CUTLERY IS NOT a necessity. Many people in many parts of the world prefer taking food with their hands, thereby enjoying a more direct, immediate, physical rapport with it. During the Middle Ages, this was the custom in Europe as well, but a new table culture slowly grew, a new way of perceiving the relations between diners and food and between diners themselves.
The first manuals of etiquette, which appeared in the thirteenth century in various European countries, took for granted that the only utensil available was the spoon, used for liquid foods. This was the only utensil deemed indispensable for obvious practical reasons. A knife and large fork served to cut meat on the common cutting board but not as individual utensils. The medieval diner was imbued with a deeply ingrained collective sense, and that is how one must interpret the practice of using the same utensils, the same drinking cups, and the same board or platter on which food was placed (as a rule, serving at least two people).
There may have been a few exceptions: an eleventh-century miniature portrays a great lord with a fork in hand (but this was probably the common fork, shared with the dining companion sitting opposite him).1 In the same century, Pier Damiani refers to the strange custom of a Byzantine princess whom he met in Venice, who “did not touch food with her hands … but raised it to her mouth with a small two-tined fork”2—an exception indeed at that time.
The hands were the real players in the alimentary performance, and it was to the correct use of the hands that twelfth-century manuals on etiquette devoted their attention; for example, they insist on the use of only three fingers to grasp food—not five, like “rustics.” This is the origin of the special importance given to cleaning the hands before a meal: “I hear it said about many people,” relates a text on Hofsucht (manners) compiled in thirteenth-century Germany and attributed to someone by the name of Tannhäuser, “that they are wont to eat without having washed. If that is true, I find it disgusting, and may their fingers be paralyzed!”3
As for utensils, the only rules concern the use of the spoon. “No sorbiliar dra boca quand tu mangi con cugial [do not suck through the mouth when you eat with a spoon]” is the sixteenth of the De quinquaginta curialitatibus ad mensam [Fifty table manners] by the Milanese writer Bonvesin de la Riva, who lived between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Also, “Do not slurp when eating with a spoon,” for “the man or woman who sputters between spoonfuls behaves like an animal.”4 As for the Hofsucht mentioned above, it declares that “a man of nobility should not share a spoon with another person.”5 This is a noteworthy injunction, as it reveals a cultural change taking place, a desire to put greater emphasis on the identity of the individual and the distance between guests. This “privatizing” also increases the distance between guest and food with the technical aid of individual utensils: first, the multiplication of spoons and then the appearance of forks.
Aside from these cultural movements, reasons of practicality must also have favored the introduction of individual forks. If they appeared earlier in Italy than elsewhere, it is perhaps because of certain alimentary uses—in particular, pasta, which, already in the late Middle Ages, characterized Italian gastronomy as compared with that of the other side of the Alps.6 It is true that in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries Neapolitan “macaroni-eaters” were still portrayed in paintings and prints holding in their hands spaghetti just purchased from street vendors. But in general, spaghetti and macaroni require utensils, especially if hot (as they should be), well buttered (as was the usage in the Middle Ages), and covered with grated cheese. It is thus not by mere chance that one of the oldest literary references to the fork involves a pasta eater: the already mentioned Noddo d’Andrea, who, in one of the Trecentonovelle [Three hundred stories] by Franco Sacchetti, “starts to take up the macaroni, surround it with his mouth and wolf it down.” Noddo was famous for the speed with which he managed to ingest food, even when boiling hot. In fact, he had already swallowed six mouthfuls of that “scorching macaroni,” while his table companion “still had his first mouthful on his fork.”7
Other documents attest, fortuitously for the most part, to the spread of a new “culture of cutlery” in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe. For example, the Franciscan Guillaume de Rubruk, when describing the eating habits of the Tartars (among whom he had been on a diplomatic mission for the King of France), comments on the way they distributed pieces of mutton to guests “with the tip of a knife or with a fork … similar to those we use to eat pears and apples cooked in wine.”8
