THE TANGLED HISTORY OF THE DINING FORK

Forks were known in ancient Rome well before our time. Initially, they were only used during the cooking process—people would extract pieces of meat from hot broth or boiling fat with large two-pronged forks made from copper, bronze, or iron, only to eat with their hands later. But greasy hands can be uncomfortable, and there isn't always a convenient, curly-haired youth standing nearby whose head could be used instead of a kitchen towel. In short, someone realized that having an implement that could skewer meat directly into the mouth was much more convenient.

More than 2,000 years ago, a resident of the city of Paestum, a Greek colony in southwest Italy, valued his small dining fork so much that he was buried with it. Thanks to this thoughtful person, we can prove that Romans did have and use this tableware, even though it was not in as widespread use as the spoon.

The custom of burying the dead with their favorite items has long made life easier for historians. The oldest Chinese forks were discovered in graves. These items, made of bone at the time, were found in the burial sites of the bronze-age Chinese culture of Qijia (2400–1900 BCE), as well as in those of the Shang dynasty (1600–1050 BCE) and subsequent dynasties. It seems striking that the people who invented such a convenient eating utensil later rejected it and returned to using chopsticks, but the ways of history are unfathomable.

In any case, humanity in Asia, and almost throughout Europe, forgot about forks for thousands of years. Even the most refined aristocracy ate with their hands, rinsing them with water, wiping them with cloth, or using special gloves that were discarded after dinner.

And so, what happened to forks? They were preserved for a long time only in Byzantium, that is, in the Eastern Roman Empire, which managed to retain much of the legacy of ancient Rome. The Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary states: ‘The first mention of forks is by Pierre Damian (died 1072), who speaks of them as a completely new thing, reporting that a certain Byzantine princess first introduced this innovation to Venice, where, however, this utensil was seen only as a sign of decadence.’ (Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary: 11th half-volume. Russia, Saint Petersburg, 1890–1907). This passage about Maria Argyra—a Byzantine aristocrat, who married a prominent Venetian named Giovanni Orseolo in 1004—describes a specific section from De Institutione Monialis by Peter Damian, a famous Benedictine monk. It is dated back to the eleventh century and states: ‘She did not touch the food with her fingers, but made the eunuchs cut it into small pieces. She picked them up with a special gold instrument with two prongs and put them in her mouth.’

In 1075, when another Byzantine princess, Theodora Anna Doukaina, ordered that each guest at the table during the celebration of her wedding to Venetian Domenico Selvo have a fork, the clergy saw it as an ungodly act. After all, forks, both two-pronged and three-pronged, are the tools of the enemy of the human race. This perspective came about because tridents and two-pronged forks were often depicted as the weapons of Poseidon and Hades, whom the Christian Church considered part of the devilish pantheon. Several years later, the princess died of an unknown illness, and some believed then that it was a punishment for using ‘devilish forks’.

It took centuries for forks to appear on the table of Charles V, the King of France, with historians dating it as late as 1379. Yet, until the beginning of the sixteenth century, the fork was a rarity in Europe. In the fourteenth century, French queen Jeanne d'Evreux had only one fork in her possession, and she kept it in a special case. According to the French historian Fernand Braudel, the French ‘Sun King’ Louis XIV (1638–1715), who built Versailles, ate with his hands and forbade the Duke of Burgundy and his two brothers from using a fork in his presence.

Braudel cites the words of a medieval German priest who cursed the fork as a ‘devilish invention’: ‘God would not have given us fingers if he wanted us to use such a tool,’ he wrote.

The oldest Russian fork was discovered in a house built in the late 1340s in Veliky Novgorod. It seems to have belonged to a visiting jeweler, possibly from Byzantium, as the first fork was seen in the Moscow Kremlin only in 1606 at the wedding feast of the impostor False Dmitry I and his Polish wife Marina Mniszech. The newly crowned Russian queen shocked not only the clergy but also the boyars with the ‘devilish utensil’. After the feast, there was almost a rebellion—not because of the fork, of course, but because of the demonstrated, emphasized ‘non-Russianness’ of the new royal couple.

The ‘proud Pole’ was certainly a dubious role model, as were both her husbands, both claiming to be Prince Dmitry, and so they failed to introduce the exotic and frightening tableware to the wider boyar masses. But under Alexei Mikhailovich the Quietest (1629–76), two-pronged forks were already present on festive tables, and his son Peter I used a fork daily. ‘There was always a wooden spoon with ivory, a little knife, and a fork with a green bone handle at his place, and it was the butler’s to carry them with him and put them in front of the tsar, even if he happened to dine as a guest’.iRussian Antiquity, 1824. Well, the boyars decided if the father-tsar desired a fork, they’d show him that they don't eat cabbage soup with a shoe! Soon ‘horns’ (or ‘forks’) appeared on many tables. But peasants in Russia barely used forks until the twentieth century . And what would they eat with them in a peasant's hut? Fried or stewed meat was rare there. ‘Cabbage soup and porridge are our food,’ they said in Russia, and spoons were sufficient enough for such dishes.

