Sattua - look at all THESE nifty spoons!!! Why oh why ARE there so many different kinds of spoons? And cutlery in general? When you think about it, you can do pretty darn good with one knife, a fork and one spoon - why do we need thirty bazillion renditions? And don’t EVEN get me started on sporks.
Darryl Lict, what in heaven’s name do you do with those? I don’ t understand them - what are they supposed to do? (I know NOTHING about absinthe).
That looks like a set of serving spoons, to me. They proliferated to a ridiculous degree, in the Victorian age. Most of them don’t date to before it, and are silly after it. Ah, the Industrial Revolution, how I love thee.
Look up marrow spoons. They’re straws like mint julep spoons, too, but they’re made to suck the melted marrow out of bones. Very Elizabethan.
That was how I got my user name.
Really? Aha! 
It’s a fun ritual, although the way I’ve seen it done is lighting the sugar cube on fire, which isn’t even mentioned in that article. I saw it done that way the first time I had absinthe in Slovakia, and since I like fiery drinks, it’s the way I do it. Beware though, the fumes are tremendous, and I’ve seen even my veteran hard core drinking buddies not be able to keep it down.
In the photo of the ice cream spoons there was one with three points. We had small ones, and always called those runcible spoons.
We also have a bunch of Chinese spoons for eating pho and other Asian soups.
My mother had not only teaspoons, soup spoons, cream soups, iced tea, salt, she also had quite a collection of bonbon spoons. When she died, my mother had 4 completes sets of sterling flatware, plus a mother-of-pearl handled fish set, and nuwerous other specialty items.
StG
I suppose no thread on spoons is complete without a reference to “runcible” spoons – note the linky in the footnotes to Cecil Adams’ article on the subject. 
I was astonished one day when my mother-in-law told me with great happiness about the tomato spoon she’d just purchased. What? Tomatoes need their own spoons?
Eastern European vs. Western European tradition. The East European way is, as you say, to douse the sugar cube in absinthe then light it on fire, so the melted sugar drips into the glass. The Western European way is to pour water over the sugar, thus sweetening and diluting the absinthe.
It’s nasty swill either way 
Yes, they have slots or perforations so the juice drips out.
