Silver Christmas gifts for your favourite cook

Buy an antique silver gadget for the cook or chef in your life and they will be deeply impressed. Cooks since the Georgian times in England have been using silver for cooking and serving their meals because of its special properties: it doesn’t taint the food, it heats up quickly and it cleans easily. They warmed their brandy (for pouring onto Christmas puddings) and sauces in silver pans, made toasted cheese delicacies in silver dishes, ladled the soups out of silver tureens, sifted icing or caster sugar (onto their mince pies) and strained orange juice into the mulled wine.

Here is an A-Z OF SILVER CULINARY EQUIPMENT which is both unique and useful and can be bought at the London Silver Vaults in Chancery Lane, London. Examples are on display in The Cook's Kitchen exhibition until the end of January 2012.

CHEF'S SILVER
Basting spoons – Georgian examples are very collectable. Great as serving spoons.
Brandy warmers – small pans with a lip for pouring and usually a wooden handle.
Chafing dish – a lidded dish, insulated to keep contents warm.
Dish cross – a raised silver dish holder with a central burner, for keeping food hot at the table.
Gravy strainer – to strain out any lumps from meat juice or gravy.
Meat skewer – for use with a boned and rolled joint of meat, mostly mid-Georgian.
Nutmeg grater - popular during the period 1780-1840.
Sugar caster - for refined sugar, with a removable, pierced lid. 1850s onwards.
Tea caddy spoons - from the 1770s onwards but mostly 1800s and up to the 1940s.
Tea infuser – for making tea, and infusing spices into sauces.


PRESENTATION
Asparagus - tongs and serving sets
Breakfast Dish – large scrolling lidded serving dish for serving the bacon & eggs.
Entrée dish – a fairly shallow, lidded serving dish for meat or vegetables, used on the table or buffet.
Ham Stand - for holding a cooked ham for carving. Magnificent example in the show.
Mazarine - an oval pierced plate used in serving fish (or meat). 18th century onwards.
Meat dish & cover – often with a ‘sunken well & tree’ to catch the juices.
Muffin dish – created especially to keep muffins hot, straight from the griddle.
Soup tureen – these first came into vogue in the early 18th century.

SPECIALIST CUTLERY FOR COOKING, SERVING,EATING
Carving sets – elegant set of carving knife, fork and steel.
Cold meat servers – with flat grips to pick up slices easily, and with a scissor-action.
Fish slice – for serving a whole fish at the table. later Georgian period onwards.
Knife rest – traditionally used to rest the carving knife on when not in use
Lobster picks & crackers
Pastry forks – with three tines/prongs, one of which is wider to cut through pastry. Marrow scoop or spoon – designed to scoop out the cooked marrow from a bone.
Serving sets – knife and large fork, or trowel-shaped server for cakes and tarts.
Sugar Nips or Tongs.
Toasting fork – with a long, extendable handle, used to toast bread (or marsh mallows) at the fireside.


ON THE TABLE
Argyll (Argyle) – an insulated jug to keep gravy or sauce warm.
Butter boat – a small boat-shaped serving dish for pouring melted butter at table.
Carafe or decanter – a more glamourous way to serve wine or port at table.
Condiment set – usually comprising mustard, pepper and salt pots.
Cream jug – typically small upright or boat style jug for pouring cream at table.
Cruet sets – comprising three, four or more (sometimes eight) silver stoppered glass bottles.
Egg coddler – a small, deep lidded dish containing a holder for cooking four eggs
Gravy boat – typically boat-shaped for pouring sauce or gravy.
Oil & vinegar sets – more popular from the late Victorian period.
Sugar caster – to dredge sugar on fruit or cakes or mince pies.
Salt cellars – traditionally lined in Bristol blue glass as salt tarnishes pure silver.
Spoon warmers – often in shell or cornucopia form.

Vote Silver Vaults Best Antiques Shop

To mark National Antiques Week 14 to 21 November 2011, Homes & Antiques magazine is asking antiques fans to vote for their best antiques shopping spots. There are five categories to choose from. No more than 50 words needed. And you could win a prize for nominating. Such as an Overnight stay at the Royal Crescent Hotel, Bath, worth £375.

To get the form click here or find out more from the Silver Vaults news room. We hope that one of your Silver Vaults dealers will be your choice or maybe you think the London Silver Vaults itself is the best antiques shop ever. It's certainly has the biggest stock of silver in the country!

End Date is 30th November 2011. The winning shops will be announced by Kirstie Allsopp at the Bath Decorative Antiques Fair on 8th March 2012.

