What Does "HH" Mean?

HH is an abbreviation for Hollow Handle. Most sterling flatware pieces are made completely of sterling silver. However, pieces such as knives and pie/cake servers often have blades made of other material such as stainless steel. The sterling handles of these pieces generally are 100% sterling but they are also hollow. The hollow part will be filled with some sort of epoxy to hold the blade firmly in place.

Some pieces, such as master butter knives and butter spreaders, may come in multiple versions within a pattern. Some may have hollow handles and some may have "flat handles" (FH). The flat handle pieces most likely will be all sterling, including the blades, whereas the hollow handle pieces may have non-sterling components.

See the post on this blog titled, "Butter Handling Utensils" for more explanation. You can find it quickly by clicking on "Butter Utensils" under "Labels" in the right column of the screen.

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Place Knives Mistakenly Called Butter Knives

I see ads from sellers now and then that say something like this, "Place setting consisting of fork, butter knife, salad fork & teaspoon". This makes me suspicious. Does this seller really have a place setting that includes a butter knife and no luncheon, place or dinner knife??

For some reason, some people call normal knives, "butter knives". I have no idea why. So, if the ad you are reviewing has this type of description, contact the seller and ask for the knife's length. Be sure you know what you are buying.

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What's the Purpose of the Butter Knife Notch?

What's the purpose of the notch in some master butter knives? Click on the picture below to see a larger version in which you can see the notch on the top of the blade better.


To be frank, we have no idea! We have heard some reasons:

• It's to help keep the knife from sliding off the butter plate (how would this work?)
• It's just decorative
• It's related somehow to fish knives

We've posted this question in the hope that it will generate comments from readers to help enlighten us!

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Butter Handling Utensils

One would think that butter knives would be fairly standard. Well, strange as it may seem, a single pattern may offer eight or more different styles of butter handling utensils. There are several different characteristics by which to categorize them, starting with:

• Master butter knife - used to transfer butter from a common serving dish to an individual diner's bread plate. This knife typically will have a sharp point to be used to "spear" a butter pat, I suppose. It is not used to spread butter onto bread.
• Individual, or place, butter spreader - used to spread butter onto bread. Each place setting will have one of these for use by a single diner. A spreader normally will have a rounded tip.

A utensil's construction defines another way to categorize:

• Solid or flat-handle - typically means that the utensil is one solid piece, all made of sterling.
• Hollow-handle - means that the utensil is constructed more like a dinner knife, probably with a sterling handle and a stainless steel blade.

The solid butter utensils could be expected to be a little more expensive than their hollow-handle cousins because the solid pieces typically are all sterling. Their sterling blades may exhibit more abrasions than the stainless steel blades on hollow-handle pieces. The categories above are illustrated in this picture of four Gorham Chantilly utensils. The utensils (from top to bottom) are:

• Solid (flat-handle) master butter knife
• Hollow-handle master butter knife
• Solid (flat-handle) butter spreader
• Hollow-handle butter spreader

Photo courtesy www.wikipedia.com

Here's a third categorization:

• With Notch - references the little notch in the blade that you see in the two master butter knives in the above picture.
• With No Notch - means that there is no notch. Some patterns include both options. The utensils often will look exactly the same except for the notch.

And now for your reading pleasure, a fourth categorization:

• Modern blade - means that the blade resembles the blade of a modern place knife.
• Paddle blade - means that the blade has a different, more rounded shape.
• French blade - may be a variation of the paddle blade.

Below are pictorial examples. The Chantilly butter spreader on the left is a hollow-handle spreader with a modern blade. We call the Chantilly spreader on the right a hollow-handle butter spreader with a paddle blade. However, some might define the blade as a French blade because of the way the sharp edge of the blade leaves the handle (taking a 90 degree turn away from the handle, then another 90 degree turn up the blade edge).










In addition to knives and spreaders, there are butter picks. Below are pictures of two examples. The top butter pick has a single tine while the bottom butter pick has two tines.

Photos courtesy of www.replacements.com

So, the bottom line here is to be careful when buying butter utensils to make sure you are getting what you want!

Click on any picture to see a larger version. By clicking on "Comments" below, you can see posted comments and add your own questions/comments.