The Evolution Of Silverware
Since they were first used, utensils have evolved a great deal. The spoon came first, then the knife and the fork as we know it today, existed mainly for spearing things It wasn't widely used as an eating utensil until the 16th century, partly thanks to the devil.
"It reminded people of the devil's horns," Darra Goldstein, the co-curator of "Feeding Desire," an exhibition of tableware at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, told Sunday Morning correspondent Martha Teichner. "Even apart from the association with the devil, the idea was that God gave us hands and God gives us food, and we as humans should take that food that was given by God with our god-given hands and convey it to our mouths, and so there was tremendous resistance by the Catholic church to the introduction of the fork."
The fork made its way to Britain and France from Italy. In those days, if you were invited to somebody's castle for dinner, you had to bring your own tableware. Artisans made clever and often beautiful travel cutlery kits. That's when the custom of turning your knife blade in toward your plate got started.
"A knife, it is really a weapon or a potential weapon, and so you don't want the blade facing your neighbor, your dining partner, because that's a hostile gesture," Goldstein said.
The first fork positively identified in America belonged to the famous Puritan, John Winthrop, founder of the Massachusetts Bay colony, who arrived in 1630. You had to be well-off to have even one fork and downright rich to have enough to serve your guests — which most of the founding fathers were.
"This is one of the most exciting pieces in the exhibition," Goldstein said, pointing to a fork that belonged to George Washington. "He had a set of 12."
In 1800, according to the exhibition catalogue, probably not even 1 percent of American households owned even a single silver spoon, let alone a fork. Silver was desirable because it was hard enough to hold up and didn't poison people like lead, but it was expensive. So how, then, by 1900, did tableware services end up as lavish displays of conspicuous consumption? The answer is the Comstock lode.
In 1859, several prospectors, including one named Comstock, made a huge silver strike in Virginia City, Nev. Silver suddenly got cheaper and so did silver utensils and silver plates.
"There was this tremendous proliferation of implements for every conceivable dish that anyone ever thought of," Goldstein said.
The Museum displays a silver macaroni scoop and a silver ice cream hatchet. It all got so out of hand that the federal government stepped in.
"There were thousands of pieces in a silver service if you wanted every piece available," Goldstein said. "It got to such an outrageous degree that in 1926, Herbert Hoover, who was then secretary of commerce, actually decreed that there could be no more than 55 different pieces in a silver service, because too many materials were going into the production of these services."
Hoover must have been a hero to America's servant-less housewives, faced with the task of cleaning all that silver, but silver was often one of the few forms of wealth that a woman could possess in her own name and pass on as she wished. Of course, times have changed.
"Many of us have silver services but they feel too ponderous for everyday use and yet we want something that's appealing at table — it's wonderful to have playful things. Plastic is really a beautiful, beautiful material," Goldstein said.
Today, we live in a world where too many meals are eat-and-run, and a lot of our most novel flatware is disposable. Where all that minimalist, stainless steel airlines designed to look futuristic has become a thing of the past, because the Department of Homeland Security and hosts of the Middle Ages had the same thought — that your knife or your fork could hurt somebody. Plastic cutlery made for the New Mexico corrections department is designed to break if used as a weapon.
There are some pretty strange utensils out there. But the last word on the subject goes to baseball legend Yogi Bera: "If you come to a fork in the road, take it."