When the Fork First Evolved

Selection of early types of forks. Originating in Africa and the Middle East, and considered truly an oddity at first, forks slowly grew popular in royal European courts. Books on courtly manners and courtly customs were also being written and more frequently read, though most of the European public was oblivious to them. Silver utensils of all sorts, along with specialized tableware, was created for the wealthy, upper classes. Many travelers carried their utensils with them, either in cased sets or as foldable articles. 
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We must wait 4,000 years before we find the fork. Or, as a French writer on table etiquette has said, “from the creation of the world to the beginning of the seventeenth century, man ate only with his fingers.” This is, however, a mistake of 400 years…
-Image source Etiquipedia private library and collection

Table Manners… How They Have Evoluted (sic) Out of Savage Customs

How did table manners arise? Where do they come from? Like Topsy and other human institutions, “they just growed.” And it is surprising how slow of development has been the sentiment of cleanliness and neatness which was the principal cause of the invention of the implements and dishes used in serving food and eating.

In good old paleolithic times, when human beings were always within 24 hours of starvation, man ate only with his fingers. He hunted for his food in the woods or by the seashore, and he picked the bones clean. Two table articles are found among uncivilized people – the knife and the spoon. The knife was originally a weapon of attack and defense. It was used for cutting and carving flesh, but its convenience in eating soon became apparent.

The origin of the spoon is uncertain. It must have been invented at a very ancient date, for it is found among people that have never come into contact with civilization. The necessity of having some implement for dipping water seems to have led first to the invention of the calabash or the use of the cocoanut shell and later on to the spoon.

We must wait 4,000 years before we find the fork. Or, as a French writer on table etiquette has said, “from the creation of the world to the beginning of the seventeenth century, man ate only with his fingers.” This is, however, a mistake of 400 years, for we find forks as early as the thirteenth century, when they are mentioned as being kept for special purposes. Thus John, Duke of Brittany, is said to have used a fork to pick up “soppys,” and Piers Graveston had three for eating pears with.– Lee J. Vance in Lippincott's, 1895

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

How Forks Replaced Knives

The fork was originally, and up to very modern times, used only to hold meat and other pieces of food, while the knife was cutting them. The putting of it into the mouth instead of the knife was only an afterthought, due probably to the unclean appearance of the knife blade after it had been used to shovel into the mouth, gravies, egg yolks, acids, etc... – Photo by site editor Maura J. Graber

Questioning the Fork: 

The Origins of This Very Useful Article and Why it Replaced Eating From Knives

One of those heterodox fellows, who may be found to question everything, asks upon what  sound principle is the law founded that forbids the putting of the knife into the mouth in eating. Why should a plate of steel, he asks, be interdicted from an office that the same steel, bifurcated, trifurcated or quadrafurcated, may properly perform? There is no objection to be made on the score of cutting one’s mouth, for in all ages of the past, when everybody ate with the knife, nobody ever cut his mouth. This heretic asserts that a certain consistency of food can be ‘‘hoisted,” as a western man would say, much more readily by a knife than by a fork. Of course, you can get the bulk of a mashed potato or turnip by dexterously fishing with a fork, but you can do it much neater and in better time with a knife, he continues; and thru the knife will secure all the gravy, which is mostly sifted out by the operation of the fork, and one thus loses the richest part of the meal. 

It is a matter of history that knives played an important part in domestic life long before forks were invented, and that when first the latter implements appeared, it was considered a mark of effeminacy or ultra refinement to use them. To such a degree was this prejudice against them indulged in France, that in the Sixteenth century the use of forks was considered sinful in monasteries, and the monks split up into two parties on the question. Forks originally came into use to save the fingers from soiling, and Italy was the first place where they were used. Ben Jonson writes of “the laudable use of forks brought into custom here as they are in Italy, to the sparing of napkins.” Some time later, a writer praises the King of Hungary for eating without a fork without soiling his clothes. An old writer explains why the Italian used the fork by saying that he could not “endure to have his dish touched with his fingers, seeing that all men's fingers are not clean alike.” 

