Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (30 page)

For Emery, as for all spoon connoisseurs, the answer is evermore-specialized spoons. If you were of this mindset, you’d have been in heaven in Victorian times, when there were aspic spoons and tomato spoons, sauce spoons and olive spoons, fluted gravy ladles, bon-bon spades, tea scoops, citrus spoons, and Stilton scoops, among others. The proliferation of flatware was fueled by the move from service a la française (all the dishes were set on the table at once for diners to help themselves) to service a la russe (dinner was served in a succession of courses, each requiring its own utensils). Late nineteenth-century America saw an even greater range of new refined spoons: not just rounded soupspoons (first introduced in the 1860s) but distinct spoons for cream soups and bouillons (the latter were smaller). And the serving spoons! Implements included special servers for fried oysters, chipped beef, macaroni, and potato chips. Tiffany’s marketed a solid silver “Saratoga Chip Server,” named after Saratoga Springs, New York, where the potato chip was first served; the implement had a stubby handle and a ballooning openwork bowl, to preserve genteel hands from the horror of handling fried potatoes. It is not clear, however, that this proliferation in eating and serving tools was a sign of progress.

 

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aving more gadgetry—more kitchen belongings—at our disposal does not necessarily make life easier. The problem with assembling more and more shiny tools that deal with the messy business of cooking and eating is that they tend to arrive with social mores that deem it necessary to use the tools, even when it flies in the face of common sense to do so. Food writer Darra Goldstein speaks of “fork anxiety,” a nervous condition brought on by the smorgasbord of silverware laid out on the table of grand dinners: “There probably never was a time when all of these forks were in use, but you can see how the very existence of a tomato fork could generate anxiety,” noted Goldstein in 2006. Etiquette books of the early twentieth century go to
elaborate lengths to describe how to use silver knives and forks to deal with foods that would be far better picked up and eaten with fingers: ripe peaches, corn on the cob, anything with bones.

Most of the polite rules surrounding cutlery reflect a terror about handling food—an anxiety about its stickiness and noise. Again and again, we are told that soup must be sipped silently—in contrast to Japan, where the etiquette for noodle soup eating decrees that it be noisily sucked and slurped, to demonstrate true enjoyment. In the West, protocol said it must be drunk from the edge of the spoon—it was thought ill-mannered to insert too much of a spoon into your mouth—though a special dispensation was created for men with full moustaches, who were allowed to drink soup from the end of the spoon. In 1836, it was thought that to pick up sugar using fingers rather than sugar tongs was such a terrible faux pas, it might lead to a gentleman losing his good reputation. On the other hand, there was also an anxiety about seeming too refined or minding too much about the finer points of table manners. To go on too much about the right fork was a sign of insecurity or even fraudulence. Real aristocrats knew the “refined coarseness” of when to employ fingers instead of a fork: fingers were right for radishes, crackers, celery, unhulled strawberries, and olives. A fictitious story circulated of an adventurer who tried to pass himself off as a nobleman. Cardinal Richelieu uncovered this rascal when he attempted to eat olives with a fork, something no true gentleman would do.

The use of knives, forks, and spoons is part of a wider culture of manners and a larger civilization of conformity Although it might not have mattered too much if you used the wrong fork, it was essential to demonstrate that you understood the rules of the game. The key was to act as if you belonged. This was the hardest thing of all, especially because fashions in the use of tableware changed rapidly, and a custom that was de rigeuer one decade could become ridiculous the next. In the early nineteenth century, there was even a brief vogue among “fashionables” for eating soup with a fork. It was soon condemned as “foolish,” and the spoon was restored.

But for almost everything else, the politest way to eat was still with a fork. Among the English upper classes of the mid-twentieth century, the “fork luncheon” and the “fork dinner” were buffet meals at which the knife was dispensed with altogether. The fork was polite because it was less overtly violent than a knife, less babyish and messy than a spoon. Forks were advised for everything from fish to mashed potatoes, from green beans to cream cake. Special forks were devised for ice cream and salads, for sardines and terrapins. The basic rule of Western table manners in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was: if in doubt, use a fork. “Spoons are sometimes used with firm puddings,” noted a cookbook of 1887, “but forks are the better style.”

