Saratoga Chips Spoons

US history details the Gilded Age as one of the nation’s most prosperous periods. It ran from the 1870s to the early part of the 20th century. The phrase was coined by writers Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. In which they satirized an era of American history that featured both extraordinary growth and outrageous poverty. They believed it to be an era of serious social problems hidden by thin gold gilding. 
While there were riches, the established European nations and their higher echelons of society, had class. The new American wealthy craved snobbery! 
Equally clever manufacturers and businessmen spotted niches all over the place for practically pointless extravagances. 

Faneuil Saratoga Chips Server Tiffany Sterling Silver circa 1909. $795 from www.rubylane.com

Included within this was of course the dining experience. A major European tradition, and one all sorts of dinner and serving-ware were created for. There were cabinets and tables for all manner of ostentatious exhibition. Lavish centre-pieces were crafted. There were glasses for the slightest sip of an obscure drink. There were tongs for picking up different types of foods, spoons and ladles for serving anything from pickles to yes, you guessed it, Potato Chips. 

It was during this period that saw sufficient growth of some companies, to secure their survival and success today. Gorham, Reed & Barton, and especially Tiffany, have become renowned worldwide for their craft. The foundations of future success began during the Gilded Age, not least with the design and development of any number of silver serving implements. 
As the Jones’s were keeping up with the Jones’s as it were, there were eventually over 150 different silver flatware pieces in a Silver Service set.
Prior to his election as President, the then Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover took a stand and decreed that the excess had gone too far, and an American Silver Service should not contain any more than 55 pieces.

The Saratoga Chip Server was actually added to the list in 1873. It came complete with oil draining holes. All the major silversmiths made them, and today they can auction for hundreds if not thousands of dollars.
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