Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (16 page)

Thus, with the knife originating 1.5 million years ago, the spoon twenty thousand years ago, and the fork in the eleventh century, the full modern-day complement of knife, fork, and spoon took ages to come together at the table. And though we take the threesome for granted today, just two hundred years ago most inns throughout Europe and America served one, or two, but seldom all three implements. When wealthy people traveled, they carried with them their own set of cutlery.

Crossing Knife and Fork
. The custom of intersecting a knife and fork on a plate at the conclusion of a meal began in seventeenth-century Italy. Today some people regard it as a practical signal to a hostess or waitress that we’ve finished eating. But it was introduced by Italian nobility as a religious symbol—a cross. The gesture was considered not only good manners but also a pious act of thanksgiving for the bounty provided by the Lord.

Napkin: Pre-500
B.C
., Near East

The small napkins of paper and cloth that we use to dab our lips and protect our laps would never have sufficed centuries ago, when the napkin served a more functional purpose. To put it simply: eating a multicourse meal entirely with the fingers—whether three fingers or five—made a napkin the size of a towel essential. And the first napkins were indeed full-size towels.

Later called “serviettes,” towel-like napkins were used by the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans to wipe food from their hands. And to further cleanse the hands during a meal, which could last many hours, all three cultures used
finger bowls,
with water scented by such flowers and herbs as rose petals and rosemary. For the Egyptians, the scent—almond, cinnamon, or orange blossom; myrrh, cassia, or spikenard—was tailored to the course being consumed.

During the sixth-century
B.C
. reign of Tarquinius Superbus, the seventh and last king of Rome, Roman nobility instituted a second use for the napkin—as a sort of doggie bag. Guests at a banquet were expected to wrap delicacies from the table in serviettes to take home. To depart empty-handed was unmannerly.

Preserved documents reveal the onetime splendor of the serviette. In Italy in the 1680s, there were twenty-six favored shapes in which dinner napkins were folded for various persons and occasions; these included Noah’s Ark (for clergymen), a hen (for the noblewoman of highest rank present), chicks (for the other women), plus carp, tortoises, bulls, bears, and rabbits.

A 1729 etiquette book clearly states the many uses of a large serviette: “For wiping the mouth, lips, and fingers when they are greasy. For wiping
the knife before cutting bread. For cleaning the spoon and fork after using them.” The same book then zeros in on a fine point: “When the fingers are very greasy, wipe them first on a piece of bread, in order not to spoil the serviette too much.”

What undermined the reign of the towel-size serviette (and for that matter, the finger bowl) was the fork. Once forks were adopted to handle food, leaving fingers spotless, the large napkin became redundant. Napkins were retained, but in smaller size and to wipe the mouth.

British folklore records an additional use of the napkin, which arose in the eighteenth century. A tailor by the name of Doily—legend does not record his Christian name—opened a linen shop on the Strand in London. One of his specialty items was a small circular napkin trimmed in delicate lace, to be used to protect a tablecloth when serving desserts. Customers called Mr. Doily’s napkins just that— “Doily’s napkins” —and through frequent use of the phrase, the article became known as a doily.

The original size and function of the serviette is evinced in the etymology of the word “napkin.” It derives from the Old French
naperon
, meaning “little tablecloth.” The English horrowed the word
naperon
but applied it to a large cloth tied around the waist to protect the front of the body (and to wipe the hands on); they called it
a napron
. Due to a pronunciation shift involving a single letter,
a napron
became “an apron.” Thus, a napkin at one time or another has been a towel, a tablecloth, a doily, and an apron. After surviving all that colorful, controversial, and convoluted history, the noble napkin today has reached the lowly status of a throwaway.

Additional examples of our tableware have enjoyed a long history and contain interesting name origins. Several pieces, for instance, were named for their shapes.
A dish
still resembles its Roman namesake, the
discus
, and is still sometimes hurled.

Bowl
simply comes from the Anglo-Saxon word
bolla
, meaning “round.”

And the Old French word for “flat,”
plat
, echoes in
plate
and
platter
.

It is the original clay composition of the
tureen
that earned it its name. Old French for “clay” is
terre
, and during the Middle Ages, French housewives called the clay bowl a “terrine.”

The Sanskrit word
kupa
meant “water well” and was appropriately adopted for the oldest of household drinking vessels, the
cup
. And
glass
derives from the ancient Celtic word
glas
, for “green,” since the color of the first crude and impure British glass was green.

Some name origins are tricky. Today a
saucer
holds a cup steady, but for many generations it was a special small dish for holding sauces (including salt) to flavor meats. Although it was popular in Europe as early as 1340, only mass production in the machine age made the saucer inexpensive enough to be merely in service to a cup.

And the object upon which all of the above items rest, the
table
, derived its name from the Latin
tabula
, meaning “board,” which was what a table was, is, and probably always will be.

