Tongs (Sugar tongs)

Description

This elegant set of sugar tongs with tapering bow sides have low-relief stamped decoration placed where the user’s fingers would squeeze them together. The imagery depicts a female figure in an Egyptian or Greek gown with a basket of overflowing fruit placed upon her head in the manner of a Caryatid. The maker was a prolific silver cutlery manufacturer in Germany, Peter Bruckmann & Company. That firm’s mark of P.B. & C. was erroneously thought to represent an earlier nineteenth-century partnership of Maltby Pelletreau, John Bennett & D. C. Cooke who worked in New York City. Firms like Pelletreau’s were instrumental in importing European luxury items for American consumers, but they did not produce silver in the lower purity standard indicated by the tongs’ 13 loth mark.