Traveling Utensils and Fork History

Photo of a retractable travel spoon bowl with the fork attached, alongside a photo of the back of the spoon bowl, sitting next to the two-tined fork which fits inside it to make a spoon. Presumed age is any time from the mid-1500’s to early 1700’s

Around the year 1400, when people carried their eating utensils with them, a folding silver spoon was made to fit the pocket. Later a fork was added. Even the wealthy did not provide these utensils; only royalty seemed to have had enough for their feasts and banquets.

Everyone carried his knife in a scabbard fastened to his belt, to use at mealtime and on any other occasion when a knife was needed. Those who could not afford silver used spoons, knives, and forks of pewter. Copper and brass spoons were used, too, by persons of limited means, although copper soon lost favor due to its tendency to rapid oxidation. 

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in the Tudor period, it was fashionable to give a christening gift of twelve spoons, each adorned with a miniature statue in silver of one of the twelve apostles. Sometimes a “Master” spoon bearing the figure of Christ was included. These sets are exceedingly rare today. Our “pitcher spoon” originated in Elizabethan days, when great starched ruffles were worn around the neck, making long-handled spoons a necessity.

In Italy, in the 1500s, knives and forks generally appeared on the tables of the cultured, but it was another century before they were popular in France and England. At one time in England it was considered effeminate to use a fork and it took several decades for the people other than the upper classes to adopt it. The clergy even protested its use “as a substitute for God-given fingers.”

In America, too, forks were freakish novelties: when the first fork was imported by Governor Winthrop in 1633, people thought it comical. They could not see any need for it, since most of their meats were cut up and cooked in ragouts and stews. Recipes of the time called for meat to be “y-mynced, hewed on a gobbet, hacked, diced and skerned.” Two-pronged forks to spear food were the most commonly used at first, but early models were made with three and four prongs too.— From “The Book of Old Silver,” by Seymour B. Wyler, 1937

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