Table forks took fifteen centuries to feel normal
The Latin root names a pitchfork, yet the dining tool arrived late. Bone tines appear in Bronze Age China; Mycenaean graves held bronze examples. Byzantine diners used personal forks by the fourth century, while northern Europe treated them as unmanly Italian fashion until the 1700s.
Chinese sites of the Bronze Age Qijia culture, dated 2400 to 1900 BC, and of the later Shang dynasty have yielded forks carved from bone, and Eastern Han tomb reliefs in Shaanxi show two-pronged forks hanging in a dining scene and lying on top of a stove. Egyptians used oversized forks in the kitchen, a bronze example turned up in a Mycenaean grave of the sixteenth century BC, and Romans owned bronze and silver ones, though mostly for cooking and serving rather than for lifting food to the mouth.
The personal eating fork most likely took hold in the Byzantine Empire, where it was ordinary by the fourth century; elite Persians used a similar barjyn by the ninth, and by the tenth it was widespread across the Middle East. Western Europe was startled. Chroniclers describe the Holy Roman court gaping at the Byzantine princess Theophanu, bride of Otto II, eating with a fork instead of her fingers, and when Maria Argyropoulina brought golden forks to Venice in 1004 to marry the Doge's son, Peter Damian condemned them as vanity.
Italy came round first, helped by Byzantine ties and by pasta: three tines gathered noodles better than the old wooden spike. Forks were commonplace there by the fourteenth century and nearly universal among merchants and nobles by 1600, when a guest brought his own fork and spoon in a case called a cadena, a habit Catherine de' Medici's retinue carried to France. Portugal's Infanta Beatrice used one around 1450, but southwestern Europe adopted them widely only in the sixteenth century. Thomas Coryat described them in English in 1611, yet Britain mocked them as unmanly Italian affectation until the eighteenth century, North America waited until about the Revolution, and four tines became standard early in the 1800s.
Specialised forks now abound. Two-pronged carving forks steady a roast, disposable chip forks 7.5 to 9 centimetres long handle greasy takeaway and are called currywurst forks in Germany, cocktail forks look like tiny tridents, fondue forks have insulated handles, and dessert forks often widen one tine for cutting. Hybrids include the spork, the sporf, the terrapin fork and the sucket fork, which has a spoon at the other end for syrupy preserves, while novelty spaghetti forks wind pasta with a hand crank or a motor.
Source: Fork