Yet we have short memories when it comes to manners. It was not so long ago that eating anything from a fork had seemed absurd. As a kitchen tool, the fork is ancient. Roasting forks—long spikes for prodding and lifting meat as it cooks—have been around since Homeric times. Carving forks, to hold meat down as it is cut, are medieval. Yet forks for eating as opposed to forks for food preparation only started to seem a good idea in the modern era. The table fork is far less time-honored than such objects as the colander, the waffle iron, the bain-marie. In the great scheme of things, eating with prongs is a novelty

 

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n the parts of the world where forks are not used, they seem profoundly alien instruments—little metal spears that, unlike chopsticks or fingers, clash with food as it enters the mouth. Yet in the West, we use them so universally, we think nothing of them.

In the contemporary Western world, unless we are eating sandwiches or soup, almost every meal we eat now entails a fork. We use the fork to spear vegetables and to steady meat as we cut it; to pick food up or to chase it around the plate; to twirl spaghetti; to flake fish; to build up fragments of different foods into a single choice mouthful; or to
hide pieces of unwanted cabbage from our parents’ beady eyes. Children play with forks, using the sharp tines to reduce green beans to a mush, or to turn potatoes pink with ketchup. In a formal mood, we may even use a fork to eat a slice of cake, crumb by crumb. At fancy dinners or weddings, we still worry about which ornate fork to use for which course, but forks are also found at the most casual of meals, for the kind of basic snacks for which knives would be out of place. Office workers sit in the park eating pasta salad with a disposable fork, with half an eye on the crossword. Even kebab-eaters, reeling from the pub, will grasp a plastic fork to spare their fingers from the grease.

We take forks for granted. But the table fork is a relatively recent invention, and it attracted scorn and laughter when it first appeared. Its image was not helped by its associations with the Devil and his pitchfork. The first true fork on the historical record was a two-pronged gold one used by a Byzantine princess who married the doge of Venice in the eleventh century. St. Peter Damian damned her for “excessive delicacy” in preferring such a rarefied implement to her God-given hands. The story of this absurd princess and her ridiculous fork was still being told in church circles two hundred years later. Sometimes the tale was embellished. The princess died of plague: a punishment, it was said, for eating with a fork.

Six centuries later, forks were still a joke. In 1605, the French satirist Thomas Artus published a strange book called
The Island of Hermaphrodites.
Written during the reign of Henri IV, it made fun of the effeminate ways of the previous monarch, Henri III, and his court of mollycoddled hangers-on. In the sixteenth century, “hermaphrodite” was a pejorative term, which might be applied to anyone you didn’t much like. In mocking these courtiers, one of the worst things Artus could think of was that they “never touch meat with their hands but with forks,” whose prongs were so wide apart that the hermaphrodites spilled more broad beans and peas than they picked up, scattering them everywhere. “They would rather touch their mouths with their little forked instruments than with
their fingers.” The implication is that using forks was—like being a hermaphrodite—a kind of sexual abnormality To Artus, the fork was not just useless—it was obscene.

It was not that spiky fork-like instruments were unheard of before then, but their use was limited to certain foods. In ancient Rome, there were one-pronged spears and spikes for getting at hard-to-reach shellfish, for lifting food from the fire or impaling it. Medieval and Tudor diners also had tiny “sucket” forks, double-ended implements with a spoon at one end and a two-pronged fork at the other. As sugary sweetmeats or “suckets” became more common among the rich, so the need for these forks increased. In 1463, a gentleman of Bury St. Edmunds bequeathed to a friend “my silvir forke for grene gyngour” (candied ginger). The fork end was used to lift sticky sweetmeats out of pottery jars; the spoon end was used to scoop up the luscious syrup. When bits of sweetmeat lodged in the teeth, the sucket fork doubled as a nifty toothpick. But this was not at all the same as a fork in the modern sense—an individual instrument to enable people to eat an entire meal without handling the food.

