The reel from the antiques dealer @msrau opens on a closed wooden chest on legs, and a white gloved hand lifts the lid. Text across the frame asks, “What did an extravagant dinner look like in 1888?” Inside, trays of silver sit on red velvet, and the video spends its 20 seconds answering that question one drawer at a time.

The caption supplies the numbers. For a table of 18, the Gorham service offered 764 pieces of sterling silver, including separate forks for oysters, strawberries and ice cream. It was crafted circa 1888 in the Versailles pattern, which the caption says was designed by Antoine Heller and inspired by the grandeur of Louis XIV’s palace. The pieces live in a fitted chest, and the contents extend to an asparagus server, a sardine fork and even a cake saw.

On screen, the text follows the same order. The lid is raised in the first three seconds, and a gloved hand then pulls out a drawer under the line “764 pieces of silver. A service for just 18.” Inside, the red lining is cut into shaped slots, and knives, spoons and forks lie in rows, each in its own place. The hand then lifts an asparagus server, a broad engraved piece with a decorative handle, under the words “In its Versailles pattern, inspired by the French palace.” The next text reads “Separate forks for fish, oysters and strawberries,” shown over a fork with gilded tines and a stack of spoons, and the one after is “Even ice cream had its own fork,” while the hand opens a drawer packed with long rows of knives. The closing frames show spoons with gilded bowls and stacks of forks under the line “Available now at M.S. Rau.” The caption lists the service as Item No. 31-5437 and points viewers to the dealer’s website.

Gorham has a well documented history. According to the RISD Museum in Providence, Jabez Gorham founded the company in 1831 in a small workshop a few blocks from the museum, spoons were a principal product at the start, and the firm became the largest silver company in the world. The museum also lists Versailles among the flatware patterns created for Gorham by Florentin Antoine Heller, a French designer who lived from 1839 to 1904, trained in Paris and spent nearly 20 years designing for the company. That matches the designer credit in the caption.

The museum’s material also explains why a service this size existed. It says dining a la russe, with up to 15 courses served one at a time, was adopted in the United States in the 1870s. It describes an 816 piece Gorham service bought between 1866 and 1880 to serve 24 people, with 687 flatware pieces among them. A 764 piece set for 18 sits in the same scale. The details are on the RISD Museum’s exhibition materials for Gorham Silver.

The word sterling also has a legal meaning in the United States. The Federal Trade Commission’s Guides for the Jewelry, Precious Metals, and Pewter Industries, revised in 2018, say that describing a product as solid silver, sterling silver or sterling is potentially misleading unless it is at least 925/1,000ths pure silver, as set out in the Federal Register notice for the revised guides. That is the threshold behind the caption’s description of all 764 pieces as sterling.

For a thrifter or collector looking at an old silver set, the video suggests a few ways to read what you have. Count the specialized pieces, such as the asparagus server and sardine fork the caption names, because they are what separates a full service from a basic place setting. Check the pattern name, since this set is identified by Versailles. Look at whether the original fitted chest comes with it, as it does here, because the shaped slots in the velvet show where every piece belongs.