Sucket Fork

sucket fork is a utensil for eating sweetmeats that was used in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries, with fork tines at one end and sometimes a spoon bowl at the other end of a common stem.

Sucket forks have an ancient history as a method of spearing and consuming sticky delicacies—succade—and are recorded at least a century and a half before table forks became widely adopted for eating savory foods. Smaller and more delicate in form than the typical late-seventeenth-century place setting (couvert) of knife, fork, and spoon, sucket forks were gradually replaced by sets of gilded sweetmeat knives, forks, and spoons. The design of these new tools for dessert matched the main course flatware, although they were smaller and more decorative. Late-seventeenth-century examples are often engraved.