Becket, Jean Anouilh’s 1959 play about the relationship between King Henry II of England and 12th-century Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas à Becket, includes a significant culinary detail.
“Tonight,” says Becket, “you can do me the honour of christening my forks.”
“Forks?” says the king.
“Yes, from Florence. New little invention. It’s for pronging meat and carrying it to the mouth. It saves you dirtying your fingers.”
“But then you dirty the fork.”
“Yes, but it’s washable.”
“So are your fingers,” says the king. “I don’t see the point.”
Unless you’re looking for it, one easily overlooks the sparseness of dining tables in early paintings of banquets. In Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, painted around 1495, neither knives nor forks appear. The hard unleavened bread of the time wasn’t cut but broken, a term that survives to this day: We still speak of hospitality as “breaking bread.” In Brueghel’s The Peasant Wedding of 1567, the only utensils are simple wooden-handled knives of the sort every man would have carried in his belt. From medieval times, a knife in its leather sheath, embossed with his family crest, was the indispensable accessory of any gentleman, second in importance only to his sword. According to the Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral, it was the custom for farmworkers to begin eating only when the farmer or overseer drew his knife. Returning it to his belt signalled that the meal was over.
Forks, as Anouilh suggests, began as an affectation of the rich, and were condemned by the church as unmanly. Some people, with memories of the Black Death, associated them with apocalyptic paintings of devils using tridents to torment the sinful in hell. When forks did appear, it was in small numbers, and so rarely that travelers often carried their own. Even then, they were used only to lift a piece of meat from the communal dish and transfer it to one’s plate. After that, one ate with fingers, wiping them on one’s clothes. One of the earliest signs of gracious eating was the introduction of napkins. A typical inventory of a 17th-century French household listed only 18 forks but 600 linen serviettes. At the table of Louis XVI, eating with one’s fingers remained a prerogative of the king. Long after it had become customary for food to be taken from the dish with a fork and conveyed to one’s plate, the king would dive into a dish and tear off the choicest morsels.
Glasses were also uncommon. With glassware so expensive, hosts kept it out of the greasy fingers of his guests. If someone wished to drink, he gestured for a servant who arrived with a goblet filled with wine. After the guest had slaked his thirst, usually in a single swallow known as a quaff, he handed back the glass, which was rinsed out for the next user.
As food became more complex, so did the tools needed to eat it and the manner in which they were used. Such codes of behavior became known by the French word etiquette, meaning a label or tag. To someone ignorant of these rules, the dining table was a social minefield. As well as specific glasses for red wine, white wine, water, apéritifs and digestifs, the basic knife, fork and spoon, known collectively as a couvert, multiplied. Ranged on either side of your plate, which itself came in a number of sizes, depending on the course being served, were knives for both meat and fish, another for buttering bread, a fork specifically for salads and spoons for both soup and dessert, not to mention tea and other beverages.
Finger bowls filled with water and meant to clean sticky or greasy fingers were an additional hazard. Ignorant diners, assuming they held a beverage or some kind of soup, sometimes drank them. The poet Sylvia Plath wrote in her novel The Bell Jar, “The water had a few cherry blossoms in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms.” Rather than show up Plath’s ignorance of etiquette, her hostess did the same thing.
Eating with the fingers never entirely died out. It only took one aristocrat to break the rules for a practice to become fashionable again. The sandwich, that classic finger food, is believed to have been invented around 1772 by John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, who had cold beef between slices of bread brought to his desk (or, in some versions, the gaming table) rather than pause for a meal.
Around the same time, Louis XVI developed a taste for the gelatinous meat of pig’s feet. Boiled for two days until the bones softened, they were best eaten with the fingers. Watching the king munch his way through a brace of trotters, and concerned about a return to the free-for-all of medieval banquets, the arbiters of etiquette dictated that, aside from pig’s feet, a special case, it was acceptable to eat with one’s fingers only those creatures that originally flew. Chicken legs and wings were permissible but not portions of rabbit and, in particular, not legs of mutton. The use of fingers survives in France. One tears bread rather than slicing it, and, on less formal occasions, using a piece of bread to mop up a sauce is regarded as a compliment to the chef.
It’s also still usual to eat cake with one’s fingers. One of the more ritualized examples involves the galette des rois or kings cake. A disc of puff pastry, rich in butter and filled with almond paste, the galette is traditionally eaten on January 6, the 12th night after Christmas, the feast of the Epiphany. Each galette comes with a golden paper crown, and, like its cousins the British Christmas pudding and the Hogmanay black bun of Scotland, contains a prize; a silver coin in the British and Scottish creations, but in the galette a china figurine known as a fève or lima bean. The person who finds the fève drops it into the glass of a child or lover, the crown is placed on that person’s head, and to the shout “le roi boit” or “la reine boit,” (the king or queen drinks), everyone toasts the person’s health.
Epiphany (Le Gâteau des rois), Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1774, Musée Fabre
The galette des rois has inspired many artists, mostly celebrating families bonding over the ritual. In Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Le Gâteau des rois of 1774, a peasant couple and their six children gather around the dining table as a toddler, held by the maid, is offered a slice of the galette. Among the most poignant uses was that made by Jacques Demy in his 1964 film Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). Catherine Deneuve, pregnant and about to contract a loveless marriage, weeps as the cardboard crown is placed on her head, a symbol of the meaningless relationship to which she is being condemned.