But the fork was originally, and up to very modern times, used only to hold meat and other pieces of food, while the knife was cutting them. The putting of it into the mouth instead of the knife was only an afterthought, due probably to the unclean appearance of the knife blade after it had been used to shovel into the mouth, gravies, egg yolks, acids, etc... For this reason, silver forks were made; they are cleaner than iron and steel forks. Every step, then, from the original use of the fork as a substitute for the fingers, to its more extended use a substitute for the knife, together with the employment of silver in place of iron, has been dictated by cleanliness. —Good Housekeeping, 1880

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia©️ Etiquette Encyclopedia 

Table Manners and Food History

Remember the nursery rhyme about “four and twenty black birds” flying out of a pie? That recipe “To Make Pies That the Birds May Be Alive in Them and Flie Out When It Is Cut Up" exists. It was translated into English from an Italian man named Epulario who wrote a cookbook in 1598. The pie, whose bottom part is edible, is baked with a cavity large enough to put “as many small live birds as the empty coffin will hold.” 

Of Culinary Classics and Manners for Them

The history of the culinary arts is a fascinating one. It is curious to read not only the recipes and ingredients, but the table manners and lifestyles of our forebearers. In writing about the culinary and household intrigues of the British royal family, my taste for other histories of food, diet and recipes was sharpened. “The Delectable Past,” by Esther B. Aresty, is a unique history of cuisine. Written by a collector of rare and antique cookbooks, Mrs. Aresty translates recipes from ancient Rome, to the Renaissance and Elizabethan periods to early American cooking into modern recipes that we can make in our own kitchens. 

She shares recipes written in crude early English with its irregular spelling and quaint words. One medieval recipe for “King Richard's Salat” goes like this: “Take parsel, sawge, garlec, chibollas (small onions) onyons, leeks, borage, myntes, fenel and ton tressis (cress), rew (rue), rosemarye, purslayre (purslain). Lave, and waishe hem clene; pike hem, pluk hem small with thyn hande and myng hem wel with rawe oile. Lay one vynegar and salt, and serve it forth.” 

The recipes from this 1390 royal cookbook titled “The Forme of Cury” are written in the blunt language of medieval England and sometimes sound as violent as the events that were transpiring there,” writes Mrs Aresty. These following descriptions are for the making of hash: “Take hares and hew them into gobbets . . Take conies (rabbits) and smite them to pieces; seeth them in grease. Take chickens and ram them together, serve them broken.” Can you imagine being in a restaurant in that time?: “Hey, Harry, gimme a rammed, broken chicken heavy on the grease!” Apparently, the reason most foods were minced or hashed was because there were no such thing as forks. Most foods were eaten with spoons and were heavily spiced and often combined with an almond paste used like a cream sauce! 

Mrs. Aresty, who seems to be a culinary historian, gives in original manuscript form, a recipe “that started its career in medieval days and made its way down through the centuries.” Here it is in original form: “Take creme of cowe mylke (or) almandes. Do thereto ayren (eggs), with sugar, safron and salt. Medle it ifere (mix it together). Do it in a coffyn of two ynche depe; bake it wel and serve it forth.” In a more updated version this creamy tart that sounds like a forerunner of cheesecake or custard pie.

A couple of hundred years later, when printing had been invented, cookbooks (written by men, then) were also put to press. Fortunately for us, those prizes also give us ground to believe our fantasy and literature. Remember the nursery rhyme about “four and twenty black birds” flying out of a pie? That recipe “To Make Pies That the Birds May Be Alive in Them and Flie Out When It Is Cut Up" exists. It was translated into English from an Italian man named Epulario who wrote a cookbook in 1598. The pie, whose bottom part is edible, is baked with a cavity large enough to put “as many small live birds as the empty coffin will hold.” 

Another Italian, Bartolomeo Scappi, wrote one of the most important of the Renaissance cookbooks, according to Mrs. Aresty. This 1570 “Cooking Secrets of Pope Pius V” gave a recipe for a doughnut-type cookie, which was boiled first, then baked Mrs Aresty adapts the recipe so it is a rather buttery cookie that is baked only.  – The Desert Sun News, 1981

🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber of The RSVP Institute of Etiquette, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Etiquette and “the Right Fork”

Using Your Utensils

Using “first” forks — Cocktail forks, oyster forks, escargot forks, and the like, are used with the right hand only. If snail or escargot tongs are being used, they are held in the left hand to hold the snail shell in place.

