Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things

by Charles Panati

  Known as the “Prisse papyrus” —not that its dictates on decorum are prissy; an archaeologist by that name discovered the scrolls—the work predates the Bible by about two thousand years. It reads as if it was prepared as advice for young Egyptian men climbing the social ladder of the day. In the company of one’s superior, the book advises, “Laugh when he laughs.” It suggests overlooking one’s quiddities with a superior’s philosophy, “so thou shalt be very agreeable to his heart.” And there are numerous references to the priceless wisdom of holding one’s tongue, first with a boss: “Let thy mind be deep and thy speech scanty,” then with a wife: “Be silent, for it is a better gift than flowers.”

  By the time the assemblage of the Bible began, around 700 B.C, Ptahhotep’s two-thousand-year-old wisdom had been well circulated throughout the Nile delta of Egypt and the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia. Religious scholars have located strong echoes of The Instructions throughout the Bible, especially in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes—and particularly regarding the preparation and consumption of food.

  Fork: 11th Century, Tuscany

  Roman patricians and plebeians ate with their fingers, as did all European peoples until the dawning of a conscious fastidiousness at the beginning of the Renaissance. Still, there was a right and a wrong, a refined and an uncouth, way to go about it. From Roman times onward, a commoner grabbed at his food with five fingers; a person of breeding politely lifted it with three fingers—never soiling the ring finger or the pinkie.

  Evidence that forks were not in common use in Europe as late as the sixteenth century—and that the Roman “three-finger rule” still was—comes from an etiquette book of the 1530s. It advises that when dining in “good society,” one should be mindful that “It is most refined to use only three fingers of the hand, not five. This is one of the marks of distinction between the upper and lower classes.”

  Manners are of course relative and have differed from age to age. The evolution of the fork, and resistance against its adoption, provides a prime illustration.

  Our word “fork” comes from the Latin furca, a farmer’s pitchfork. Miniatures of these ancient tools, the oldest known examples, were unearthed at the archaeological site of Catal Hoyuk in Turkey; they date to about the fourth millennium B.C. However, no one knows precisely what function miniature primitive pitchforks served. Historians doubt they were tableware.

  What is known with certainty is that small forks for eating first appeared in eleventh-century Tuscany, and that they were widely frowned upon. The clergy condemned their use outright, arguing that only human fingers, created by God, were worthy to touch God’s bounty. Nevertheless, forks in gold and silver continued to be custom made at the request of wealthy Tuscans; most of these forks had only two tines.

  For at least a hundred years, the fork remained a shocking novelty. An Italian historian recorded a dinner at which a Venetian noblewoman ate with a fork of her own design and incurred the rebuke of several clerics present for her “excessive sign of refinement.” The woman died days after the meal, supposedly from the plague, but clergymen preached that her death was divine punishment, a warning to others contemplating the affectation of a fork.

  In the second century of its Tuscan incarnation, the two-prong fork was introduced to England by Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury and British chancellor under Henry II. Renowned for his zeal in upholding ecclesiastical law, Becket escaped England in 1164 to avoid trial by the lay courts; when he returned six years later, after pardon by the king, the archbishop was familiar with the Italian two-tined dining fork. Legend has it that noblemen at court employed them preferentially for dueling.

  By the fourteenth century, the fork in England was still nothing more than a costly, decorative Italian curiosity. The 1307 inventory of King Edward I reveals that among thousands of royal knives and hundreds of spoons, he owned a mere seven forks: six silver, one gold. And later that century, King Charles V of France owned only twelve forks, most of them “decorated with precious stones,” none used for eating.

  People were picking up their food in a variety of accepted ways. They speared it with one of a pair of eating knives, cupped it in a spoon, or pinched it with the correct three fingers. Even in Italy, country of the fork’s origin, the implement could still be a source of ridicule as late as the seventeenth century—especially for a man, who was labeled finicky and effeminate if he used a fork.

