The Rituals of Dinner

by Visser, Margaret

  An interim period followed the introduction of rounded knives, as forks began to make their way in the world. For a while, people were occasionally exhorted to eat only with the back of the knife-blade, blunted as it now often was. (As late as 1845, American eaters with their knives were advised, when putting a blade into their mouths, to “let the edge be turned downward.” For some reason, during this operation upper lips stood in greater need of protection than lower lips did.) Special knives appeared with widened, not merely rounded, blade ends. The English in the eighteenth century, so Le Grand d’Aussy tells us, were given to using this knife like a sort of flat spoon, even for eating peas. It was an anonymous Englishman who expressed the frustration of many by imagining a heroic solution:

  I eat my peas with honey—

  I’ve done it all my life.

  It makes the peas taste funny

  But it keeps them on the knife.

  Yet it is the English who have insisted for at least a hundred and fifty years on trying to pierce peas with their fork tines, and balance them or crush them on the humped side of a fork, instead of sweeping them onto a fork held in the manner of a spoon.

  When Sigmund Freud explained his theory of “symptomatic acts,” he gave an example supplied to him by Dr. Dattner of Vienna of a colleague, a doctor of philosophy, who was holding forth while eating cake. This gentleman was talking of a missed opportunity, and as he did so he let fall a piece of cake, an unintentional but perfect “pun” expressing his idea. “While he was uttering the last sentence,” the doctor wrote, “he raised a piece of cake to his mouth, but let it drop from the knife [my italics] in apparent clumsiness.” The slip reveals to us that in Vienna in 1901, eminently bourgeois people were carrying cake to their mouths with their knives. Cake-forks were to become the solution—or simply fingers, as the British insist—and not providing knives with cake at all.

  Spikes, not only for spearing meat that is roasting but also for lifting food from the fire or from a food heap and carrying it to the diner, are at least as old as the first knives and spoons; a sharp stick must have been one of mankind’s earliest tools, in cooking and eating as for other purposes. Ancient Romans had spoons with one prong or two at the end of the handle for winkling out shellfish, and one-pronged dinner spikes survive from the Middle Ages: a perero, for example, was a spear on which one impaled fruit in order to peel it. A fork most simply splits into two tines; early dinner-table forks were generally two-pronged, large, and used mostly to help in cutting, and for serving, not eating, food—our carving forks still keep the size, shape, and original function. Or they were small “suckett” forks, used to lift preserves like ginger out of jars, or to eat fruits, like mulberries, which might stain the fingers.

  The fork revolution did not, then, present the world with an utterly strange new implement; what did constitute an important change in the West was the spread of the use of forks, their eventual adoption by all the diners, and their use not only to hold food still while it was cut, but to carry it into people’s mouths. The first modern fork, as far as we can at present ascertain, is mentioned as having been used in the eleventh century by the wife of the Venetian Doge, Domenico Selvo. St. Peter Damian, the hermit and cardinal bishop of Ostia, was appalled by this open rejection of nature; he excoriated the whole procedure in a passage entitled “Of the Venetian Doge’s wife, whose body, after her excessive delicacy, entirely rotted away.” Forks are mentioned again three centuries later, in 1361, in a list of the plate owned by the Florentine Commune. From this time onwards, forks are spoken of frequently; more than two hundred years were to pass, however, before they were commonly used for eating. In Bartolomeo Scappi’s book, 1570, there is an engraving depicting a knife, a fork, and a spoon. King Henri III of France and his companions were satirized by Thomas Artus in 1605 for their fork-wielding effeminacy. “They carried [their meat] right into their mouths” with their forks, exclaims the author of L’Isle des Hermaphrodites, “stretching their necks out over their plates … They would rather touch their mouths with their little forked instruments than with their fingers.” They looked especially silly, the satirist goes on, chasing artichokes, asparagus, peas, and broad beans round their plates and trying without success to get those vegetables into their mouths without scattering them everywhere—as well they might, given that early forks had long, widely separate prongs made for spearing with their very sharp points; scooping with them was impossible. An early nineteenth-century American complained that “eating peas with a fork is as bad as trying to eat soup with a knitting needle.”

  Italy and Spain led the world into the adoption of forks. In 1611, the Englishman Thomas Coryat announced that he had seen forks in Italy and had decided to adopt them and continue to use them on his return home. The reason for the Italian custom was, he explains, that these extremely fastidious, ultra-modern people considered that any fingering of the meat being carved at table was a transgression against the laws of good manners, “seeing all men’s fingers are not alike cleane.” Even Coryat, however, does not seem to think of forks as for eating with, but for holding the meat still while carving oneself a slice from the joint intended to be shared by everyone.

