Did you know that eating Forks were once considered to be an affront to God?
When we pick up a dinner fork we rarely think about how or why it came to be. Using it is as natural as using our own hands. But the fork is a relative newcomer to the table, appearing many centuries, even millennia, after the knife and spoon. The fork’s short and rocky history is the story of the evolution of etiquette and table manners.
Maria Argyropoulina, the Greek niece of Byzantine Emperor Basil II, showed up in Venice for her marriage in 1004, to Giovanni, son of the Pietro Orseolo II, the Doge of Venice, with a case of golden forks—and then proceeded to use them at the wedding feast. They weren’t exactly a hit. She was roundly condemned by the local clergy for her decadence, with one going so far as to say, “God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks—his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to him to substitute artificial metal forks for them when eating.”
When she died shortly after her arrival the populace felt she got her due for using such insulting instruments.
Forks continued to have a negative stigma attached to them. When they were used, it was usually only for sticky foods that weren’t convenient to eat with the fingers. All that changed in the 16th century when Catherine de Medici, wife of King Henry II, helped to popularize the fork in France, along with all sorts of other Italian things, during the Renaissance.
While forks were becoming more common on the continent, it took a brave English traveller to bring them across the channel. Thomas Coryate travelled extensively throughout France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany in 1608 and published an account of his journey after his return to England.
For his troubles, his friends called him Furcifer. Our word fork comes from the Latin furca, so furcifer means “fork-bearer” but was also an acerbic pun; in the slang of the day, furcifer was also a man doomed to hang.
The fork would not fully realize its prime spot alongside the spoon and the knife until the mid-to late-19th century after the Industrial Revolution was in full swing. At that time, common people could finally afford full sets of utensils that included knives, spoons, and — yes! — forks!
As Jacob Bronowski points out in The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination, “A knife and a fork are not merely utensils for eating. They are utensils for eating in a society in which eating is done with a knife and fork. And that is a special kind of society.” Other societies have evolved chopsticks or more ritualized use of the fingers for eating, but the fork is a uniquely western approach to dining. However, following the delirious profusion of pickle forks, fish forks, pastry forks, and oyster forks of the Victorian table, the pendulum has swung the other way. The rise of casual dining, convenience foods and drive-throughs means that for the first time since the 1500s we regularly eat complete meals with our hands. Forks and knives may again become the source of confusion and social unease. If history is any guide, it’s about time for another Furcifer, an intrepid and well-travelled diner, ridiculed at first, who will change the way we eat forever.