Dining in Style at the Silver Vaults

When his owner went to see the Cook’s Kitchen selling exhibition of
silver at the London Silver Vaults (opened 3 October) there was a little
culinary treat waiting outside for Nelson the bulldog. Served in a silver bowl
of course. Well the Silver Vaults is the biggest antique silver shop in the world.

Silver and A Special Relationship

What do Goldie Hawn, Joan Rivers and Barbara Walters have in common? A great sense of humour? Not sure about Barbara. Well in fact they are all American girls who at various times popped over from the US and dropped into the London Silver Vaults in Chancery Lane to do a little silver shopping. They are amongst generations of Americans who first began this special relationship with English quality silver after the war, when many GIs were still stationed here. At that time us Brits were still trying to get some rationed butter to put on our rationed bread, rather than splashing out on a shiny lifestyle. We have caught up a bit now and rather like a dash of glamorous silver about the home.

Meanwhile, also discovering the appeal of English silver is another American, the young editor of An American Girl in Chelsea, the ‘chic guide for American women in London’. She particularly likes the Silver Vaults for wedding gifts to get away from that Wedding List sameyness. And she is rather taken with some of the antique culinary silver that is in the next selling exhibition at the Vaults in The Cook’s Kitchen show, starting in October.

Desserts Boum!

Cocktails are so yesterday declares
that style maitresse Harpers Bazaar this month
because it seems the ‘fashion crowd now head
to one of London’s chic dessert bars for a rendezvous.’
Could it be that one of their researchers popped into
the London Silver Vaults off Midtown’s Chancery Lane
and saw the Just Desserts exhibition of silver that no
self respecting dessert hostess could ignore. So when
you’ve sampled the English liqueurs and ice-cream
at the Waldorf Astoria or been colour blocked by
Ladurees macaroons in their new salon in Covent Garden, you
can try your hand at dessert parties at home. Just don’t forget
a dash of silver. And by the way, according to that uber sylist,
Wallpaper magazine, macaroons are, je regrette, a little passé,
it’s now the turn of the cream puff or chou à la crème. First stop
café Popelini, rue Debelleyrne in Paris, of course.
Just Desserts selling exhibiton June to end September 2011. Catalogue

SAVE OUR SILVER HALLMARKS

The ‘Red Tape Challenge’ launched by the Government on 7 April is designed to do away with any superfluous rules and regulations that make commerce more difficult than necessary. One of the regulations being ‘challenged’ is the requirement for all precious metals to be tested independently for adequate metal content. This is known as hallmarking, the name derived from the first assay office, Goldsmith’s Hall in London. (The London Silver Vaults's logo (shown) depicts the current London hallmark,
the leopard's head.

As reported in this week’s Antiques Trade Gazette (21 April 2011) the Birmingham and London Assay Offices have countered the ‘challenge’ to hallmarking with an appeal for people to log onto the Government Red Tape Challenge site and make their objections known. You have until 5 May 2011.

There are aleady more comments logged on this subject than for changing the Sunday Trading laws.

Rather than stifling enterprise, the independent hallmarking of precious metals carried out by Assay offices, could be claimed to promote enterprise and industry because it guarantees a consistent level of quality for gold and silver objects. A silversmith today who produces a silver object such as a vase or a set of cutlery, just like British silversmiths since the end of the 12 century, submits their work to be assayed. This way the ultimate purchaser is guaranteed silver of the required 92.5 per cent proof sterling silver quality which cannot be confused with inferior silver, silver plate, chrome, nickel or any base metal.

The customer is also told through the various ‘marks’ who made the piece, what date it was made and where it was assayed. It is one of the cleverest methods of quality control in manufacture and has contributed to British silver’s unrivalled reputation throughout the world. People who shop at the London Silver Vaults, for instance, know everything they buy there is as described by its hallmarks. Whether silver is antique or modern, it carries its history with it. This protects both silversmith, retailer and customer and should not be changed.

Silver value doubles in a year

According to Kitco www.kitcosilver.com the web page for investors in precious metals, silver doubled in value over the last year. To be precise it rose 122 per cent to where it sits now at around $40 an ounce or nearly £25. Metals and particularly gold, which now fetches a mind boggling $1400 or so an ounce, are seen as a good hedge against weak currencies and general economic turbulence.

Vintage silver objects such as one can buy at the UK’s biggest retailer of
antique silver, the London Silver Vaults are currently remarkably good value ounce for ounce against their bullion counterparts. But the strength of silver bars is likely to pull up the price of handmade or manufactured silver as demand for silver increases. So now might be the time to add some silver loveliness to the home and watch your possession become even shinier.