Nora Ephron: “Dessert spoons are large, oval-shaped spoons. They are so large that you could go for a swim in them. I’m not one of those people who like to blame the French for things, especially now that the French turned out to be so very very right about Iraq, but there’s no question this trend began in France, where they’ve always had a weakness for dessert spoons.”
The Brits have dessert-spoons of equal size–usually placed at the top of the place setting horizontally. The bizarre touch is that one/you is/are expected to use this gawky tool to dismantle a fresh peach or attack a teeny sphere of ice-cream. The dessert spoons used eons ago on British Railways were perhaps the largest [equal to what us Yanks would use to stir a pot of soup] and were dented, dull and often Not All That Clean. Watching a Brit feed himself green peas by mashing them up the backside of a fork and wodging the mass in place by a bit of potato is not for the faint of heart. If we hadn’t whupped Cornwallis, we’d be backsiding green peas too…where’s our gratitude?