Ice cream has been favored and savored by Americans at least since the second quarter of the eighteenth century, when Maryland’s royal governor Thomas Bladen served it to his guests. It remained a prerogative of the upper classes until the early nineteenth century. With the invention of the hand-cranked freezer in the 1840s and the process of pasteurization slightly later, it became more widely available. These spoons and the accompanying flatware that comprise this service indicate the trend toward specialized place and service pieces that evolved in the United States during the nineteenth century.

Technical notes: The spoon bowls are gilded.

Related examples: These spoons were originally part of a more extensive service that included eight additional ice cream spoons, two pierced ladles (see B.97.8), and a berry spoon.

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.