  The use of individual forks began to spread as the seventeenth century progressed. People would often share forks with others as they would spoons, wiping them carefully on their napkins before passing them on. Antoine de Courtin, in the late 1600s, advised using the fork mainly for fatty, sauce-laden, or syrupy foods; otherwise, hands would do. It was in the course of the seventeenth century, again, that hard plates—prerequisites for the constant use of individual knives and forks—began to be provided for every diner at table. At medieval banquets, plates had been trenchers (from the French trancher, “to slice”), made of sliced bread: they were for receiving morsels of food taken from a central dish with the hand, and for soaking up any dripping sauces, not for holding portions which needed subsequently to be pierced and cut up. Trenchers started to receive pewter or wooden underplaques, also called trenchers, in the fourteenth century; cut-marks found on some of them show us that people were beginning occasionally to use them to slice food. The solid non-serving dishes at this time and later were bowls shared between couples, as was the platter of Jack Spratt and his wife in the nursery rhyme.

  It is said that the earliest flat modern plates so far known (the word “plate” means “flat”) are depicted standing on a buffet in a fresco of the Palazzo del Te at Mantua which dates from about 1525; they are made of metal. (These could be serving dishes, however, and not meant for individual portions.) King François I of France ordered a set of six plates for separate servings (assiettes—from asseoir, “to sit”: the word originally meant both a course or “sitting” and an individual place at a meal). The date was 1536—about a generation before that of Henri III, the king who was laughed at for introducing individual forks at his table. The French, who made superb silver dinnerware in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ended up melting down most of it to defray the cost of wars. But during that period the rising bourgeoisie could afford to buy more and more silver dishes; they were steadily closing the gap that separated their acquired wealth from inherited riches. The aristocracy retaliated by opting for simplicity, and ceramic plates. (“Good taste,” as we saw earlier, can be the last bastion of privilege.) But whatever the material used, individual knives and forks required a hard surface to cut on, for every diner served.

  Flat ceramic plates were fairly common in France by the end of the seventeenth century, but they completed their general acceptance, replacing bowls for all but soup and certain desserts, only in the nineteenth century. The French still like drinking their breakfast coffee out of bowls. It is a custom under heavy attack at present, because it encourages the downing of copious draughts of very milky coffee in the morning, and the taking of time. In any case, bowls are far too broad and comfortable-looking, and have no handles; two hands are required to lift them. They do not suit the brash new rushe
d and masculine image, the longing to be “on the cutting edge.”

  By the beginning of the nineteenth century, North Americans generally were beginning to replace wooden trenchers with pewter and china dishes, and the use of forks was spreading. As late as 1837, however, Eliza Ware Farrar still recommended “the convenience of feeding yourself with your right hand, armed with a steel blade; and provided you do it neatly, and do not put in large mouthfuls, or close your lips tightly over the blade, you ought not to be considered as eating ungenteelly.” But the book was edited, by 1880, to exclude her suggestion that one might with propriety eat with the knife-blade: forks have conquered the field they are henceforth to occupy. For a long time forks usually had two prongs, very separate, long, and sharp-pointed. They were often used in conjunction with the English “eating” knives. In this operation the fork, held in the left hand, served to keep the meat still while it was being cut, and then to raise the morsel from the plate. The food was then transferred to the knife’s rounded blade and placed in the mouth: the knife was being used like a spoon.

  The fork soon fought back. It had often been made with three prongs; now these were shortened and moved closer together, and a fourth prong more commonly added. (Five prongs were also tried, on an analogy with hands, but custom soon decreed that four would suffice. The fashion at the time was for small mouths, and hands were no longer supposed to be feeding them.) Now the fork resembled a spoon, if it was held with the tines facing upward; the knife-blade’s spatula end gave way and narrowed to its present shape, and forks more authoritatively took over the function of introducing food into the mouth.

  There was a fashion in Europe during the nineteenth century for downplaying the knife to such an extent that one was not only to use it as little as possible but also to put it aside when it was not in use. You cut up your food with the knife in the more capable hand and the fork in the other; you then put down the knife, being careful to place it with the blade’s edge towards the centre of the plate, not facing neighbours. Then the fork changed hands, and was used to take the cut food to the mouth. More elaborate manners demanded that one should perform this manoeuvre for every mouthful consumed. Using only one hand is commonly thought polite, as we have seen, and the right hand only is often de rigueur. Eaters adhering to this fashion thought that people who ate with both hands holding on to the cutlery were gross and coarse. What Emily Post calls “zig-zag” eating was still customary among the French bourgeoisie in the 1880s, when Branchereau describes it. He says, however, that the English are successfully introducing a new fashion: they hang on to their knives, and take the food to their mouths with the left hand which is still holding the fork.

  Eating in the “English” manner means that the fork, having just left off being an impaling instrument, must enter the mouth with the tines down if it is not to be awkwardly swivelled round in the left, or less capable, hand. Food must therefore be balanced on the back of the rounded tines. This has two advantages for polite behaviour. First, a fork thus held encourages the mouth to take the food off it quickly and close to the lips—it is quite difficult to push the fork, with its humped tines, far into the mouth. “Weapons” should not be plunged into mouths; we now keep this rule faithfully, hardly needing it to be enunciated. The second advantage is that denying a modern fork its possible spoonlike use is wantonly perverse: it forces us to take small mouthfuls and to leave some of the food, unliftable, on the plate. It is difficult to get the food onto the fork, and harder still to balance and raise it faultlessly. Managing to eat like this with grace is a triumph of practice and determination, and therefore an ideal mannerly accomplishment.

