“Some people think it is very barbarous to eat corn from the cob. . . .”  For the Victorians, corn on the cob presented a direct challenge to etiquette rules about the handling of food. The corn scraper was developed to shave off kernels for more polite consumption. The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a succession of related utensils, including corn holders, forks, butterers, and even a scorer scraper. The Bayou Bend scrapers are among the earliest American examples of this specialized form.

Technical notes: The handle is double struck.

Related examples: This pair originally comes from a set of twelve, each displaying slight variations in their profiles.

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.