TABLEWARE History traces royal customs

In the Middle Ages, your eating utensil was also your weapon.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
If you've ever sat at a fancy dinner table and felt intimidated by the array of forks and unfamiliar stemware, consider yourself lucky. At least you don't have to feel intimidated by your tablemates wielding daggers to stab at the main course.
Had you dined elegantly in the Middle Ages, you and the other guests would have been spearing meat from the center of the table with your knives, the very same knives you might have used that morning to fend off an enemy.
Lucky for us, fine dining has become considerably more refined since then.
The elements of an elegant table and the way they're arranged have evolved through the centuries. To us plebeians, a formal table setting may seem like a foreign code known only to the upper crust, but it's really a logical arrangement that's arisen from both practicality and tradition.
Not really formal
Actually, formal isn't quite the right term for the kind of dining most of us experience, cautioned Suzanne von Drachenfels, author of "The Art of the Table" and a former tabletop consultant to fine-dinnerware maker Fitz & amp; Floyd. A truly formal dinner involves a chef, servants, parking attendants and a seemingly endless procession of food courses. Anything less is considered informal.
Formal or informal, today's elegant table setting has been heavily influenced by the practices of European royalty, but it harks back to some rather inelegant beginnings.
For the most part, our ancient ancestors didn't even bother with plates. Food was placed directly on the table or in communal bowls, so "you could only eat what you could reach," said John Niehoff, an associate professor at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y.
Upper-class Romans were another matter. They not only had individual plates, Niehoff said, but even plates for different courses. There's also evidence that Assyrian noblemen ate from individual trays, von Drachenfels said.
Nevertheless, such niceties pretty much disappeared in Europe during the Middle Ages. Instead of dishes, most people ate with their hands off shared slices of bread called trenchers and drank from common vessels, von Drachenfels said.
If an eating utensil was used, it was typically a knife. When a nobleman was invited to a feast, he brought his dagger along and used it for everything from picking up food from the table to cutting it and then putting the morsels into his mouth.
Because the knife doubled as a weapon, the custom arose of positioning it with the blade toward the plate -- a custom we still observe today. An inward-facing blade signified good will, von Drachenfels explained; one that faced outward allowed for swift retaliation.
Forks were used in Middle Eastern courts by the seventh century, but a Byzantine princess who tried to introduce them to Venice when she married a Venetian magistrate in the 11th century got a chilly reception. The church censured her, calling the fork an affront to God's intentions for fingers, von Drachenfels said.
Nevertheless, the fork eventually gained acceptance in Italy, and Italy's Catherine de Medicis helped bring it to France. After her marriage to Henry II of France in 1533, she urged the fork's use for the sake of both hygiene and appearance, Niehoff said.
The English, however, continued to shun the fork as an effeminate tool that had no other purpose than keeping the hands clean -- not a priority for British macho men, evidently.
French and English nobility finally accepted the fork in the 17th century, von Drachenfels said, but it was another 100 years before it caught on with commoners.
Simpler settings
Early Americans were slower than Europeans to adopt dining refinements, largely because the settlers lived and ate simply, Niehoff said. In fact, the knife remained the main eating utensil for us rough-edged Americans until the 1820s or 1830s, according to Ann Boger, a former assistant curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art who organized an exhibit on the history of flatware in 1994.
Those early settlers typically ate from wooden trenchers or wooden tableware called treen, von Drachenfels said, even though most Europeans were using ceramic dishes by the 17th century.
The biggest boost to elegant dining was probably the Industrial Revolution, when mass production and the invention of electroplating made good china and flatware affordable to a growing middle class. These newly moneyed consumers wanted to emulate nobility by using an array of implements for different foods and times of day, and they sought to set themselves apart from the lower class by developing elaborate dining rituals, Niehoff said.
Practical matters
Although royal custom has influenced where all those accouterments go on a table, practicality has also played a role. The placement of flatware is an example: The knife, Niehoff explained, went to the right of the plate because most people are right-handed. Strength is needed for carving meat, so it made sense to put the knife within easy access of the dominant hand. The fork's use for spearing requires less strength, so that utensil went on the left. The spoon ended up on the right largely to avoid crowding the left side, which often is set with two or more forks.