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Letter to the editor

In dining, young nation reached fork in the road

By BILL DURYEA
Published June 8, 2005

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - In 1800, less than 1 percent of U.S. households had a single silver spoon.

"How then did the American middle class become tyrannized by the tables they set," asked Darra Goldstein, a professor of Russian at Williams College and the founding editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. Goldstein was one of a handful of food experts who spoke in mid May at a symposium dedicating the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the University of Michigan.

In less than a century, Goldstein explained to the symposium crowd, American dining habits evolved from democratic and unostentatious to unapologetically elitist. As they left behind the Colonial Era and embraced the Gilded Age, diners abandoned the simplicity of knife and spoon for ever-more elaborate presentations demanding dozens of pieces of silverware. It was a trend toward excess begun in the courts of Europe, but the young United States was incapable of resisting the allure of aristocratic living.

You might say the trouble started with the fork.

The fork, with just two prongs, was invented in the late 15th century for wealthy women to daintily nibble on sticky sweetmeats. For that reason, the fork was for a long time "associated with prissy women," Goldstein said. "Queen Elizabeth insisted on eating with her fingers."

Well into the mid 1800s, a knife and spoon sufficed for most meals. For some centuries before that, daggerlike knives, good for stabbing and slicing, and fingers were all the most distinguished diners required.

John Adams, second president of the United States, brought home silver forks from France. "His enemies said he had abandoned the ways of democracy," Goldstein said.

At the time, the way Americans ate was as charged politically as their rhetoric. Furnituremakers designed oval dining tables to promote a less-authoritarian seating plan. This was a deliberate critique of the European style of long rectangular tables at which one's social position was revealed by how close one was seated to the salt at the center of the table.

This "democratic interlude was short-lived," Goldstein said. Pretty soon wealthier Americans were commissioning rectangular tables. Electro-plating in the 1840s and the discovery of large silver deposits such as the Comstock Lode made tableware affordable to the middle class. In the 1860s the nation's silver companies began to produce their flatware.

Into the mid 1800s, families served themselves and their guests a la francaise, meaning all the dishes were laid on the table simultaneously. Then came the advent of dining a la russe, in which dishes were brought out one at a time. The most immediate effect of this was ever more complex place settings; each course had a specific utensil.

Hence the asparagus fork, the asparagus tongs, the horseradish spoon, the olive fork, the terrapin fork, the ice cream slice, the berry spoon, the buckwheat cake lifter and on and on. Some silverware patterns included 146 implements, 19 of them spoons.

"This played into American insecurities," Goldstein said.

Etiquette manuals became a small industry as people struggled to stay abreast of the ever more intricate dining rituals. "There were pockets of resistance," Goldstein said. "President Grover Cleveland insisted on eating with a knife."

In 1925, Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce, urged passage of a law forbidding silver companies from making more than 55 pieces in a pattern.

But we still don't know how to serve asparagus.

[Last modified June 7, 2005, 08:39:04]