Until the eleventh century, almost everyone ate with their hands. The most educated were those who used only three fingers to bring food to their mouths. In that century, Domenico Salvo, a member of the court of Venice, married Princess Theodora of Byzantium. She brought a pointed object with two teeth in her trousseau, which she used to skewer food. That first fork was considered a heresy: food provided by God was sacred and had to be eaten with the hands. But, little by little, members of the nobility and clergy were adopting cutlery. The habit took a while to catch on among the population: with more teeth, the skewer only became popular even in the 19th century. The knife is the oldest cutlery: it was the homo erectus, which appeared on Earth 1.5 million years ago, who created the first sharp object, made of stone, for hunting and defense. Since then, the man has always carried a knife.
In the Bronze Age, which began around 3000 BC, it started to be made with this metal and the same knife that was used to kill was also used to peel fruit. The first to suggest that every man should have a cutlery to be used exclusively at the table was the French cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642), an ardent defender of good manners, around 1630. Unlike the knife, the spoon already appeared with the purpose of being used at the table. There are archaeological records of similar artifacts over 20,000 years old, made of wood, stone and ivory. But, in the beginning, the spoon was for collective use and looked like a shell. “When bread appeared, 12,000 years ago, people were already using a spoon to pour the broth over it”, says sociologist Gabriel Bollaffi, from the University of São Paulo (USP).
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