  The former way of eating was not dislodged in North America as it was in the rest of the world. It has been suggested by James Deetz that the old way was more deeply entrenched in America because forks arrived there relatively late. According to this theory, Americans remained attached to eating with their spoons; they would cut food (probably holding it still, when necessary, with their fingers or their spoons), then lift it in the spoon, first shifting it if necessary to the right hand, to their mouths. Forks, imported from Europe, were certainly used sometimes not only for impaling food but for transporting it into the mouth. Charles Dickens visited America in the early 1840s and witnessed eating with both knife and straight, long-pronged fork: he says in American Notes that people “thrust the broadbladed knives and the two-pronged forks further down their throats than I ever saw the same weapons go before, except in the hands of a skilled juggler.” But soon forks took their modern spoonlike form, so that they could be treated, after the spearing and cutting was done, as though they were spoons. Europeans, meanwhile, kept eating food impaled on the tines.

  Americans have been badgered and ridiculed about their eating habits for over a hundred years. They have refused so far to change, not seeing any need to do so, and out of patriotic pride in non-conformity. In any case, as Miss Manners (1982) says, “American table manners are, if anything, a more advanced form of civilized behavior than the European, because they are more complicated and further removed from the practical result, always a sign of refinement.”

  The spoon is the safest, most comfortable member of the cutlery set. It is the easiest implement to use—babies start with spoons—and the one with the most versatility, which is the reason why its employment is constantly being restricted. Spoons are for liquids, porridge, and puddings—even the last being often given over to forks. Insofar as spoons have an infantile image, they lack prestige. (A Freudian analysis of the knife, fork, and spoon gives the spoon the female role in the trio; the fork, if I understand the writer correctly, is a male child of the knife and the spoon, and, like a little Oedipus, resentful of the knife and jealous of the spoon.) Social historians are puzzled by medieval paintings of banquets, which show knives but seldom spoons, although we know that spoons were often used. It has been suggested (unconvincingly, I think) that knives might simply have impressed the painters more. Spoons seem, at any rate, not to have been laid down on the table’s surface as knives were.

  But spoons can inspire affection as knives and forks cannot; they are unthreatening, nurturing objects. Superstitions about them show that they are subconsciously regarded as little persons: two on one saucer means an imminent wedding; dropping one on the table means a visitor is coming; and so on. Spoon-handles, more than knife- or fork-handles, are made in the shape of human figures, as in the sets of twelve apostle spoons. The Welsh traditionally made love-spoons carved with the lovers’ hands, which they gave to each other as tokens, and an old English custom at Christmas was for all the diners to hold up their spoons and wish health to absent friends (spoons were customarily classed with cups and bowls). Spoons have always been popular as presents and commemorations, whereas knives are often superstitiously avoided as gifts, and forks somehow fail, still, to stand on their own as spoons and knives can.

  A spoon is a bowl with an arm attached, the earliest spoon being a cupped human hand. Every race on earth has made itself spoons, out of seashells, coconut shells, bones, gourds, amber, ivory, stones ranging from agate to jasper, many kinds of wood and metal, porcelain, tortoiseshell, either cut or boiled and pressed horn, and even basketry. The word “spoon,” however, means in Old English a chip of wood, and many spoons have been flat spatulas, like those provided with ice-cream tubs, or like the blades of “eating” knives. The flat spoons of some North American Indian bands could be so large that they were used partly as plates. Spoon bowls have been made in many forms, from round to banana-shaped.

  The fig-shaped spoon bowl was roughly triangular, with the handle attached to the pointed end and the front end almost straight. It was introduced into Europe during the Middle Ages from the eastern Mediterranean; only wooden cooking spoons are still commonly made in this ancient shape. It probably reflected the practice of drinking from the front end of the spoon, a usage which is still correct in many European countries. The British and North Americans treat the bowl of a
soup spoon like a cup, and drink from the side of it; French visitors to Britain often express their fascination with this mannerism. The word “ladle” means the bearer of a larger-than-usual “load” of food or drink; ladles, like most spoons made for dipping into deep bowls, are usually provided with upward-turning stems. (Modern oval-shaped spoons with horizontal handles became conventional in the eighteenth century. They mark the transition to the custom of eating most commonly from flat or shallow plates.) Persians and Arabs have traditionally drunk water from a large wooden ladle (Mohammad forbade Moslems either to drink wine or to use gold and silver spoons), which they passed round the company as cups were passed in Europe. Care was taken in polite society to pour water into the mouth so that the ladle never actually touched the lips of anyone.