And our changing fork habits can reveal our attitudes about big subjects, including religion, masculinity, and foreignness. The fork is a latecomer to the table. Knives are the descendants of sharpened hand axes—the oldest human tools.
It is likely that the first spoons derived from whichever local objects were used to scoop up liquid: The word for spoon in both Latin and Greek derives from a snail shell while the Anglo-Saxon spon means chip. The shape of the fork has been around a lot longer than the eating utensil. In ancient Greece, Poseidon brandished a trident while mortals had large forked tools to pull food out of boiling pots.
Sporadically, the fork made inroads. In the eighth or ninth century, some Persian nobility may have used a forklike tool. In the 11th century, forks were in use in the Byzantine Empire.
An illustrated manuscript from that period shows two men using two-pronged forklike instruments at a table, and St. Peter Damian, a hermit and ascetic, criticized a Byzantine-born Venetian princess for her excessive delicacy: " [S]uch was the luxury of her habits … [that] she deigned not to touch her food with her fingers, but would command her eunuchs to cut it up into small pieces, which she would impale on a certain golden instrument with two prongs and thus carry to her mouth.
In a historical overview of cutlery in Feeding Desire , the catalog for a exhibition on the tools of the table, Sarah Coffin speculates that the fork's image problem could be connected to its resemblance to the devil's pitchfork a word from which it derives its name. In the Middle Ages, most people ate off rounds of stale bread called trenchers, which could hold cooked meat and vegetables and which could be brought directly to the mouth; knives and spoons could handle anything else that a hand couldn't.
The political culture of 16th-century France was riven by sectarian violence, and Catherine, in her role as mother to two child-kings, used massive public festivals to demonstrate the power of the monarchy. Food was part of this strategy of spectacle. Catherine's eating methods, as well as foods as diverse as the artichoke and ice cream, went on display as she toured the country for more than a year in the s, drumming up support from the populace and devising etiquette that forced members of rival factions to eat together at her table.
At this time, most forks were two-pronged, and either hefty enough to hold down a cut of meat similar to what we would think of today as a carving fork or so dainty they were used primarily to eat sweets at the end of meals.
Forks were used occasionally, but not every day. Montaigne , writing in the s in a passage about the force of habit, mentions forks but says he rarely uses them. And they were still associated with sinister behavior.
In an essay in Feeding Desire on the sexual politics of cutlery, Carolin Young notes that in , an anonymous allegorical novel about the courtiers of Henry III portrayed a mysterious island peopled by hermaphrodites, whose behavior is characterized by theatricality, artifice, and falsehood. Sure enough, the hermaphrodites eat with forks, spilling more food than they manage to consume in their pursuit of the new and the unnecessary.
In the time of Henry III, fork-owners would have been well-off, and most of them would have had one set of cutlery that traveled with them; there are numerous examples of forks and knives housed in carrying cases that could be slung over a shoulder or around a waist. It wasn't until the late s and early s that people began to purchase multiple sets of silverware for their homes, which were just beginning to be equipped with rooms specifically set aside for dining.
It was also around this time that forks with three and then four tines were made. Even as the fork gained ground, it was not universally accepted. As Ferdinand Braudel notes in The Structure of Everyday Life , around the beginning of the 18th century, Louis XIV forbade his children to eat with the forks that their tutor had encouraged them to use. But by the middle of the century, the use of the fork had become sufficiently normal that rebukes were reserved for those who used forks incorrectly.
But they did not wish to omit any of our manners which were just becoming as fashionable among the Greeks as English manners are among ourselves, and I saw one woman throughout the dinner taking olives with her fingers and then impaling them on her fork in order to eat in them in the French manner.
By the beginning of the 19th century, the fork was firmly established on the French table and beyond, and the table had become a center of social life not just for the aristocracy, but for the newly established bourgeoisie. In , a judge named Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin published The Physiology of Taste: Or Mediations on Transcendental Gastronomy , and in it he paints a portrait of a world increasingly preoccupied with the culture of dining.
