Wealthy families in eighteenth-century England regularly sat down to elaborate, multicourse dinners that required numerous silver pieces, from marrow scoops to cake baskets, for proper service and consumption. Jennifer Faulds Goldsborough notes that meat at this time was often preserved by salting or smoking, which rendered it too highly flavored to eat without a variety of neutralizing sauces. Hence the need for sauce boats, produced either in pairs or in larger sets.

This pair of sauce boats is exceptionally elegant. Made in the shape of seashells, each is ornamented with additional marine motifs. The repetition of various curving lines and decorations gives these pieces a sense of fluidity and grace, further emphasized by the intricate, petallike designs on their solid bases-quite a departure from the three-legged supports of most contemporary sauce boats. These qualities demonstrate the strong influence of French rococo style on mid-eighteenth-century English silver and may also owe something to Godfrey's Huguenot (French Protestant) heritage. The importance of these works is shown by the fact that Godfrey includes a virtually identical sauce boat on one of her trade cards. Godfrey's mark here consists of her initials enclosed within a lozenge, the traditional heraldic sign for a widow