Chopsticks: Antiquity, China

During the late Middle Ages, Europeans were confronted with a new vogue: cutting food at the table into small, bite-size pieces. They found the custom, recently introduced by merchants trading with China, tedious and pointlessly fastidious. Unknown to thirteenth-century Europeans was the Oriental philosophy dictating that food be diced—not at the table, but in the kitchen before it was served.

For centuries, the Chinese had taught that it was uncouth and barbaric to serve a large carcass that in any way resembled the original animal. In addition, it was considered impolite to expect a dinner guest to struggle through a dissection that could have been done beforehand, in the kitchen, out of sight. An old Chinese proverb sums up the philosophy: “We sit at table to eat, not to cut up carcasses.” That belief dictated food size, which in turn suggested a kind of eating utensil. Chopsticks—of wood, bone, and ivory—were perfectly suited to conveying the precut morsels to the mouth, and the Chinese word for the implements,
kwai-tsze
, means “quick ones.” Our term “chopsticks” is an English phonetic version of
kwai-tsze
.

In the Orient, the father of etiquette was the fifth-century philosopher Confucius—who, despite popular misconceptions, neither founded a religion nor formulated a philosophical system. Instead, motivated by the social disorder of his time, he posited principles of correct conduct, emphasizing solid family relationships as the basis of social stability. The Oriental foundation for all good manners is taken to be Confucius’s maxim “What you do not like when done to yourself, do not do to others.”

Western Etiquette Books: 13th Century, Europe

During the dark days of the Middle Ages, when barbarian tribes from the north raided and sacked the civilized nations of Southern Europe, manners were people’s least concern. Formal codes of civility fell into disuse for hundreds of years. It was the popularity of the eleventh-century Crusades, and the accompanying prestige of knighthood, with its own code of chivalry, that reawakened an interest in manners and etiquette.

One new court custom, called “coupling,” paired a nobleman with a lady at a banquet, each couple sharing one goblet and one plate. Etymologists locate the practice as the source of a later expression for cohorts aligned in any endeavor, said to “eat from the same plate.”

The rebirth of strict codes of behavior is historically documented by the appearance, starting in thirteenth-century Europe, of etiquette books. The upper class was expanding. More and more people had access to court, and they wanted to know how to behave. The situation is not all that different from the twentieth-century social phenomenon of upward mobility, also accompanied by etiquette books.

The Crusades and the prestige of knighthood occasioned a rebirth in etiquette, cultured person ate with three fingers; a commoner with five
.

Here is a sampling of the advice such books offered the upwardly mobile through the centuries. (Keep in mind that what the etiquette writers caution people
against
usually represents the behavioral norm of the day.)

13th Century

• “A number of people gnaw a bone and then put it back in the dish—this is a serious offense.”

• “Refrain from falling upon the dish like a swine while eating, snorting disgustingly and smacking the lips.”

• “Do not spit over or on the table in the manner of hunters.”

• “When you blow your nose or cough, turn round so that nothing falls on the table.”

14th Century

• “A man who clears his throat when he eats, and one who blows his nose in the tablecloth, are both ill-bred; I assure you.”

• “You should not poke your teeth with your knife, as some do; it is a bad habit.”

• “I hear that some eat unwashed. May their fingers be palsied!”

15th Century

• “Do not put back on your plate what has been in your mouth.”

• “Do not chew anything you have to spit out again.”

• “It is bad manners to dip food into the salt.”

During these centuries, there was much advice on the proper way of blowing one’s nose. There were of course no tissues, and handkerchiefs had still not come into common use. Frowned upon was the practice of blowing into a tablecloth or coat sleeve. Accepted was the practice of blowing into the fingers. Painters and sculptors of the age frankly reproduced these gestures. Among the knights depicted on the tombstone of French king Philip the Bold at Dijon, France, one is blowing his nose into his coat, another, into his fingers.

Children’s Manners: 1530, Netherlands

The one book that is credited more than any other with ushering manners out of an age of coarseness and into one of refinement is a 1530 treatise—so popular following its publication that it went through thirty editions in the author’s lifetime, qualifying it as an outstanding best-seller of the sixteenth
century. The author, Christian philosopher and educator Erasmus of Rotterdam, the greatest classical scholar of the northern Humanist Renaissance, had hit on a theme ripe for discussion: the importance of instilling manners at an early age.

Table manners should be instilled in the young, the philosophy espoused by Erasmus of Rotterdam, whose etiquette book became a best-seller and a standard school text
.

Titled
De civilitate morum puerilium
, or
On Civility in Children
, his text continued to be reprinted into the eighteenth century, and spawned a multitude of translations, imitations, and sequels. It became a standard schoolbook for the education of boys throughout Europe. While upwardly mobile adults were struggling to break ingrained habits and acquire proper manners, Erasmus pointed out that the easiest, most painless place to begin is in childhood. Manners ought to be not a patina over coarse adult actions but a foundation upon which a child can erect good behavior.