SC - Tablewear

[david friedman]

At 3:28 PM -0800 3/10/00, lilinah at earthlink.net wrote:
>Not related to food, but to eating it...
>
>As a Ren Fair actor, i have two, count 'em, two sets of eating 
>utensils, a brass two pronged fork and matching more-or-less 
>hemispherical bowl spoon (watch out for acids, make you taste the 
>brass) and a hand forged iron set (two-pronged fork and more 
>elongated-bowl spoon).
>
>I know that the prevailing wisdom is that the forks wouldn't really 
>have been used in Elizabethan England, but at small fairs we buy our 
>food, often Thai stir fried noodles (don't ask), since i'm primarily 
>vegetarian, and forks come in handy.
>
>But a late period Byzantine reenactor says on his website that there 
>is evidence of two-pronged forks at that time (i think around the 
>time of the of the Seljuk Turks - what's that, 11th to 13th C., i 
>think)
>http://www-personal.une.edu.au/~tdawson/tware.html
>
>Anyone else have any knowledge of this? Any other information about 
>fork use? typical table ware of the 10th through 13th centuries, 
>anywhere in the "Knowne Worlde"? I'm guessing my Near Eastern 
>persona would have been content with clean fingers, but, well, 
>inquiring minds, and all that...

The Cleveland Museum of Art has a Byzantine fork; I don't remember 
the date, but I think it is earlier than the 11th century. The 
British Museum has an Anglo-saxon fork and spoon set. The Victoria 
and Albert Museum published a pamphlet on tableware, which contains a 
reproduction of what the author thinks is the first painting showing 
someone eating with a fork; my vague memory is that it is about 13th 
century.

The situation, so far as I can tell, is that forks existed through 
most of our period in Europe, as rather uncommon eating 
utensils--think of a modern equivalent as a fondue fork, which exists 
but isn't used all that often. In the seventeenth century (I think) 
they shifted to being part of the standard set of eating utensils. I 
believe that forks also existed as cooking utensils through most of 
our period.

Hope that helps.  So far as practical solutions to eating stir fried 
noodles in persona, I would eat them with my (right) hand--as, I 
gather, would you. I think eating things that can be eaten with the 
fingers but nowadays are not is a useful touch--one more element that 
suggests how someone from a different culture would respond to things.

David/Cariadoc
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/