To
get around the no eating with your hands at the dinner table rule, I
would stealthily wait until my mom picked up her mostly-eaten pork chop
in her hands to get the meat clinging to the bone. As soon as she did, I
would snatch mine up. Immediately, my dad would say, “Don’t eat with
your hands.” To which I would reply, “But Mom is.” Battle won!
But
this whole eating with your fingers thing wasn’t always taboo. There was a
time when forks were taboo, even thought to be evil—instruments of the
devil. So how did forks get such a bad rap?
Before
there were forks, people either used their fingers or stabbed their food
with a knife and ate off the knife. (My dad would have been horrified.
Another table rule was to never eat with your knife or put it in your
mouth.) If people had utensils at the table, they would be a knife and a
spoon. What one couldn’t stab with the knife, one could scoop up with
the spoon, so this extra thing called the fork was superfluous.
The
first forks date back to 2400-1900 B.C. China, being made of bone.
Ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire both had large forks as cooking
utensils.
The Eastern Roman Empire likely gave us the personal table fork, which was in common use there by the 4th century. This instrument wasn’t
immediately accepted.
In
the Italian Peninsula, the fork came into some use by the 11th century,
where upper-class ladies would use it to eat candied fruits. When
Princess Maria Argyropoulina married Venetian leader Domenico Selvo,
most of Venice was aghast when she brought the fork with her and used it. Saint Peter Damian deemed it was from the
devil because it resembled his horns. Seriously. He said it was an
affront to God’s intentions for our fingers. When the poor princess died
within a couple of years, the saint was deemed correct and the fork
disappeared for several hundred years.
It was used by nearly all merchants and the upper class in Italy by 1600. Also, it was proper for guests to arrive with their own fork and spoon in a carrying box called a cadena.
 |
| 1550-1600 French Travel Utensils with Case |
Forks
were introduced to French court by Italian noblewoman Catherine de’
Medici when she married King Henry II. Queen Elizabeth I, though she
owned forks, preferred to eat with her fingers. She considered “spearing
an uncouth action.”
Though
forks were in common use in Southern Europe in the 16th century, they
didn’t infiltrate to the north until the 18th century. It had been
viewed as an unmanly Italian device.
The
Roman Catholic Church viewed it as an “excessive delicacy.” England was
a hold out and didn’t adopted the fork until the 18th century. In North
America, the fork didn’t catch on until after the American Revolution.
All raw materials from the Colonies were shipped back to Great Britain
as it was illegal to produce anything in the Colonies. Then products
would be made in England and shipped back to the Colonies for sale.
Forks made of lead were a health hazard, while forks made of steel
rusted and made food taste funny. That left metals like silver and gold
which were far too expensive for anyone but the wealthy.
The
early forks had two tines, but foods like peas fell through the large
gap. Then came along the three-tine fork, and early in the 1800s the
four-tine fork was born.
Commercialization
of silver-plating in the 1840s made a market of less expensive forks.
In 1859, silver was discovered in Nevada and flooded the market, which
caused the price of silver to drop and made forks even more accessible
to the masses.
With
forks being so affordable, the wealthy no longer felt special. Silver
companies knew that a fork to the wealthy was more than a useful tool,
it was a status symbol, so they started creating a myriad of forks for
every kind of food: fish, fruit, bread, dessert, cheese, dinner, crab,
olive, oyster, salad, pickle, and the list goes on and on.
Fortunately,
the number of forks used today have been dialed back to a handful. Most
of us can get along with one or two styles of forks.
Can you name all the different types of forks in the first picture? I don’t even want to try.
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Thanks for your post! I don't know the names of all the forks but I've seen most of them, and even own most of them. I for one am glad the fork was invented!
ReplyDeleteI, too, am glad the fork was invented. It's very useful. I wouldn't be able to name half of them. =0)
DeleteWhat a fun post! Such a seemingly trivial item, but in reality quite important, and as you've shown full of history! Thanks for sharing. As a catering manager, I'm required to be fully versed in forks. :-)
ReplyDeleteI never realized the fork had such checkered past. I always took it for granted. =0)
DeleteI am sure I read, as a child, that a British king (r a Scottish one - one of the Stuarts?) accidently stabbed himself with an upturned fork, and that is why they shuld be placed on the table tines down. Is this true (- ish)?
ReplyDelete