All spoons are used with the right hand, including individual caviar spoons and caviar spades.

Using dessert forks alone— Pie forks, ice cream forks, fruit forks can all properly used in the right hand, if no cutting with a knife is involved, with one notable ex-ception being the mango fork. A mango fork is held in the left hand while using a fruit knife or fruit spoon in the right hand.

Using dessert spoons alone — Ice cream, pots de crème, and other soft desserts eaten with spoons in the right hand.

Using a dessert fork and spoon together — Dessert eaten using 2 utensils is nearly always done in the Continental style, except this is done with a fork and spoon as opposed to with a fork and knife. The fork is held in the left hand with tines facing down, and the spoon is held in the right hand. The fork is used to hold or keep a dessert in place as the spoon cuts off small bites. This works well with desserts such as Baked Alaska or certain types of cakes.

An exception to this rule is pie or cake, à la mode. These are both eaten with a dessert fork and spoon. The spoon is used to cut and then place a bite of cake or pie and a bit of ice cream on the fork, which is held in the right hand and used to eat the dessert.

For all other dining with a knife and fork, the fork is in the left hand and the knife in the right when dining in the Continental style.

Fork tines point down for all cutting and eating in Continental dining, save for stringy pasta.

Fork tines point down only for cutting food, in the American style of dining.

From the book, Reaching for the Right Fork... the evolution of tabletop utensils 

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia 

Table Etiquette Customs Explained

Table etiquette is not, as is often alleged, merely a matter of fashion, although some things that were in vogue a generation or two ago, are no longer deemed polite.The reason is that manners and table furniture have undergone so many changes, have really so much improved, as to require a mutual adjustment. 

While certain forms of table etiquette may seem altogether conventional, even fantastic, the forms usually observed are founded on good sense, and adapted to general convenience. Table etiquette is not, as is often alleged, merely a matter of fashion, although some things that were in vogue a generation or two ago, are no longer deemed polite. The reason is that manners and table furniture have undergone so many changes, have really so much improved, as to require a mutual adjustment. 

For example, everybody was accustomed, twenty or thirty years since, to use the knife to carry food to the mouth, because the fork of the day was not adapted to the purpose. Since the introduction of the four-tined silver fork, it has so entirely supplanted the knife, that the usage of the latter, in that way, is not only superfluous, but is regarded as a vulgarism. Another example is the discontinuance of the custom of turning tea or coffee from the cup into the saucer. Although small plates were frequently employed to set the cup in, they were not at all in general use; and even when they were used, the tea or coffee was likely to be spilled upon the cloth. The habit, likewise, of putting one’s knife into the butter arose from the fact that the butter-knife proper had not been thought of. Such customs as these, once necessitated by circumstances, are now obviously inappropriate. 

Certain habits, however, are regulated with good taste and delicacy of feeling, and the failure to adopt them argues a lack of fine perception or social insight. One of these is eating or drinking audibly. No sensitive person can hear any one taking his soup, coffee or other liquid, without positive annoyance. Yet those who would be very unwilling to consider themselves ill bred are constantly guilty of such breaches of politeness. The defect is that they are not so sensitive as those with whom they come in contact. They would not be disturbed by the offence; they never imagine, therefore, that any one else can be. It is for them that rules of etiquette are particularly designed. Were their instinct correct, they would not need the rule, which, from the absence of instinct, appears to them irrational, and purely arbitrary. To rest one’s elbow on the table is more than a transgression of courtesy, it is an absolute inconvenience to one’s neighbors. 

All awkwardness of position, such as sitting too far back from, or leaning over the table, are reckoned as rudeness, because they put others ill at ease through fear of such accidents as are liable to happen from any uncouthness. This and kindred matters are trifles; but social life is so largely composed of trifles, that to disregard them wholly is a serious affront. We can hardly realize to what extent our satisfaction of dissatisfaction is made up of things in themselves insignificant, until their observance or nonobservance is brought directly home to us. —Scribner’s Monthly, 1875

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia  

Etiquette from Fingers to Forks

Fingers were once used to perform the office now assigned to forks, in the highest and most refined circles of society. — (Above) A rare "bird set" in the Chantilly pattern.

