utensils. Cromargan is just the WMF-trademarked name for their stainless steel.
They have almost certainly been replaced by new designs, but it is easy to identify their descendants, namely Silk, Merit, and Sara.
In Silk, we can see the elegantly rounded handles as well as the lovely shape of the scoop of the spoon. The tips of the spoons are more rounded than pointy. I strongly prefer non-pointiness in spoons.
In Merit, we can see elements of design being inherited, primarily in the handle and the fork heads. Merit unfortunately has an undesirable spoon scoop shape and the handles seem to be too ‘tail-heavy’.
In Sara, we can see a further refinement of the Merit collection, but with harsher curves and little of the elegance that remains from the original mystery collection.
But my search will certainly not end here. There remains much of the internet to be scoured and I am hopeful that one day, I can identify the model of the original mystery collection so that I can complete the collection once more. And find a great dinner spoon once again.
2017 - The Vienna Teaspoon
I was in Vienna, in the summer of 2017, when I met my final significant spoon. I was solo-tripping and was staying at an Airbnb owned by a lovely elderly Austrian couple. I had bought a yogurt (one of those corner yogurts where you can flip the cereal into the yogurt - in this case chocolate crispies into a banana-flavored yogurt) and was planning on taking the yogurt on a picnic to the Austrian countryside outside of Vienna. I realized last-minute that I didn’t have a spoon, so I asked my Austrian hosts whether they had any plastic utensils I could take with me and they replied that they didn’t have any. As I turned around in dejection at having to suck the yogurt out of the container with my not-so-long tongue, one of them chimed up that they may have a non-matching spoon I could have. After scrounging around in their utensil stash, they presented me with a small teaspoon. Perfect for eating yogurt. This teaspoon had only one identifying mark - 18/0 Edelstahl and it is likely that I will never manage to find a friend for it. So, it goes everywhere with me now. I pack it with my toothbrush whenever I travel now and it has accompanied me as a backup spoon everywhere I go.
Thus ends my past relationships with spoons. Let us move to the present.
Present
I brought no utensils to Colorado. The first few days in my new apartment consisted of me using various plastic spoons procured from various takeout places. Ikea was one of the first places I visited, and after not too much thought, picked up the cheapest set available - a $4.99 16-piece flatware set called “Mopsig”.
Mopsig is what I needed - cheap and usable. And not too painful to discard down the road when a fancier set of flatware could be found or when I needed to discard stuff to move yet again. Deep down I knew I would grow attached to this set of flatware and that they would rest in the back of the drawer for the rest of my life, but anyways.
Mopsig is very cheap. It’s made of a malleable metal that’s easily misformed. The sides of the handles are roughly hewn. But its simple design carries a level of elegance not seen in sets many times the price. Noteworthily, the spoon scoop shape is nearly perfect, albeit with rough edges.
16 became 15 earlier in 2021 when I accidentally left a dinner spoon in a blender, which malformed it to an unrecoverable mess.
I’m happy with the present, but sometimes, when eating dinner, my tongue scrapes a rough edge of a spoon and suddenly craves refinement. Which brings us to the future.
Future
So, who will be my spoonificant of the future? The past is past, but we must learn from it to understand what perfection truly is. Here is a short list of requirements that my spoonificant must meet:
- Wide easy-to-hold handles
- No corners on the handles
- Not pointy at the tip
- Smooth curves all over
- Glossy, not matte
While I’ve done some snooping, no spoon quite meets all the criteria.
The above-referenced Silk collection meets all conditions except for being glossy. They are only made in a matte finish now.
Another WMF collection, called Vela, meets all conditions except for there being no corners on the handles.
In fact, I’d argue that Vela exceeds the requirements in all other areas, but the sharp corners make the collection rather mean-looking.
There is also the Georg Jensen Arne Jacobsen set, which doesn’t quite meet the lack-of-pointiness requirement. The spoon is a bit more pointy that I’d like.
Another possibility is the Hackman Savonia set, which doesn’t seem to fully satisfy the “smooth curves all over” requirement in the section where the handle ends.
One final option known to me at this point is the Iittala Piano set, which doesn’t seem to meet the “smooth curves all over” requirement either, this time due to its straight rigidity in the handle.
And that brings us to the end. But the search has only just begun. There are many more designs to pore over. Perhaps, one day in the distant future, I could even design a spoon to my own standards. But until then - ever in search of the perfect spoon. Ever in search of my spoonificant other.