Forks, tiles and more
It’s a curious path that brought this ubiquitous culinary tool to our tables
When we pick up a dinner fork we rarely think about how or why it arrived at our table. As history has it, the fork is actually something of a latecomer to the culinary world. While knives and spoons are ancient, we’ve only been aided by tines for a few centuries. If you stop to look at it, a fork is a rather bizarre object. A spoon makes sense — a practical tool to scoop up liquid; one that’s been used for millennia. A knife? Well, it’s a descendant of the oldest human tool — a sharpened hand axe — and has long been a table essential when it comes to turning meat into bite-sized morsels. But the fork? It’s perhaps not surprising that for centuries it was regarded as pretentious folly for people too posh to touch their food.
To be fair, a version of the fork appeared in the kitchens of ancient civilisations such as Egypt, China and Greece, but it was an oversized utensil used to prepare and serve food, rather than to eat it. Fork-like tools used for eating made brief appearances at the tables of the nobility through the ages. They were used in the 8th and 9th centuries in Persia, and in the 11th century in the Byzantine Empire, but they were largely regarded as a vain excess.
In the Middle Ages, most people ate off a piece of tableware called a trencher. This was typically a flat round of bread used as a plate. Food was piled on it and brought directly to the person’s mouth, using their hand. At the end of the meal, the trencher could be eaten with sauce, but was more frequently given as alms to the poor. Knives and spoons could handle anything a hand couldn’t.
It was only in the 16th century that forks began to be used as regular eating utensils. First gaining popularity in Byzantium, they travelled to Italy, where, while initially deemed as pompous, they slowly started to gain popular appeal. It was thanks to Catherine de Medici, who travelled in 1533 from Italy to France to marry Henry II, that the fork’s image was finally given a complete turnaround.
Rumour has it that Catherine arrived in France with her own cooks, pastry cooks, chefs, confectioners and distillers. She toured the country for more than a year in the 1560s, drumming up political support and simultaneously spreading her culinary habits.
At the time most forks were two-pronged. They were used occasionally, only by the well-off, who took their cutlery with them everywhere they went. It wasn’t until the late 1600s and early 1700s, when dedicated dining rooms became a feature of wealthy homes, that people began to purchase cutlery sets to keep at home. It was around this time that forks were tweaked to have three and four tines.
It took until the beginning of the 19th century for the fork to be a regular fixture on French tables and beyond, largely due to the fact that social dining was previously reserved for the aristocracy.
Once it became a household staple, the fork went through a phase of extreme specialisation, with everything from lobster forks to sardine forks, and pastry forks. Even bread forks found their way onto the consumer market. The excitement eventually died down, and as much as forks have followed the trends, being pressed in every style and material imaginable, the utensil’s basic shape has remained the same. In fact, the forks we use today provide a tidy example of a design item that reached its plateau quickly and was so suited to its purpose that it was never improved on again.
It’s perhaps not surprising that for centuries it was regarded as pretentious folly for people too posh to touch their food