The Duchess of Beaufort, dining once at Mme. de Guise's with King Henri IV of France, extended one hand to receive His Majesty's salutation, while she dipped the fingers of the other hand into a dish to pick out what was to her taste. This incident happened in the year 1598. It demonstrates that less than three hundred years ago the fingers were still used to perform the office now assigned to forks, in the highest and most refined circles of society. At about this time, in fact, was the turning point when forks began to be used at the table as they are now. 

When we reflect how nice were the ideas of that refined age on all matters of outer decency and behavior, and how strict was the etiquette of the Courts we may well wonder that the fork was so late in coming into use as a table furnishing. The ladies of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were not less proud of a delicate, well kept hand than those of our own days, and yet they picked the meat from the platter with their slender white fingers, and in them bore it to their mouths. The fact is all the more remarkable, because the form of the fork was familiar enough, and its application to other uses was not uncommon.—J. Von Folke in Popular Science Monthly, via the Press Democrat, 1899

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J.Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia 

Etiquette, Entrées and “Extras”

Forks designed for a variety of courses —   Some say the word “entrée” came from the word “entremets.” An entremets (from the Old French, literally meaning “between servings”) is in modern French cuisine a small dish served between courses or simply a dessert. Originally, an elaborate form of entertainment dish, it was common among the nobility and upper middle class in Europe during the later Middle Ages. Entremets marked the end of a serving of courses.

Q . What is the meaning of entrée, and how is it pronounced?
A.  It is a dish served between the chief courses, or, in English usage, before the roast. Pronounced AHN-tra, first a as in ah, second a as in tray, accent first syllable. 

Q. My husband, some friends and I were discussing different courses of a dinner and their names. My husband and I agreed that we always thought of the entrée as being the appetizer, since logically you are ‘entering the meal.’ Our friends disagreed and said the entrée is a main course. The dictionary said the entrée is a side dish (which would make it seem my husband and I are right), yet while eating at one of the better restaurants we found the main course labeled ‘entrée.’ Please settle this question for us. If my husband and I are right, what is the correct name for the main course (other than what I called it)? In addition, please give us the correct names for all the courses.

A. The word entrée comes from the vocabulary of the great French chefs and from the days when formal dinners were elaborate affairs indeed. Originally it meant a dish served between the main courses of a banquet or, in the words of an English dictionary, “a made dish served between the fish and the joint.” Nowadays, of course, elaborate multicourse dinners are almost entirely a thing of the past, with the result that the meaning of “entrée” has gradually shifted until now it means any meat or fish course usually the main course of a meal. As to nomenclature of the courses, according to most etiquette authorities, even an elaborate formal dinner today should not have more than six, in this order:

• First the appetizer canapes, oysters or the like
• Second soup
• Third fish (this could be labeled “entrée” in the early sense of the word). 
• Fourth main or meat course (which today we would call the “entrée”)
• Fifth salad course
• Sixth dessert course

Q. When setting the table should a knife for the entrée be included? 
A. A knife for the entrée is seldom required, and is not used unless necessary.  

Q. Where do the salad fork and knife go in the table setting? 

A. The salad fork goes to the left of dinner plate, then come the meat fork and left of that the fork for fish or entrée. If a salad knife is used, it goes at right, next to the plate.

Q. We have no actual salad forks and nothing especially suitable for eating dessert. In fact, I have only very big knives and forks and the smaller ones which I had first before the newer big ones. 

A. It is too bad that you got big ones, because the medium sized ones are the essential ones. They are the only ones used for breakfast or lunch, and they are also used for fish, entrée,salad and dessert at dinner. Properly they are called small forks, but so many patterns made in the last few years have been absurdly tiny that I said medium instead. The small (medium) knife may very well be dispensed with by never serving fish with bones or skin, and never serving salads or cheeses impossible to eat with a fork alone. 