It is therefore toward the end of the Middle Ages that cutlery makes its entrance into table customs, albeit discontinuously and with important regional differences in usages and in choices. In the treatise De civiltate morum puerilium (1526–30), Erasmus of Rotterdam does not mention the fork at all but limits himself to evoking the rules of using the hands according to medieval tradition: “Country people plunge their hands into sauces”; “It is uneducated to dig one’s hands into the bottom of a plate”; “Whatever you cannot take with three fingers you would do well to leave in the plate.”9 A few decades later the French writer Calviac dedicated a page of his treatise on good manners (Civilité) to the diversity of habits in each country, with the warning that precisely because of that diversity, “the boy [to whose education the treatise is dedicated] will have to conform to the place and manners of those among whom he finds himself.” In particular, he singles out in Europe a region of the spoon (more conservative) and a region of the fork (more innovative)—Germany and Italy, respectively: “Germans use spoons for eating soups and all liquid dishes,” whereas Italians prefer the fork whenever possible. France was seen as a region of mediation between the two cultures: “The French use the one and the other [spoon and fork] according to which one seems better suited and more convenient for them.” Calviac goes on: “Italians in general prefer to have one knife for each person. Germans consider it so important that they are very annoyed if their knife is taken or is requested by others. The French, on the contrary, for an entire table of diners use two or three knives without seeing any problem if it is asked for or taken, and proffer them when requested.”10
Naturally, we are dealing here with elite customs. During his trip to Italy in 1581, Michel de Montaigne did not come across many knives on the tables where he was a guest. Only in Rome, at the table of the Cardinal of Sens, was “each person offered a towel to wipe his hands [after washing them], and to those to whom they wish to pay special honor, seated beside or opposite the master of the house, they present large squares of silver that bear a salt-cellar. … On top of that is a napkin folded in four; and on that napkin, bread, a knife, a fork, and a spoon.”11
Among the dining customs of the sixteenth century, still of great importance—for reasons similar and contrary to those that slowed the spread of individual cutlery—were the large knives and forks with which the “carver” divided and apportioned meats: the office of carver was one of great ceremonial and political significance, around which a veritable art developed, as the carver was equipped with differentiated and sophisticated instruments like those shown in Bartolomeo Scappi’s Opera (1570) or, in even more detail, in Trinciante by Vincenzo Cervio (1581).
Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the increasing presence of individual cutlery and plates ran parallel to the growth of an individualistic mentality, which bourgeois culture was largely responsible for spreading. The distress caused by this change—cultural even more than technical—was apparent first among such nostalgic representatives of the “old order” as the Marquis de Coulanges, who shortly after the middle of the seventeenth century wrote these heartfelt verses: “Once, soup was eaten from a common bowl without ceremony, and often one wiped the spoon on the boiled hen. Then, one often dipped one’s fingers and bread into the stew. Today, everybody eats soup in his own plate; one has to serve oneself politely with a spoon and a fork, and from time to time a servant goes and washes them at the buffet.”12
The lament over those great days, when one could feel food with one’s hands and when fingers were dipped into the sauce (this brings to mind “Efemeride” by Ausonio, who told his cook to “shake the scalding pots, quickly stick your fingers into the boiling sauce and lick them with a wet tongue, rolling it back and forth”13), has a primarily social and political flavor. What is mourned is not so much the way one ate as the period in which the aristocracy was solidly in power, with its traditional values of pedigree, of clan, and of family cohesion. What is noteworthy is that all this appears in treatises on convivial behavior, recalling the robust physicality of a relationship with food that mirrors perfectly the virile and warlike culture of ancient nobility. Cultures are slow to die, as demonstrated by the voices of dissent, which even in Italy—the country earliest to be conquered by the fork—were raised against the use of the new utensils.