Forks in our sense were considered odd until the seventeenth century, except among Italians. Why did Italy adopt the fork before any other country in Europe? One word: pasta. By the Middle Ages, the trade in macaroni and vermicelli was already well established. Initially, the longer noodle-type pastas were eaten with a long wooden spike called a
punteruolo.
But if one spike was good for twirling slippery threads of pasta, two were better, and three ideal. Pasta and the fork seem made for one another. It is a joy to watch a table of Italians eating long ribbons of tagliatelle or fettuccine, expertly winding up forkfuls of pasta, like slippery balls of yarn. Having discovered how useful forks were for eating noodles, Italians started to use them for the rest of the meal, too.

When Thomas Coryate, an Elizabethan traveler, journeyed around Italy sometime before 1608, he noticed a custom “that is not used in any other country,” namely, a “little fork” for holding meat as
it was cut. The typical Italian, noted Coryate, “cannot endure to have his dish touched with the fingers, seeing all men’s fingers are not clean alike.” Although it seemed strange to him at first, Coryate acquired the habit himself and continued to use a fork for meat on his return to England. His friends—who included the playwright Ben Jonson and the poet John Donne—in their “merry humour” teased him for this curious Italian habit, calling him “furcifer” (which meant “fork-holder,” but also “rascal”). Queen Elizabeth I owned forks for sweetmeats but chose to use her fingers instead, finding the spearing motion to be crude.

In the 1970s, real men were said not to eat quiche. In the 1610s, they didn’t use forks. “We need no forks to make hay with our mouths, to throw our meat into them,” noted the poet Nicholas Breton in 1618. On the cusp of the twentieth century, as late as 1897, British sailors were still demonstrating their manliness by eating without forks. This was a throwback, for by then forks were nearly universal.

By 1700, a hundred years after Coryate’s trip to Italy, forks were accepted throughout Europe. Even Puritans used them. In 1659, Richard Cromwell, the lord protector, paid 2 pounds and 8 shillings for six meat forks. With the Restoration, forks were firmly established on the table, alongside the new trifid spoons. Not wanting to dirty your fingers with food, or to dirty food with your fingers, had become the polite thing to do. The fork had triumphed, though knives and spoons continued to outsell forks until the early nineteenth century.

The triumph of the knife and fork went along with the gradual transition to using china dinner plates, which were generally flatter and shallower than older dishes and trenchers. When bowls were used for all meals, the ideal implement was a spoon with an angled handle for digging deep, like a ladle (the fig-shaped spoons of the Middle Ages usually had stems pointing upward). A knife or fork with horizontal handles does not sit naturally in the curved structure of a trencher or a pottage bowl. They need a flat surface. Try to eat
something in a deep cereal bowl using a knife and fork, and you will see what I mean; your elbows hunch up and your ability to use the cutlery is severely restricted. Flatness is also necessary for the elaborate semaphore of knife-and-fork table manners that reached their apogee in Victorian times. The plate becomes like a dial, on which you communicate your intentions.

It is sometimes said that the earliest forks were all two-pronged. This is not so. Some very early forks have survived with four prongs (or “tines”), others with three, and a greater number with two. The number of prongs was an indication not of date but of function. Two prongs were best suited to impaling and stabilizing food—mostly meat—while it was cut (like the carving forks still sold as a set with carving knives). Three prongs or more were better if the fork was to be used as a quasi-spoon, for conveying food from plate to mouth. There were even experiments to push it to the limit with five-pronged forks (like the five-bladed razors that took over from the old two-bladed and three-bladed ones, claiming hyperbolically to be the most “technologically advanced” way for men to shave), but this was found to be too much metal for the human mouth to hold.