  Women fared only slightly better. A Venetian publication of 1626 recounts that the wife of the doge, instead of eating properly with knife and fingers, ordered a servant to “cut her food into little pieces, which she ate by means of a two-pronged fork.” An affectation, the author writes, “beyond belief!” Forks remained a European rarity. A quarter century later, a popular etiquette book thought it necessary to give advice on something that was not yet axiomatic: “Do not try to eat soup with a fork.”

  When, then, did forks become the fashion? And why?

  Not really until the eighteenth century, and then, in part, to emphasize class distinction. With the French Revolution on the horizon, and with revolutionaries stressing the ideals of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” the ruling French nobility increased their use of forks—specifically the four-tined variety. The fork became a symbol of luxury, refinement, and status. Suddenly, to touch food with even three bare fingers was gauche.

  An additional mark distinguishing classes at the dining table was individual place settings—each aristocrat present at a meal received a full complement of cutlery, plates, and glasses. Today, in even the poorest families, separate dining utensils are commonplace. But in eighteenth-century Europe, most people, and certainly the poorer classes, still shared communal bowls, plates, and even drinking glasses. An etiquette book of that period advises: “When everyone is eating from the same dish, you should take care not to put your hand into it before those of higher rank have done so.” There were, however, two table implements that just about everyone owned and used: the knife and the spoon.

  Spoon: 20,000 Years Ago, Asia

  Spoons are millennia older than forks, and never in their long history did they, or their users, suffer ridicule as did forks and their users. From its introduction, the spoon was accepted as a practical implement, especially for eating liquids.

  The shape of early spoons can be found in the origin of their name. “Spoon” is from the Anglo-Saxon spon, meaning “chip,” and a spoon was a thin, slightly concave piece of wood, dipped into porridge or soupy foods not liquid enough to sip from a bowl. Such spoons have been unearthed in Asia dating from the Paleolithic Age, some twenty thousand years ago. And spoons of wood, stone, ivory, and gold have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs.

  Upper-class Greeks and Romans used spoons of bronze and silver, while poorer folk carved spoons of wood. Spoons preserved from the Middle Ages are largely of bone, wood, and tin, with many elaborate ones of silver and gold.

  In Italy during the fifteenth century, “apostle spoons” were the rage. Usually of silver, the spoons had handles in the figure of an apostle. Among wealthy Venetians and Tuscans, an apostle spoon was considered the ideal baptismal gift; the handle would bear the figure of the child’s patron saint. It’s from this custom that a privileged child is said to be born with a silver spoon in its mouth, implying, centuries ago, that the family could afford to commission a silver apostle’s spoon as a christening gift.

  Knife: 1.5 Million Years Ago, Africa and Asia

  In the evolution to modern man, Homo erectus, an early upright primate, fashioned the first standardized stone knives for butchering prey. Living 1.5 million years ago, he was the first hominid with the ability to conceive a design and then labor over a piece of stone until the plan was executed to his liking. Since that time, knives have been an important part of man’s weaponry and cutlery. They’ve changed little over the millennia, and even our word “knife” is recognizable in its Anglo-Saxon antecedent, cnif.

  For centuries, most men owned just one knife
, which hung at the waist for ready use. One day they might use it to carve a roast, the next to slit an enemy’s throat. Only nobles could afford separate knives for warfare, hunting, and eating.

  Early knives had pointed tips, like today’s steak knives. The round-tip dinner knife, according to popular tradition, originated in the 1630s as one man’s attempt to put an end to a commonplace but impolite table practice.

  The man was Armand Jean du Plessis, better known as Duc de Richelieu, cardinal and chief minister to France’s Louis XIII. He is credited with instituting modern domestic espionage, and through iniquitous intrigues and shrewd statesmanship he catapulted France to supreme power in early seventeenth-century Europe. In addition to his preoccupation with state matters and the acquisition of personal authority, Richelieu stressed formal manners, and he bristled at one table practice of the day. During a meal, men of high rank used the pointed end of a knife to pick their teeth clean—a habit etiquette books had deplored for at least three hundred years. Richelieu forbade the offense at his own table and, according to French legend, ordered his chief steward to file the points off house knives. Soon French hostesses, also at a loss to halt the practice, began placing orders for knives like Richelieu’s. At least it is known factually that by the close of the century, French table settings often included blunt-ended knives.

