The biggest change with the Puritan spoon was its handle, which was entirely unadorned. It had no decorative "knop" on the end. Over the previous few centuries, silversmiths lavished great artistry on a part of the spoon we would now consider almost irrelevant, adding little sculptures called knops on the end point of the handle. Pre-1649 knop "finials" included diamonds and acorns, owls and bunches of grapes, naked women and sitting lions. Some knops were flat-ended abstract shapes, such as a stamp or a seal. Others depicted Christ and his apostles in ornate finials.

None of these decorative spoons found favor during the Commonwealth, when excessive decoration of any kind, particularly religious, was disapproved of. The Roundheads lopped the heads off spoons just as they lopped off the king's head. The new republican eating utensils were entirely devoid of pattern, just plain, dense lumps of silver. It has been suggested that one reason Puritan spoons were made so heavy was that citizens used them to hoard silver against the frequent proclamations that came through to give up your personal silver to pay for the defense of the town. If your silver was tied up in cutlery, you could claim it was essential and prevent its being confiscated.

In any case, it wouldn't be long before the Puritan spoon was itself swept away by the spoon of the Restoration, the trifid, which traveled with the newly crowned Charles II from his court of exile on the Continent. It is the earliest spoon in its modern form; most spoons today, however cheaply made, still owe something to the trifid. No British person had ever eaten from such a spoon before in Britain -- the first trifids are hallmarked 1660. Yet by 1680, they had spread through the entirety of Charles's kingdom and remained the dominant spoon type for 40 years, killing off both the Puritan spoon and the fig-shaped spoons that went before. The base metal spoons of the masses made from pewter and latten also changed shape from Puritan to trifid. The change was not gradual, but sudden. Politically, no one wanted to be seen eating dinner with a Roundhead spoon.

The bowl of the trifid was a deep oval rather than a shallow fig. Like the Puritan, the trifid had a flat handle, but it now swelled toward the end, with a distinctive cleft shape (hence the name, which means "three-cleft"). The design is French; the trefoil is an echo of the fleur-de-lis, the stylized lily associated with French kingship. On the reverse side, the hammered stem continued up onto the back of the bowl, finishing in a dart-shaped groove sometimes called a "rat tail." Over the decades, these new spoons also seem to have gone along with changes in the way they were held. Certain shapes invite you to hold them in certain ways. Because of the knobbly part at the end, medieval spoons are easiest to hold with the stem under the thumb at a right angle. The trifid, by contrast, could be held in the polite English way, with the handle resting in the palm of the hand, parallel with the thumb. With a regal trifid in your hand, poised to plunge it into an apple pie, you might forget that a reigning monarch had ever been executed or that England had ever done without its king. This was kitchenware as political propaganda.