Illustration by Denis Shifrin

A short discourse on cutlery

When I was raising my children I served them what was dubbed "finger food", bite-sized portions that could easily be picked off the plate (plastic!) by chubby not-yet-nimble fingers. Only when they were manually able did I progress with them to spoons and forks. Knives were definitely the last achievement, not because of the implement's size but with all the sibling rivalry I wasn't sure how many kids would be left around the table at the end of a meal if knives were added to the table settings. Among adults these days, acceptable fare for fingers is generally restricted to sports stadium food, cocktail party bites, and tasty buffets of ethnic and exotic cuisine.

But for all the wonderful contributions of the glorious civilizations of the Mayans, Etruscans, the builders of the Acropolis and the Coliseum, they were satisfied with handheld pigeon quarters, fist of fish, and lamb on the spit.

"Assisted" eating began with the spoon. It is thought that the first spoon was a shell tied to a stick but as man progressed from rubbing stones to roasting food over a fire, a carved wooden spoon made its appearance. Because of cooking and grilling, spoons were not used for eating but rather for stirring. Yet by the Middle Ages, cutlery was deemed to be of great value and was included in the household inventories and wills of the wealthy. From these lists we know that spoons came in a variety of woods - from rosewood to poplar and cherry and even were cast in bronze, gold and silver. Smaller spoons because de rigeur when stirring sugar became part of serving tea and coffee in the French royal court.

It was the Victorians, in the late 19th century, who went spoon crazy - dreaming up a spoon for every dish brought to the table, from the ordinary to the unusual - from scooping out marrow to sifting sugar on berries.

The change in knives from weapon to table-friendly was not made by the English but rather by the French. Hot food helped propel the switch - eating a solid piece of meat with your hands was possible when the meat was cold but once the meat was too hot to hold (and deemed tastier when served straight off the fire), the knife became the perfect tool. Dagger-like knives could stab at the meat and bring it to the mouth. It was Cardinal Richelieu who declared it illegal for innkeepers to give their diners pointed dinner knives. The law declared that when a fight broke out, it would no longer be possible to be killed or injured by the same knife that had sliced your viande. Bien sur! From that moment in the 17th century, we can trace the change in the shape of the knife blade to the rounded-end edge we're familiar with today.

And now to the fork...

The Italians like to lay claim to the introduction of the fork on Western tables; a romantic myth claims it was brought to Venice in the 11th century by a Turkish princess who had married a Venetian doge and brought with her a set of golden forks. Outrage, cried the religious establishment, after all the good Lord has given man natural forks - fingers. All to no avail. It was Catherine de Medici, the Italian wife of King Henry II, who set her table at the French court with one fork for each diner. In 1611, the English writer Thomas Coryate vowed he was the first man in London to use a fork at the table. In a book he wrote how he had observed and been impressed by gentlemen in Italy eating with this utensil.

And here I am back to children and all those nursery rhymes about soups and puddings and cakes of whey ... The cow jumped over the moon; the little dog laughed to see such sport, And the dish ran away with the spoon.