  Thus, with the knife originating 1.5 million years ago, the spoon twenty thousand years ago, and the fork in the eleventh century, the full modern-day complement of knife, fork, and spoon took ages to come together at the table. And though we take the threesome for granted today, just two hundred years ago most inns throughout Europe and America served one, or two, but seldom all three implements. When wealthy people traveled, they carried with them their own set of cutlery.

  Crossing Knife and Fork. The custom of intersecting a knife and fork on a plate at the conclusion of a meal began in seventeenth-century Italy. Today some people regard it as a practical signal to a hostess or waitress that we’ve finished eating. But it was introduced by Italian nobility as a religious symbol—a cross. The gesture was considered not only good manners but also a pious act of thanksgiving for the bounty provided by the Lord.

  Napkin: Pre-500 B.C., Near East

  The small napkins of paper and cloth that we use to dab our lips and protect our laps would never have sufficed centuries ago, when the napkin served a more functional purpose. To put it simply: eating a multicourse meal entirely with the fingers—whether three fingers or five—made a napkin the size of a towel essential. And the first napkins were indeed full-size towels.

  Later called “serviettes,” towel-like napkins were used by the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans to wipe food from their hands. And to further cleanse the hands during a meal, which could last many hours, all three cultures used finger bowls, with water scented by such flowers and herbs as rose petals and rosemary. For the Egyptians, the scent—almond, cinnamon, or orange blossom; myrrh, cassia, or spikenard—was tailored to the course being consumed.

  During the sixth-century B.C. reign of Tarquinius Superbus, the seventh and last king of Rome, Roman nobility instituted a second use for the napkin—as a sort of doggie bag. Guests at a banquet were expected to wrap delicacies from the table in serviettes to take home. To depart empty-handed was unmannerly.

  Preserved documents reveal the onetime splendor of the serviette. In Italy in the 1680s, there were twenty-six favored shapes in which dinner napkins were folded for various persons and occasions; these included Noah’s Ark (for clergymen), a hen (for the noblewoman of highest rank present), chicks (for the other women), plus carp, tortoises, bulls, bears, and rabbits.

  A 1729 etiquette book clearly states the many uses of a large serviette: “For wiping the mouth, lips, and fingers when they are greasy. For wiping the knife before cutting bread. For cleaning the spoon and fork after using them.” The same book then zeros in on a fine point: “When the fingers are very greasy, wipe them first on a piece of bread, in order not to spoil the serviette too much.”

  What undermined the reign of the towel-size serviette (and for that matter, the finger bowl) was the fork. Once forks were adopted to handle food, leaving fingers spotless, the large napkin became redundant. Napkins were retained, but in smaller size and to wipe the mouth.

  British folklore records an additional use of the napkin, which arose in the eighteenth century. A tailor by the name of Doily—legend does not record his Christian name—opened a linen shop on the Strand in London. One of his specialty items was a small circular napkin trimmed in delicate lace, to be used to protect a tablecloth when serving desserts. Customers called Mr. Doily’s napkins just that— “Doily’s napkins” —and through frequent use of the phrase, the article became known as a doily.

  The original size and function of the serviette is evinced in the etymology of the word “napkin.” It derives from the Old French naperon, meaning “little tablecloth.” The English horrowed the word naperon but applied it to a large cloth tied around the waist to protect the front of the body (and to wipe the hands on); they called it a napron. Due to a pronunciation shift involving a single letter, a napron became “an apron.” Thus, a napkin at one time or another has been a towel, a tablecloth, a doily, and an apron. After surviving all that colorful, controversial, and convoluted history, the noble napkin today has reached the lowly status of a throwaway.

