INVENTIONSThe Fork:
A New Way to
Set the Table
Introduced to Europe from medieval Byzantium, the fork was
initially scorned as unnatural and pretentious. Only by the
1800s was its conquest of the dining room complete.F
or late 19th-century North
Americans and Europeans, a
fork—and the ability to use it
with ease—was a reflection of
good taste. A display of such
table ware could reveal much about some-
one’s social status, as the wealthy took
great care to procure different types of
forks for everything from salad to pastry.
A special fork was even invented with
which to eat ice cream: a spork-like
instrument in the form of a spoon with
three or four tines.
The centrality of the fork in Victorian-
era dining etiquette would, however,
have surprised earlier generations. It was,in fact, a newcomer to the utensil drawer,
having only won widespread use in
Europe by the close of the 18th century,
and in America as late as the mid-1800s.
Until then, people of all classes had eaten
with what seemed the only utensils nec-
essary: a knife to cut and spear, and
a spoon to scoop.Although the fork’s path to the table
was hard-won and slow, it probably
started, in domestic terms at least, not all
that far away—in the kitchen itself. In
ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, cook-
ing forks were used for carving or lifting
meats from a cauldron or fire.
Following a reduction in size, the fork
appears to have entered dining areas in
the courts of the Middle East and Byzan-
tine Empire by the eighth and ninth cen-
turies, and become common among
wealthy families there by the tenth cen-
tury. Early in the 11th century, it crops up
in graphic form in various pieces of Eu-
ropean art, most notably a 1023 edition
of a medieval encyclopedia by the
ninth-century scholar Rabanus Maurus,
which depicts a man eating with the new
utensil.ITALIAN TWO-TINE FORK,
15TH CENTURY. METROPOLITAN
MUSEUM, NEW YORK
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ARTFORKS BEGIN APPEARING
IN MEDIEVAL WORKS,
INCLUDING IN THIS DINING
SCENE FROM A 1023 EDITION
OF THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
RABANUS MAURUS.
BRIDGEMAN16TH-CENTURY FORKS FROM
A GUIDEBOOK COMPILED BY THE
COOK OF POPE PIUS V
INTERFOTO/ALAMY