What the actual fork?
The fork! A sinful Johnny-come-lately that would go on to rule the dining table. By
As
stainless-steel production and techniques of silver-plating advanced and made it economical for more people to own cutlery, the early- to mid- 20th century marked an increase in the various items that make up a complete flatware set. One item in particular, the fork, seemed to appear in so many arguably unnecessary variations that it inflated its actual role and history as part of the dining table. To this day, some tables still feature the salad fork, the fruit fork, the fish fork, the prosciutto fork, the dinner fork, the dessert fork and the oyster fork.
Does anybody still give a fork?
Thankfully, flatware has largely become a much simpler affair. Hence when it comes to style variety, most modern standard dining sets simply offer a knife or two, a fork or two, a tablespoon and a teaspoon; even the old fish
knife
seems to have gone out of fashion. These days, fork variety is about material, style, design and colour, rather than a fork for each function.
A sinner’s utensil
“Such was the luxury of her habits that she scorned even to wash herself in common water, obliging her servants instead to collect the dew that fell from the heavens for her to bathe in. Nor did she deign 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 it to her mouth… this woman’s vanity was hateful to Almighty God; and so, unmistakably, did He take his revenge.”
This quote is attributed to Saint Peter Damian, a Benedictine monk who lived in the 11th century, by English aristocrat historian, writer, and broadcaster John Julius Norwich in his book A History of Venice.
The woman being accused of vanity deserving of divine punishment, in part because she used a “certain golden instrument with two prongs” to carry food to her mouth, was Maria Argyra, granddaughter of the Byzantine emperor Romanos II, and wife to Giovanni Orseolo, the son of the Doge of Venice – doge being the title given to the chief magistrate and leader of the Republic of Venice between
726 and 1797. In 1007, both Maria and her husband passed away from plague, or God’s petty revenge for the use of fresh water and eating utensils, if St Peter Damian is to be believed. This is the accepted version out of a few stories about how table forks came from the Byzantine Empire to Italy.
BYOF – Bring your own fork
St Peter Damian’s disdain for pronged utensils aside, the fork slowly grew in popularity in Eastern Europe, but it would be another five centuries before central Europe started changing from eating with their hands to using the fork. That change is credited to Catherine de Medici, who travelled to France in 1533 to marry Henry II. She toured the country for more than a year, meeting and dining with opposing factions, all the while carrying her cutlery for use at dinners.
Like many cultural changes, the acceptance of the fork at the dinner table can be accredited to multiple influences, from its role as status symbol given its popularity with aristocrats and the wealthy, to
industrial advances, such as the prevalence of stainless steel in the early 20th century, to the spread of the popularity of pasta.
A fork in the road
Today, the use of the fork and knife has become so standard and near universal that it is considered good table manners not only to use the utensils, but also how you use them: fork on the left and knife on the right.
Some stick to that, some cut and then switch the fork over to the right hand for
Nor did she deign 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 it to her mouth…
eating. Some, like slate.com writer Mark Vanhoenacker, find the latter bothersome: “Do you cut-and-switch? Well, you’ve got to stop,” writes Vanhoenacker. “The more time you waste pointlessly handing utensils back and forth to yourself, the less time you’ll have to cherish life and liberty, pursue happiness and contribute to America’s future greatness. And also – though that snob at dinner surely didn’t know this – the supposedly all-American cut-and-switch is in fact an old European pretension, of just the sort we decided to free ourselves from 237 years ago.”
Thankfully, change itself is older than any culture.
While cultural gatekeepers may do their utmost to maintain the status quo, if history is anything to judge by, they are unlikely to succeed. Some practices, some forks, will be relics of a time when we went too forking far.
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