The folks over at The Irish Times have a great article about the history and age of cutlery. How long have been using a fork, knife and spoon?
Excerpt:
“Spoons are among the oldest eating tools; it’s not hard to imagine early humans making the leap from natural spoons such as seashells or stones to fashioning spoons out of wood, animal horns and eventually metal, adding handles somewhere along the way.”
Claire Lower is the food & beverage editor for Lifehacker’s Skillet site which we read regularly around here.
She published an article stating “When You’re Cooking, Use a Wooden Spoon to Taste Food”. The reasons she gives are mostly related to temperature and not burning yourself. Hot cutlery can be a problem. Most kitchens use metal tasting spoons. And wood tends to burn on gas ranges.
So what do you think? Wood or metal spoons?
The image above was found over at Reddit on We Want Plates. I guess a rather fancy chef thought it would be a good idea to use a lot of cutlery to serve bite sized food. That’s a lot of forks. And probably not a very happy dishwasher.
But this does bring to mind how flatware can affect your meal. We use different spoons for different foods such as soup, dessert, coffee, grapefruit and such. We have different knives for butter, steak and cake. We have a couple of different forks I guess. I remember being in Germany and it seemed every brand of beer had it’s own special glass. With the easy access to 3D printing are we coming up on custom cutlery as well?
We will see, here at the Cutlery Review.
Here’s some interesting cutlery trivia for you. Dinner forks were considered to be a tool of the Devil & banned by the Catholic Church. And there might be a connection between the word fork and bad four letter word (or not).
A snippet from the article at Leite’s Culinaria by Chad Ward:
“God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks—his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to him to substitute artificial metal forks for them when eating.”
It’s a great article with detailed history about flatware that we haven’t seen before.
