THE HISTORY OF THE FORK

Febbraio 10, 2022

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THE HISTORY OF THE FORK
Endless stories and unfounded legends related to food and its evolution.
Flavors and Knowledge

Feb 10

Buongiorno amici:

Let’s be honest dear readers, we don’t have good dining etiquette, especially in the Western World, where we taste most of our food from our fingertips. The restaurant industry doesn’t help the matter, as many of their new offerings are in the dipping form, forcing us to constantly lick our fingers. In the US, we still consume food with one hand, rejecting the two—hands practice-the norm in many industrialized nations. So, let’s talk about the fork, one of the essential tool we have at our disposal.

There are endless stories and too many unfounded legends related to food and its evolution. For example, reading Il genio del Gusto, by Alessandro Marzo Magno, published by Garzanti, tells of “how Italian eating has conquered the world,” Italy is a peninsula located in the middle of the Mediterranean sea, a land of conquerors and conquered. Consequently, ethnic purity does not exist; Italian food is foreign.

Let’s begin with the fork history, a tool that seems indispensable to us but has not always existed on Western Europe’s tables. The first appearance, accredited by historical sources, was a silver contraption with a handle and two prongs in Venice during the Lord year 1004. Probably a derivation from the Greek verb piròn, the fork became the tool of choice in the hands of a Byzantine noblewoman named Maria Agiropulina, Giovanni Orseolo’s wife son of the doge. But unfortunately, the Venetians regarded the use of the tool in question as a mere oddity.

{Image Attribution via Streaty}

After the Eastern and Western churches (1054), the situation changed drastically. Perhaps this religious fracture created the initial cultural obstacle in spreading ingenious cutlery. As a result, the fork will take almost a millennium to reach everyone’s tables.

The first iconographic representation of the fork in Italy is again in Venice and again brought by the Byzantines. On the tables of the Last Supper of the Pala d’ Oro of San Marco, two forks and two knives were displayed and sublimely destined for Christ and Peter. The cutlery was not for everyone but only for the principal characters. In some rural and impoverished areas of Italy, an unusual custom prohibited women from using cutlery, and just the head of the family was allowed such luxury. The trend continued until the early twentieth century.

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The use of the fork remained for a long time, limited to the consumption of long pasta. In Milan in 1288, Bonvesin della Riva tells us how people ate their food, mentioning primarily spoons and knives (everyone didn’t need to have their own, just a couple of them on every table), but not the fork. Eating pasta in Milan was an ambitious job; the fork arrives in the city much later.

In the Renaissance, cutlery shapes changed following society’s natural evolution. The knife loses its point because it is no longer used to pierce. It is replaced by the increasingly widespread fork, just as Renaissance society is less violent and hunter than medieval. Despite the suspicion surrounding it, the fork begins its slow but inexorable conquest of our tables from the seventeenth century onwards. Its shape also gradually changes: if up to the fifteenth century, the prongs were only two, in the sixteenth century, they became three.

The fourth prong arrived in Naples between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to twist wrapping long pasta more effectively. After overcoming the Italian mistrust, the fork sets out to conquer the rest of Europe, not without further resistance. Henry III, son of Caterina de Medici, tried to impose it in France during the sixteenth century. Still, the fork will have to clash against the prejudice of its superfluous refinement for Italianophiles. In England, one of the first forks arrived in 1608 from Italy following Thomas Coryat, who took it as a travel souvenir and used it. At first, considered a fantastic tool, the Brits are not very keen on the use for some strange reasons, unknown to most and at the beginning of the eighteenth century in the various British Isles. However, the middle-upper classes of Europe (not so the poor, who will continue to eat with their hands until well into the twentieth century) will begin to consistently use the fork from the end of the eighteenth century. Still, it will take another century before the Byzantine custom consolidated our shared traditions.

One of my most brilliant ideas came from looking at a group of English people who tried to cut and eat spaghetti. I quickly thought of a course to teach those who don’t do it since childhood to wrap long pasta. Could it be a success, or will finger food relegate the fork to oblivion in a few years?

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