A Spooner- Useful but little known kitchen utensil

When preparing food, it is useful to have a ready supply of clean spoons available so that you can taste your food and tweak it as necessary before serving. I keep my tasting spoons in a spooner on my kitchen counter. Never heard of a spooner? You aren’t alone; it seems that most people haven’t. Shockingly, the editors of my Canadian Oxford Dictionary (COD) can’t define “spooner” nor can the folks at Wikipedia. It seems my usual information sources have let me down. I had to do a Google search of ‘antique spooners’ before I could find anything resembling a spooner online. You’ll note that my spooner happens to have been a marmalade jar in a previous life; I would prefer an old mustard pot.

The COD does have a definition of the word spoonerism. This is an accidental transposition of the initial letters of two or more words. For example, "he hissed the mystery lectures”, rather than, “he missed the history lectures” or more petulantly, “he hit the bought bun” rather then “he bit the hot bun”.

In the movie The Baker, (previously reviewed in Food for Thought by my sister on Oct. 12, 2009), the elderly female grocery store owner describes her husband as being “ Sharp as a spoon and twice as useful”. He retorts by saying with knifelike precision, “Spoons are very useful”. Spooners too.