Forking it up

Have you ever wondered where forks came from? Well, it seems that 4000-odd years ago, Jewish peoples in the Middle East "removed morsels from metal pots with a two-pronged implement as offerings to Jehovah" (Snodgrass, 2004, p. 390). If we roll the clock forward 3000 years to "Byzantium [, now Istanbul, in] around 1050 CE, householders employed forks solely for serving suckets, or sweetmeats" (p. 390), so we finally get to eating food with a fork. The Byzantine royals didn't like their hands to touch their food, apparently (Nicol, 1988). It is around this time that "Dogissa Maria Argyra, a Greek-born Venetian, [was known for eating] with a two tined gold fork, which she called a prong (Snodgrass, 2004, p. 390, citing Wright, 1999, p. 82) and - horrors! - taking regular baths (Nicol, 1988). Married to "a Venetian doge", the Dogissa carried - "as part of her dowry" - forks from Istanbul to Venice (Skeptics, 2018). A 'cautionary tale' is told about the Dogissa by St Peter Damiani, "a fervent reformer of the evils of his time, who" admonished his flock to "beware of the decadent and sybaritic ways of the east" (Nicol, 1988, p. 47), apparently saying "Such was the luxury of [the Dogissa's] habits…[that] she deigned [not] to touch her food with her fingers, but would command her eunuchs to cut it up into small pieces, which she would impale on a certain golden instrument with two prongs, and thus carry to her mouth'" (Snodgrass, 2004, p. 390, citing Wright, 1999, p. 82). Needless to say, she met an untimely and horrible end (Nicol, 1988). 

So three thousand years to evolve from a Middle Eastern offerings tool to the plate in what is now modern-day Turkey, then to Italy with the Dogissa (who appears to be "one of the sisters of the future Emperor Romanos III; though John the Deacon and Dandolo believed that she was a niece or a sister of Basil II"; Nicol, 1988, p. 46). This makes "first appearance of forks in the West [, as Istanbul is considered to be in the 'East',] in Venice, the European bridge to the East and terminus of the Silk Road". The Dogissa was the "'patient zero' of forks" (Skeptics, 2018). Beautiful: 'patient zero'!

Another school of thought is that the fork gained fame in Venice along with "the spread of pasta" around 1570 (Rebora, 2001, p. 14), beginning with a single pasta spike (a 'punteruolo'; Rebora, 2001) which quickly evolved into two or three tined implements, but given the 500 year gap between 1050 and 1570, both could have some credibility. So how did forks migrate across to the far west of Europe? Slowly through Italy, Spain, Switzerland (Rebora, 2001), then possibly France... and lastly the UK:

A globetrotter in the Elizabethan age, Thomas Coryate (Wilson, 2012),  who travelled through Italy in early 1608 (Rebora, 2001), found  Italians were using a "'little fork' for holding meat" to cut it. "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" (Wilson, 2012, pp. 192-193).

What is also interesting is HOW we eat with a fork. Apparently we began with what was originally called the "zigzag" method; our knife is in our right hands, our fork in our left. We then cut everything into small pieces, put down our knife, move our fork to our right hand, and fork up our cut up food, zig-zagging our dinner plate (Wilson, 2012). The zig zag method would have been somewhat common before emigrants to the new world departed for future America. 

This was initially the most common eating pattern in "Europe, but it later came to be seen as an Americanism" (Wilson, 2012, p. 194). This is supposedly "because the English devised a still more refined approach. In English table manners, the knife is never laid down until the course is finished. Knife and fork push against one another rhythmically on the plate, like oars on a boat. The fork impales; the knife cuts. The knife pushes; the fork carries. It is a stately dance, whose aim is to slow down the unseemly business of mastication. Both the Americans and the British secretly find each other’s way of using a fork to be very vulgar: the British think they are polite because they never put down their knives; Americans think they are polite because they do. We are two nations separated by common tableware, as well as by a common language" (p. 194-195).

And we haven't even considered the Germans, who consider someone who has a hand in their lap at the table untrustworthy: they may have a dagger in their off hand and be about to gut their dining partners under the table. No one-handed forking dessert with the other hand politely in our laps in Deutschland (University of Frankfurt, 2016). It is amazing how the hand being on the table can be considered so polite in some cultures, and so greedy in others. But no elbows anywhere, please; not until dinner is over :-)

It should be noted that while eating with a knife and fork is great when we are "cutting a slice of roast beef, [a knife and fork can be] more [of a] hindrance than help for eating peas or rice, which are better served by the humble spoon" (Wilson, 2012, p. 195; I presume no pun intended). 

Well, there we have it.

Sam

References:

University of Frankfurt. (2016). Guide to German culture, customs and etiquette. Goethe Welcome Centre. https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/62886456/Guide-to-German-culture_-costums-and-etiquette-Aug-2016.pdf

Nicol, D. M. (1988). Byzantium and Venice: A Study in Diplomatic and Cultural Relations. Cambridge University Press.

Rebora, G. (2001). Culture of the Fork: A Brief History of Everyday Food and Haute Cuisine in Europe. Columbia University Press.

Snodgrass, M. E. (2004). Encyclopedia of Kitchen History. Routledge.

Skeptics. (2018, August 18). Did the Catholic Church forbid the use of forks in Medieval times?. StackExchange. https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/42159/did-the-catholic-church-forbid-the-use-of-forks-in-medieval-times

Wilson, B. (2012). Consider the fork: a history of how we cook and eat. Hachette UK.