MAKER'S MARK OF JOHAN VAN'T HOFKEN, AMSTERDAM, 1734

This fish trowel is an early example. According to M. Clayton, The Collector's Dictionary of the Silver and Gold of Great Britain and North America, London, New York, Sydney, Toronto, 1971, p. 135, only in the third quarter of the 18th Century the fish trowel developped from the pudding trowel. By the 1770s it was fashionable to eat whitebait and a large number of trowels were made. The earliest examples have solid silver handles, later turned wooden handles became the rule

See illustration