The pleasures of the table are known only to the human race; they depend on careful preparations for the serving of the meal, on the choice of place, and on the thoughtful assembling of guests. Brillat-Savarin loved the rules of the table—the proper room temperature for a dinner party is 60 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit, in case you're taking notes—but even he found contemporary manners a but fussy.
He writes, in discussing life around , that it was "during this period that there was generally established more orderliness in the meals, more cleanliness and elegance, and those various refinements of service which, having increased steadily until our own time, threaten now to overstep all limits and lead us to the point of ridicule.
For the contemporary eater, Brillat-Savarin's words might come to mind when looking at some flatware patterns from the late 18th or early 19th centuries. Most utensils before the 18th century were made of silver—the metal that reacts the least with food—but silver is rare.
The invention of silver-plating techniques, accompanied by the vigorous expansion of the consumer market, resulted in scores of forks for eaters of all classes and in scores of different fork types: oyster forks, lobster forks, salad forks, terrapin forks, berry forks, lettuce forks, sardine forks, pickle forks, fish forks, and pastry forks—just to name a few.
You'll find both salad and main course sized forks in each "set," and both will have either three or four tines. When in doubt at fancy dinners, use the "outside to inside" rule. Use the utensils at the extreme left and extreme right with your first course and work your way in with each succeeding course. You finish with the dessert utensil s at the top of your place setting. The standard four-tine design became current in the early 19th century.
A seafood fork looks like this and it only has 2 tiny prongs get your facts straight!!!!! Rant girl, I'm sorry but you actually should get your facts straight. If you are shopping at target or Walmart yes those two tined forks may be referred to as a seafood fork.
They are actually a lobster or crab pick. A proper seafood fork at a formal table usually has three and often have a curve to them, they are also often refereed to as cocktail forks. Please next time you chose to respond in such a classy manner, make sure you don't give away which class of society you are. Nice first post to a two year old thread from another one hit wonder.
Did a Google search for seafood fork and up came the picture from rantgirl. Changed the parameters to fish fork and up came this:. JPG chefross Jan 7, However, the French court considered the fork an awkward, even dangerous, utensil, and the nobility did not accept it until the seventeenth century when protocol deemed it uncivilized to eat meat with both hands. The way to use the fork remained a mystery, and many sophisticates, notably King Louis XIV, continued to eat with fingers or a knife.
In , Thomas Coryate, son of the Rector of Odcombe, took the "grand tour" of Europe, and on his return published a narrative that included the Italian custom of eating with a fork. Thereafter, Coryate's friends jokingly called the young traveler Furciferus , "Pitchfork. The Italian, and also most strangers that are cormorant in Italy, does alwaies at their meales, use a little fork when they cut the meate. The reason of this their curiosity is because the Italian cannot endure by any means to have his dish touched by fingers, seeing that all men's fingers are not alike cleane.
Hereupon I myself thought to imitate the Italian fashion by this forke cutting of meate, not only while I was in Italy, but also in Germany, and often-times in England since I came home. The modern table setting is attributed to Charles I of England who in declared, "It is decent to use a fork," a statement that heralded the beginning of civilized table manners. But it wasn't until almost a century later that the fork gained acceptance among the lower class.
In England, the acceptance of the fork encouraged preparation of continental recipes, such as 'olios' from Spain, a dish made with stewed meat taken with a fork as opposed to mashed food eaten from the blade of a knife. Because the average family owned a limited number of forks, historians suggest that the service of sherbet midway through a meal gave the servants time to wash the forks used earlier on.
The first dinner forks were made with two flat prongs. The earliest two-prong fork to bear an English hallmark and engraved with a coat of arms dates to and is attributed to the Earl of Rutland.
It can be seen today in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. In the seventeenth century, fork tines were made of case-hardened steel and were fast to wear down. To promote utensils with longevity, early fork tines were extra long in length and made with sharp pointed tips. But when it came to spearing certain foods, such as peas and grains, the widely spaced two-prong fork was impractical, and between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the tines increased in number from two to three and then to four.
Moreover, from the late seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth century, the profile of the fork changed from flat to slightly curved, a shape that accommodated a scoop of soft food, such as peas.
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