In Central Asia, forks were a very late innovation. The traditional cuisine of the local peoples for centuries was designed for the use of spoons or fingers, and foreign cuisine, requiring complex serving methods, could only be prepared in the homes of the very wealthy and did not influence national customs.

Unlike their Christian colleagues, however, Islamic preachers did not oppose forks, The Christian Church never liked forks, which resembled the tridents of Hades and Poseidon too closely. For example, many Orthodox Christians still do not use forks during memorial services, and in some places, this superstition extends to Christmas and Easter feasts as well.

The Muslims, observing the sacred rejection of forks by Christians, prompted the Permanent Committee for Scholarly Research and Ifta of Saudi Arabia to issue the following clarification: ‘There is nothing wrong with eating at the table or eating with spoons, forks, etc. And there is no resemblance to unbelievers, as this is not their distinctive feature’.iFatwas, 26/309. The main thing here is to eat with the right hand, as it is known that this is the hand that the Prophet Muhammad used to eat.

Christians never had official religious justification for forks—ignoring the protests of clergy, these utensils simply became commonplace. But even after forks stopped being seen as miniature devil's pitchforks, they were still perceived as somewhat immodest. Thus, the regulations of the British Royal Navy still prohibited sailors from using knives and forks during meals in 1897, as these utensils, according to the admiralty, undermined discipline and fostered decadence among the lower ranks.

But despite all restrictions, the fork has remained on our table and is unlikely to ever disappear. Moreover, it has even slightly displaced the familiar spoon. In the eighteenth century, when a German master first pioneered the bending of the previously flat tines of the fork, it became possible to scoop food with it and not just spear it. Porridge, mashed potatoes, pilaf—everything not too liquid—became manageable with a fork, leaving the spoon to be used only for soups. But the dining fork didn't change in this aspect alone. Initially designed with only two prongs or tines, by the eighteenth century, it grew to have four prongs. However, some specific kinds of forks still have only two tines, like the ones used for lemons, lobsters, fruit, et cetera. However, dessert and cheese forks still have three tines.

In his work The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible, Braudel lists a whole series of caustic statements by French and English people regarding the ‘uncultured nations’ lacking table manners, which include references to the unfamiliarity with the fork among Hungarians, Greeks, or Arabs. Statements like these appeared around the seventeenth century, and by the nineteenth century, they became commonplace. By that time, the idea of a luxury ​​banquet had shifted from roasted peacocks and goblets encrusted with rubies to a complex table setting, where each dish corresponded to its own specific utensil and manner of use.

Good manners now imply as much detachment from everything natural and organic as possible; humans try to oppose themselves to the animal world in everything, and touching food with their bare hands, except for bread, is perceived as an act of glaringly uncivilized behavior. The fork then becomes a tool in the fight against wildness, primitiveness, and rudeness. From this point on, it is a symbol of civilization, the triumph of culture over nature, reason over instinct. And the emerging views on hygiene and sanitation support this idea in every way, which has spread across all countries and continents, evolving into a form of social snobbery rather than a national characteristic.

It is difficult to say exactly when the fork reached Kazakhstan. Of course, once upon a time, Kazakhs, like all other peoples—the ancient Greeks, French, English, Russians, et cetera—ate with their hands. But those times have long passed. Now Kazakhs, while eating beşbarmaq, which in Kyrgyz means ‘five fingers’, also prefer to eat it with a fork. And as long as we haven't started eating only calorie tablets, as futurists promised us in the past century, the fork is unlikely to disappear from our tables.

After all, there are even monuments to it. The world's largest fork is located in Springfield, Missouri, in the US. The sculpture, which is 10.7 meters tall, was built by an advertising agency that considers this tableware its mascot. In Kyiv, near a pub named Pivna Duma, there is also a monument to the fork created by sculptor Vladimir Belokon. Thanks to the efforts of the Nestle corporation, a gargantuan fork floats in the middle of Lake Geneva opposite the Alimentarium food museum and the Nestle headquarters. The sculpture, created in 1995, is called Monument to Food.

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2. K.A. Burovik. The Red Book of Things. Ekonomika, 1996.

3. I.A. Pugachyov, ed. The Soviet Commodity Dictionary 1956–61. State Publishing House of Trade Literature, 1956.

4. Judith Herrin. Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire. Centrpoligraf, 2023.

5. Fernand Braudel. The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible. Progress, 1981.