Q. I have been told that finger bowls are going out of fashion. Is this true?
A. Of course not. They are always put at the places either with or following the dessert plates. For that matter, they should also be proffered whenever fruit or broiled lobster or any other smeary food has been held in the fingers. 

Q. Are place cards used only at a formal dinner?
A. They are not used at dinners of less than, ten or at lunches or less than eight unless for some particular reason you want to put favors at the places for Christmas or an anniversary, for example.

 Sources— Syndicated articles by Emily Post, Roberta Lee, William Morris

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia 

Etiquette, Diplomacy and Forks

Poland brings up table manners in chopper feud with France

October 2016
WARSAW (AFP) - Poland's deputy defence minister last week claimed that Poles taught the French how to use forks, as a diplomatic row raged over the handling of a failed multi-billion euro helicopter deal.

He spoke after Paris withdrew the Polish delegation's invitation to the Euronaval industry fair in France this month, amid tension over the breakdown in talks aimed at Poland buying Airbus choppers.

"The French side officially invited us a long time ago and now they are showing us the door," Deputy Minister Bartosz Kownacki said on the TVN24 private news channel.

"But these are the people we taught to eat with a fork a couple of centuries ago, which may explain their behaviour today."

He was referring to the fact that the fork was introduced to France by French King Henry III, who had earlier been elected king of Poland.

Historians are however divided on the origin of that particular fork: some say the king discovered it during a stay in Venice after leaving Poland.

Others believe he really did become acquainted with the utensil in Poland, where the fork was brought over half a century earlier by Poland's Italian-born Queen Bona Sforza.

Kownacki's comments were heavily condemned by the liberal opposition as well as the spokeswoman of the governing conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, Beata Mazurek, who described them as "unfortunate" and "not very diplomatic".

"Minister Kownacki is perhaps the first politician to commit diplomatic suicide by fork," the Polityka weekly commented on its website.

Last week, Poland halted talks with Airbus to buy 50 of its Caracal helicopters, drawing a furious response from chief executive Tom Enders who said his company had never been treated so badly by any government.

The spat has ratcheted up diplomatic tensions between Warsaw and Paris, which was backing Airbus in the process, leading French President Francois Hollande to postpone a visit to Warsaw.

There is disagreement over who actually ended the negotiations.

On Wednesday, several media outlets reported the cancellation of Poland's invite to Euronaval, citing an official letter received at the Polish embassy in Paris.

A source familiar with the matter confirmed the cancellation to AFP in Paris.

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Etiquette and the History of Forks

      

An assortment of fork designs, for everything from Victorian green corn, to baked potatoes, bread, butter, ice cream and cheese.

Early Forks and Use in Europe

Thomas Coryat was an English traveller and writer of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean age (c. 1577 – 1617). He is principally remembered for two volumes of writings he left regarding his travels, often on foot, through Europe and parts of Asia. He is credited with introducing the table fork to England, with “Furcifer” (Latin: fork-bearer, rascal) which then became one of his nicknames. The fork he described had two tines. Since then, forks have been designed with many more than 2 tines. Some forks have up to 7 or 8, depending on what one is serving.

               

Antique melon forks ~ Perfect for cantaloupes, watermelons, honeydew melons, etc. Though the fork’s early history is obscure, the fork as a kitchen and dining utensil is believed by some to have originated in the Roman Empire, or perhaps in Ancient Greece. Others believe the fork’s origins to be in Africa or the Middle East. 

The origins of personal table forks are believed to be in the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire, when, according to “1843 Magazine” at the party celebrating her marriage to the son of the doge of Venice in 1004, Byzantine Princess, Maria Argyropoulina, niece to the emperor of Byzantium, scandalized the guests by using a fork to eat. Prior to that, forks were large, two-pronged utensils used for toasting or carving foods, and smaller versions could be used to retrieve food from jars or other containers, but no one had used one to eat with publicly. Her actions were immediately condemned. One priest declared that “‘God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks – his fingers.’ When Maria died of the plague two years later, it was seen as divine punishment for her decadence.”

Use of the fork spread slowly during the first millennium CE and then spread into southern Europe during the second millennium. Forks did not become common in northern Europe until the 18th century and were not commonly used to eat in North America until the 19th century. By the mid 1800s, forks were being designed for nearly every type of food, and were considered necessary to every proper home's table.