  Additional examples of our tableware have enjoyed a long history and contain interesting name origins. Several pieces, for instance, were named for their shapes. A dish still resembles its Roman namesake, the discus, and is still sometimes hurled.

  Bowl simply comes from the Anglo-Saxon word bolla, meaning “round.”

  And the Old French word for “flat,” plat, echoes in plate and platter.

  It is the original clay composition of the tureen that earned it its name. Old French for “clay” is terre, and during the Middle Ages, French housewives called the clay bowl a “terrine.”

  The Sanskrit word kupa meant “water well” and was appropriately adopted for the oldest of household drinking vessels, the cup. And glass derives from the ancient Celtic word glas, for “green,” since the color of the first crude and impure British glass was green.

  Some name origins are tricky. Today a saucer holds a cup steady, but for many generations it was a special small dish for holding sauces (including salt) to flavor meats. Although it was popular in Europe as early as 1340, only mass production in the machine age made the saucer inexpensive enough to be merely in service to a cup.

  And the object upon which all of the above items rest, the table, derived its name from the Latin tabula, meaning “board,” which was what a table was, is, and probably always will be.

  Chopsticks: Antiquity, China

  During the late Middle Ages, Europeans were confronted with a new vogue: cutting food at the table into small, bite-size pieces. They found the custom, recently introduced by merchants trading with China, tedious and pointlessly fastidious. Unknown to thirteenth-century Europeans was the Oriental philosophy dictating that food be diced—not at the table, but in the kitchen before it was served.

  For centuries, the Chinese had taught that it was uncouth and barbaric to serve a large carcass that in any way resembled the original animal. In addition, it was considered impolite to expect a dinner guest to struggle through a dissection that could have been done beforehand, in the kitchen, out of sight. An old Chinese proverb sums up the philosophy: “We sit at table to eat, not to cut up carcasses.” That belief dictated food size, which in turn suggested a kind of eating utensil. Chopsticks—of wood, bone, and ivory—were perfectly suited to conveying the precut morsels to the mouth, and the Chinese word for the implements, kwai-tsze, means “quick ones.” Our term “chopsticks” is an English phonetic version of kwai-tsze.

  In the Orient, the father of etiquette was the fifth-century philosopher Confucius—who, despite popular misconceptions, neither founded a religion nor formulated a
philosophical system. Instead, motivated by the social disorder of his time, he posited principles of correct conduct, emphasizing solid family relationships as the basis of social stability. The Oriental foundation for all good manners is taken to be Confucius’s maxim “What you do not like when done to yourself, do not do to others.”

  Western Etiquette Books: 13th Century, Europe

  During the dark days of the Middle Ages, when barbarian tribes from the north raided and sacked the civilized nations of Southern Europe, manners were people’s least concern. Formal codes of civility fell into disuse for hundreds of years. It was the popularity of the eleventh-century Crusades, and the accompanying prestige of knighthood, with its own code of chivalry, that reawakened an interest in manners and etiquette.

  One new court custom, called “coupling,” paired a nobleman with a lady at a banquet, each couple sharing one goblet and one plate. Etymologists locate the practice as the source of a later expression for cohorts aligned in any endeavor, said to “eat from the same plate.”

  The rebirth of strict codes of behavior is historically documented by the appearance, starting in thirteenth-century Europe, of etiquette books. The upper class was expanding. More and more people had access to court, and they wanted to know how to behave. The situation is not all that different from the twentieth-century social phenomenon of upward mobility, also accompanied by etiquette books.

  The Crusades and the prestige of knighthood occasioned a rebirth in etiquette, cultured person ate with three fingers; a commoner with five.

  Here is a sampling of the advice such books offered the upwardly mobile through the centuries. (Keep in mind that what the etiquette writers caution people against usually represents the behavioral norm of the day.)