What Can’t the Grapefruit Spoon Do?
The clever little utensil has a permanent place in my silverware drawer.
This is One Thing, a column with tips on how to live.
Somehow, our house ended up with two of them: spoons with serrated scoopers and pointy ends. They were so odd. We didn’t eat much grapefruit. And when we did, we just used a knife to slice the sections free so that we could pull them out with a fork. (Apparently this is close to the proper British way to enjoy the sour breakfast treat: with a grapefruit knife and a standard fork.)
Yet as time went on, I found myself using the grapefruit spoons more and more—and not just out of desperation when all the other spoons were in the dishwasher. It turns out that grapefruit spoons are up to a variety of tasks, including but not limited to seeding tomatoes, jalapeños, or cucumbers (cut lengthwise first); hulling strawberries; freeing avocado or kiwi directly from their fruit-skin bowls; or scraping out honey jars or menorahs.
It feels fancy to have this specialized but secretly multipurpose utensil. What else do we really have, in modern times, in the way of fun silverware—the spork? A few years earlier, at our local museum’s exhibition of Gorham silver, I had beheld a mustard ladle, sardine tongs with adorable fish for paddles, a macaroni serving spoon, sugar tongs, a set of 12 fruit knives, and sets of 24 asparagus tongs and melon forks. Much of this was part of the show’s pièce de résistance: an 816-piece collection of gilded silver created between 1866 and 1880 for an insurance magnate that, when complete, filled 17 trunks. Sure, today we have those vegetable choppers that TikTok loves, but what’s elegant about a hunk of plastic?
There’s a lot about the Victorian era I’d rather leave behind—imperialism, child labor, tightlacing—but I’d argue that it got a few things right: namely, hair jewelry, mourning rituals, and an exuberant approach to cutlery. In terms of the latter, I plan to take inspiration from that time period. Next Mother’s Day, I’ll be asking for a fabulous pair of grape shears. I imagine that the scissors, in addition to snipping off bunches of grapes, will come in handy for trimming kale or even slicing grapefruit.
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