Until I met my mother-in-law, the queen of obscure, single-use culinary gifts of the inexpensive, unrefined kind: plastic-square pan scrapers, strawberry de-stemmers, apple slicers - she’s sent them all from across the country, with love. My kitchen had what it, and I, needed, and nothing more. Just more stuff in a drawer - in a world! - already cluttered. Like fine china, specialized silverware seemed so antiquated. Using a grapefruit spoon to eat a grapefruit seemed akin to using an umbrella in a drizzle. Instead, I painstakingly cut through the membranes with a versatile paring knife, until each wedge was wrested free. Once I had my own home, and my own silverware, I forgot all about the citrus spoon, even though I came to love grapefruit. Every so often I’d accidentally grab one and get a good cheek-graze with my Honey Nut Cheerios. Whereas our serrated, stainless steel duo lived unceremoniously, jumbled among the teaspoons. My parents had grapefruit spoons because their parents had grapefruit spoons, but those came with more pomp: They were sets of eight, sterling silver, each lying peacefully in its own slot in a felted wooden box. Since only my parents ate grapefruit, only they used them.
They sort of scared me: With their sharp teeth, they were the sharks of the silverware drawer. We had two grapefruit spoons when I was growing up.
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