Talk:tablespoon

At least in Australia you never eat with a tablespoon. It's a bit too big to fit in your mouth. It's used mostly for cooking. The usual spoon for eating is the dessertspoon or dessert spoon. &mdash; Hippietrail 19:05, 24 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Interesting. In the US, the small spoon is a teaspoon, the larger spoon is a tablespoon. Red Prince

Oh, and they eat desserts with a fork in the US, I could not believe my eyes when I moved here from Europe. Red Prince 19:10 UTC


 * That is interesting. In Australia there are three sizes of spoons plus the soupspoon. It's more usual to eat dessert with a spoon - especially anything with cream, ice-cream, sauce etc. We don't normally think of "dessertspoon" as meaning "spoon for dessert" but just a word we don't analyse further. In fact its most common use is for eating breakfast. &mdash; Hippietrail 19:19, 24 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Yes, you sound more like what we did in Europe (I'm from Slovakia originally). Red Prince 19:25 UTC

Here's a conversation I just had on the subject with a Brazilian friend:

how many different sized spoons do people normally have in the kitchen drawer in brazil? in Australia we have 3: teaspoon (very small), dessertspoon (for eating cereal), tablespoon (a bit too big to use for eating)


 * the same... but somepeople have a dessertspoon a bit smaller than others and have both in their house... let´s say one for cereals and the other actually for desserts

and what do you call them in portuguese?


 * colher (spoon) de sobremesa (dessert); colher de sopa (tablespoon); colher de café
 * colher de café would be the same as teaspoon

ah over here a soupspoon is different again. it's rounder and maybe deeper but similar size to the tablespoon - a bit too big for your mouth so you're supposed to sip from the side of it


 * yes, you have to sip here as well...
 * it´s rare but some people also have the soupspoon, like you described

&mdash; Hippietrail 19:59, 24 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * In traditional (Northern) UK, we have teaspoons that are slightly more than 5 ml (coffee spoons are smaller); fruit spoons for eating light dessert such as trifle & ice cream; dessert spoons for eating heavier dessert (like spotted dick) and breakfast cereal; soup spoons (as above); and table spoons for serving, not eating (These were formerly larger, but seem to be shrinking!). I would consider the Wikipedia and Wiktionary definitions of tablespoon to be wrong for the UK, but perhaps American usage is taking over in the South?    D b f  i  r  s   12:39, 15 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Like Dbfirs, I'd consider the Wikipedia and Wiktionary definitions of tablespoon to be wrong for the UK. The precise sizes of teaspoons, dessert spoons and tablespoons were somewhat variable here until the middle of the last century, but they were in the ratio of 1:2:4 by volume, with a tablespoon holding approximately half of an Imperial fluid ounce (untestable authorities: "what my late mother, the sometime professional cook and canteen manager, taught me", and the Victorian prison-issue tablespoon passed to me by my grandmother, which has volume 21 ml; more robustly verifiable: Mrs Beeton, Chapter 4). As for nowadays, I can find any number of web sites that, indeed, claim a UK tablespoon to now be 15 ml (and the measures available in the shops that I've seen are invariably actually metric measures of that volume) - but I can also find several, including measurement convertors, that maintain instead that the UK tablespoon is now defined as 17.7 ml. I haven't as yet, been able to find an authority for that claim, but it's a very precise number to have been merely conjured out of thin air. The bottom line, though, is that anyone trying a older British recipe quoting things in "spoons" may be in for a nasty shock if they try to use a 15 ml measure; they should be aware that they may need to adjust the "tablespoons" quantities upwards by as much as one third, and plan their cooking with that possibility in mind.

&mdash; Doghouse 14:36, 7 October 2011 (UTC)


 * ... and, of course, in Australia they still use the old British tablespoon of 20 ml.  D b f  i  r  s   15:20, 7 October 2011 (UTC)