Most interesting is the testimony from the latter half of the seventeenth century of Vincenzo Nolfi, author of a book of etiquette for ladies that includes a chapter entitled “Del ritrovarsi a banchetto [On finding oneself at a banquet].” After having reminded his readers that “liquid dishes such as soups, broths and the like … are eaten with a spoon,” he concedes that other dishes, meaning solid foods, can be taken up with a fork. In every instance, however, he regards it preferable “for the fingers to bring [food] gently to the mouth,” and he expresses the opinion that by then the fork had had its day because “the hands of a person are less disgusting than a piece of silver.”14 Nolfi’s point of view would have little future, but it nonetheless indicates the persistent hostility to utensils mediating between food and mouth and to their “taste of metal.”
Eighteenth-century manuals of etiquette expatiate in minute detail on the way to handle spoons, forks, and knives. “When spoons, forks or knives are dirty, or greasy, it is unpleasant to lick them and not at all acceptable to clean them with the tablecloth,” we read in the French text by La Salle (1729). Further: “When the plate is dirty avoid scraping it with the spoon or the fork to clean it, or cleaning it with the fingers” (making clear the equation fingers/utensils and the fundamental interchangeability of the two in the view of many). In addition:
When at the table, it is not polite to keep the knife in one’s hand the whole time; one takes hold of it only when it is needed. It is equally rude to bring a piece of bread to the mouth with the point of a knife. This same rule applies when eating an apple or a pear, or any other fruit. It is against good manners to hold a fork or a spoon with the whole hand, as though grasping a broom. … One should not use a fork for liquid food. … It is quite polite always to use a fork for bringing meat to the mouth, insofar as proper behavior does not allow one to touch greasy food, or sauces, or even syrups with the fingers.15
In the meantime, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, on the tables of the wealthy middle class, service “à la russe” (each course served in sequence and presented to each seated diner—the style still in use today) began to replace the traditional service “à la française” (all the courses brought at the same time, guests serving themselves out of common platters—still alive in the style of the buffet).16 This marked at the same time the decisive blow to the medieval system of conviviality and the definitive victory of individualism—and gave rise to an unprecedented gastronomic egalitarianism because the new system proposed the same dishes to all, whereas the portioning of the Middle Ages and early modern era was based on the principle of difference and hierarchy. This transformation also favored the increase in the number of pieces of flatware and their progressive differentiation: each type of food—for those who could afford it—required flatware of different shapes and dimensions, predetermined according to the succession of courses. During the nineteenth century, flatware came into general use and conquered new social spheres, thereby losing the elitist character that had distinguished it for centuries.
At the end of this long and tormented history, flatware finally became a commonplace; its presence could perhaps be discussed from an esthetic angle, but its right to exist could no longer be questioned. And yet even today, the manuals of etiquette continue to repeat rules and warnings not too dissimilar to those in the treatises of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, implying that for many, the use of flatware has remained a problem, not only because masters were unable to teach or students to learn, but also because of a residual resistance to accepting these objects that simultaneously simplify and complicate our use of hands. The fact is that flatware tends to distance us from a childhood (individual and collective) that was marked by a more spontaneous and “animal” relation with food, and childhood, as we all know, is the ideal period for nostalgia and regrets in adulthood. Is this not also what explains, along with many other reasons, the success of certain kinds of eating, seemingly “modern” but in reality highly regressive on the level of behavior, such as sandwiches and hamburgers?
At other times, a return to the use of the hands was proposed in more explicit terms as a conscious demand for physicality and a more immediate, “vital” contact with food. This brings to mind the Manifesto della cucina futurista [Manifesto on futurist cooking], published in 1932 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who, among the eleven rules of the “perfect meal,” included in the fourth rule “the abolition of the fork and knife for the sensorial experience that can be derived from a tactile pre-labial pleasure.”17 Beyond its provocative and exaggeratedly intellectual context, the proposal is not without a certain appeal because it goes back to ancient sensations, deep-seated habits, and probably indelible needs of homo edens. Against this dynamic between “nature” and “culture,” between spontaneity and artifice, between the hand and the tool, the history of our flatware—and in fact, of our entire civilization—is played out.