It is common knowledge (and a flattering social myth for us) that our own ancestors used to have very different -- and much cruder -- table manners from those we practice today. We have “come on,” in other words; we have “progressed.” The simplest historical novel or movie can make an exotic effect by presenting a scene in which dinner guests gnaw meat straight off bones gripped in their greasy fists, then hurl the remains into the corners of the room. These, the audience accepts without difficulty, were the manners of the past, before we became modern and civilized. (This sense of superiority does not prevent us from feeling proud, at the same time, of modern simplicity and lack of pomp. We are as capable of despising our ancestors for their tradition-bound complexity as for their rudimentary standards of propriety.) 

Forks had also to be made and sold, then produced in versions which more and more people could afford, as they slowly ceased being merely unnecessary and became the mark of civilized behavior. 

Manners have indeed changed. They were not invented on the spot, but developed into the system to which we now conform. Since manners are rituals and therefore conservative -- part of their purpose is always conservation -- they change slowly if at all, and usually in the face of long and widespread unwillingness. Even when a new way of doing things has been adopted by a powerful elite group -- using forks instead of fingers, for example -- it may take decades, even centuries, for people generally to decide to follow suit. Forks had not only to be seen in use and their advantages successfully argued; they had also to be made and sold, then produced in versions which more and more people could afford, as they slowly ceased being merely unnecessary and became the mark of civilized behaviour. After the eleventh-century date of the first extant document describing (with wonder) the sight of someone using one, the fork took eight centuries to become a utensil employed universally in the West. —From Margaret Visser’s, “The Rituals of Dinner” 

“It’s a dinglehopper!” Scuttle the seagull, answering an inquisitive mermaid Ariel, after she presents a dinner fork for his expert identification of a human item that she is unfamiliar with, in Disney’s 1989 The Little Mermaid ~ From “Let Them Eat Cake... The Strange Saga of the Mango Fork and the Unique Dining Habits of the Dutch” by Etiquipedia Site Editor, Maura Graber 

Meet Fork In Box. Fork, meet reader. “Meet Fork in Box” was the misspelled listing I found on eBay that allowed me to snag my second Dutch mango fork. Obviously a misspelling, I am sure the German Ebay seller who listed this beauty meant to list a “meat fork in box”. Before I go any further however, I should tell you a bit of my history with this odd utensil. In reality, I have never met a fork I didn’t like. My preoccupation with forks began not too long after Disney’s Ariel made her landing at the box office. Katie, my daughter, was almost three. She was enthralled with the precocious sea maiden who had red hair the color of her own. By the time the VHS tape was running continuously at home, I was starting an etiquette business for children and teens. The majority of the kids I taught were so used to fast foods, they rarely ate at a family dinner table. Showing them interesting and odd looking forks, along with other unusual utensils, was a way I found that kept kids interested when I talked of setting the table at home. I needed to do something to catch their wandering attentions, and strange utensils filled that need. 

Several Dutch mango forks ~ Many Dutch feel these forks are better suited to cake. All of these pictured are Dutch, save the fork on the far right. It was from South America. 

My husband was great at sussing out unique forks for me in the beginning. We stopped in thrift and antiques shops to find odd things for the table that were relatively inexpensive. Utensils over $10.00 seemed pricey. After all, these were props for my students to pass around and examine. Sales of very old used books on silver at the local library were how I did my research on pieces we’d found. Some were sold for only a quarter. I use them for reference still. 

Anything Victorian was popular during the 1990s. Tea rooms were sprouting up in malls, while magazines and books devoted to the subject were readily available. Over the next few years, as my collection of table silver oddities grew, my forays for the rarest of forks became more time consuming. Any weekend outing meant a side trip to a thrift shop or antiques mall. I was asked to give talks and lectures on not just my collection, but how people in America once dined with grace and forethought. At least more forethought than wondering if “... you want fries with that?”, before being handed a bag of fast food through the car window.– From various sources including the book, “Let Them Eat Cake,” by Maura J. Graber

🍽️Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber of The RSVP Institute of Etiquette, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia