Don Nalezyty explores the various spoon designs and the relationship between handle and bowl
The wooden spoon has been around for millennia and has been making a big comeback recently. One only has to look at the number of articles, rapidly growing groups and events around the globe focused on spoon carving to know it has exploded in the past few years. With so many adherents to the cult of the wooden spoon, questions of good design are constantly in the ether. Ask a dozen spoon carvers, from the occasional hobbyist to the dedicated professional, what makes a good spoon and you may get a dozen answers. But there are common themes: functionality, appearance, hand-feel and mouth-feel. Functionality is certainly
easy to understand. Appearance too is fairly easy to understand in terms of finish, form, fairness of curves and overall visual balance. Hand-feel and mouth-feel may be less obvious. Hand-feel is the culmination of how a spoon feels in the hand during use and is impacted by many factors such as shape, size, and relation to the bowl. Mouth-feel is the culmination of how an eating spoon feels in the mouth and adds factors of texture, finish, and usability.
The anatomy of a spoon
A spoon at its most basic level has two parts – the bowl and the handle. We often refer to the bit between the handle and the bowl as the neck, when viewed from above. The neck has a second named section – the keel is the bottom section of the neck that runs from the handle to the bottom of the bowl. Like its namesake on a ship, the keel provides structural support to the spoon. An important part of the spoon is crank. Seen in the side profile of a spoon, crank is the bend between the bowl and the handle. Finally, at the terminal end of a spoon, one sometimes finds a finial. An embellishment, the finial can define the character of a spoon and balances opposite the bowl.
Spoon bowls come in many shapes, but the three most common are egg, ficulate, and squoval. The egg-shaped bowl is an oval that narrows as it approaches the tip of a bowl.
The ficulate bowl is shaped like a fig or teardrop and widens as it approaches the tip of the bowl. The squoval bowl is rectangular with rounded corners and, like the egg, typically narrows as it approaches the tip of the bowl, but most importantly it has a relatively flat tip. One can, of course, mix bowl shapes and this often results in the most interesting shapes.
Spoons can also have handedness – meaning they work better for a left or right-handed individual. This is generally visible via an asymmetric bowl with a pronounced curve leading to an off-centre tip. Looking at the bowl face up, a big curve on the left to a point offset to the right is a right-handed spoon and vice versa for a left. This may be confusing at first, but if one considers that the origin was not in spoons carved with handedness, but rather evolved as a right or left-handed user eroded the opposite side of the spoon through use scraping clean dishes for every meal until the handedness emerged.
Crank
The most challenging part of a spoon to understand is crank. It is measured as the angle between the top of the bowl and the bottom of the handle where it rests upon the hand. Crank ensures that when a given spoon is used for its intended purpose and held comfortably in the hand that the top edge of the bowl remains level and retains the contents easily. If the handle has one or multiple bends, each may impact crank depending on
where and how a spoon is held. It is different depending on the type of spoon, which falls into three broad categories: cooking, serving and eating.
Cooking spoons
Cooking spoons are often the simplest spoons of all as they have the simplest functions to perform. Meant for stirring and scraping, the best tend to have very little to no crank, allowing them to predictably hit all corners of a pot as one moves, twists and turns them about. The handle must be comfortable in the hand and easy to hold for extended periods. The front edge of the bowl on a good cooking spoon is flat enough to scrap the bottom of a pan well and the handle is long to keep the hand from hot food. The bowl is typically about 1⁄4 the overall length of the spoon. Overall length varies, but favorites are somewhere between 250mm and 330mm long.
Serving spoons
Serving spoons are more complex and come in many forms based on purpose. A generic serving spoon for serving up a healthy dollop of mashed potatoes has a large bowl around 1⁄3 the overall length. This sort of spoon often has more crank than a cooking spoon – sometimes as much as 45° but more typically 30° or less. The bowl can be of any shape and depth. For serving liquids such as gravies, soups and syrups we have ladles, which have significant crank – often as much as 90° between the top of the bowl and handle. This allows one to reach into a deep vessel such as a soup pot and have the bowl top remain level and full of liquid. Ladles such as cooking spoons tend to have longer handles with the bowls only accounting for ¼ or less of the overall length. Small ladles for gravy may be only 200mm long, whereas those for soup may be 400mm or more. The bowl of a ladle is quite deep with an overall hemispherical shape which maximises volume.
Eating spoons
Eating spoons are considered by many to be the most complex and challenging to carve well. Unlike cooking and serving spoons that need to serve their purpose and have good hand-feel, an eating spoon must also have good mouth-feel. The bowl or a portion of it has to slide easily into the mouth with food and a simple closing of the mouth should gently pop the bowl out of the mouth clear of food. The bowl of the eating spoon should be rather shallow so the upper lip can easily remove all of the food without the need to flip the spoon to vulgarly lick the bowl clean. Soup and cawl spoons have a larger, deeper bowl allowing more soup that can be easily supped from the edge of the bowl. A pocket spoon is meant to be carried about in a pocket. It is small enough to easily tuck into a pocket and sturdy enough to survive it. The bowl of a typical eating spoon is 1⁄3 the overall length of 150mm to 180mm, but a pocket spoon is shorter with the bowl accounting for up to half or more.
Having the right crank is critical to a good eating spoon. Crank is best placed 1⁄4 to 1⁄3 of the way into the bowl from the handle or at the widest part of the bowl. The top edge of the bowl must be level while the wrist is resting is in a neutral position and the handle rests comfortably in the hand. One should not have to hold an eating spoon at a peculiar angle or perform gymnastic gyrations of the wrist to get food from a dish to the mouth; it should be as effortless as breathing. The secret is in the crank, which is optimally between 27° and 32°. w
Spoon bowl, handle, crank and bowl shape guidelines
