Old French Spoons
My Peculiar Hobby and Its History in France
One of my hobbies is wood carving. I like to do it without the help of power tools. Several years ago I sold all my large power tools and started focusing on hand work. There were several reasons for the change but the two biggest were A) we were just starting our plans to move abroad so I needed my hobbies to be more portable and B) the dogs won’t hang out with me in my shop if there are noisy tools running. Long term readers might recall an old post about Carolyn’s heart attack when I packed sharp hand tools in my luggage bound for France.
Last month I approached Reid Schwartz—a U.S. based blacksmith I know—about building me a special tool that I was having trouble getting my hands on: a spoon scorp. I wrote about it in another substack, so I won’t go into detail here. While discussing the project with Reid I mentioned that I was interested in learning more about the French tradition of spoon carving. Reid turned me on to Jane Mickelborough, a spoon carver based in Brittany whom I had never heard of. She makes spoons that are shaped and decorated in the French tradition and Reid said her folding spoons were incredible; as you can see in the screen capture below, he was right!
I am ordering Jane’s books (and someday I’ll own one of her spoons!) Her work is MUCH more intricate than any spoon I have ever carved. Heck, they're more intricate than the computer I helped build in high school! I’m excited to study what she does and to have a launching point for digging into the French tradition that surrounds a hobby I have pursued for years. Besides satisfying my own interests, I think that when we finally apply for permanent residency status—or for French passports—they’ll like that I obsessed over an obscure cul-de-sac of French history and art. The French appreciate discerning people, right?
While reading about the history of spoon making in France, I was struck by the idea that not so very long ago, a spoon and the clothes they wore might be the only possessions many people owned. In turn, this reminded me of a show I watched years ago in which they taught people basic wilderness survival skills; after making shelter and finding water and food, making a bowl and spoon for eating were on the top of the list of things to get done quickly.
It always makes me pause when I consider the razor’s edge of survival that many Americans and Europeans lived upon well into the twentieth century. I doubt many people appreciate how tenuous and recent our widespread prosperity is. As wealth and power continue to shift upward to an ever-shrinking number of oligarchs, it’s not hard to imagine huge numbers of now-prosperous people sinking back into subsistence living.
This is what I love about carving spoons, folk music, and folk art in general: the spoon is a simple and utilitarian object. It might be intricately decorated or little more than a stick with a shallow bowl at one end. Either way, it’s a fundamental tool and an entry point to consider politics, justice, economics, music and more.
Or maybe they’re just pretty spoons.
Jusqu’à la prochaine fois (until next time),
Roberto & Carolyn
Many of us are insulated from those who deal daily with the struggles of abject poverty and still maintain some level of personal dignity. It is easy to imagine our recent prosperity as universal when in fact so many are one missed paycheck away from being on the street. In those cases, something as simple and universal as a spoon could be a most prized posession. Art, a hobby, a Godsend.
Brilliant !!! What a ab fab wake up call !!!