How To Use Every Utensil

[upbeat music]

Hi, I'm Darra Goldstein, an author and food scholar.

And I'm here to show you all kinds of eating utensils

and the proper way to use them.

This is just one way to set the table.

What we'll look at today are the utensils used

in Western culture,

though there are many, many more.

The fork is actually a latecomer to the table.

The earliest table forks were used by very elite ladies

who didn't want to mess up their fingers.

They were only about two inches high

and they were used to spear sweet meats.

But the Catholic church condemned them

because the two tines resembled the devil's horns.

And so forks kind of disappeared for several centuries.

They started coming back in the 15th century

during the Renaissance.

Initially they were considered effeminate

because women were the ones to use them.

It's only later that the fork came to be seen

as a much more male and sort of aggressive implement

while the spoon became gendered as feminine.

This is a dinner fork.

This is a fork you're most likely to see wherever you go.

It is the standard.

The dinner fork will be the longest fork at the table

and also have the greatest curvature.

As you can see, there's a curvature here

and this is how the fork developed,

because when people wanted to use it

not just for stabilizing but for eating,

you wanted to be able not just to spear

but also to scoop.

A reason why the fork became more popular,

until the Renaissance, people did not use napkins

at the table.

And they used the edges of the tablecloths

to wipe their hands.

You can imagine how greasy those tablecloths were

at the end of the meal.

A fork is a lot easier to clean than a tablecloth.

What makes a fork a wonderful utensil is it's multipurpose.

If you have something like these beautiful gnocchi to spear,

you just spear them directly.

You can also scoop and lift.

This is a lobster pick.

During the Gilded Age in the late 19th century,

all sorts of specialized utensils were created

for every imaginable purpose.

They have a tiny fork on one end and a scoop on the other.

When you have something small like this,

the tines of a regular fork won't fit.

So you take the scoop and you simply reach in,

you dig in, scrape it out into the plate,

spear it with the fork tines and into the mouth.

Here is a fish fork.

For meaty fish like swordfish

you can always use a dinner fork,

but if you have something delicate like sole

you want to use a finer fork.

The outer times are curved slightly

to enable you to scoop up the fish.

Sole and other delicate fish is very flaky.

And you wanna make sure that you don't compress

those beautiful flakes.

You'll notice that there are two notches

on either side of this fork.

They echo the notch that you always find in the fish knife.

To use the fish fork, you cut the fish

and then scoop it onto the flat tines of the fork.

This is a salad fork.

It's smaller than the dinner fork.

It's usually six to seven inches long

and it doesn't have the same deep curvature

that the dinner fork has.

You'll also notice that it has a very wide tine.

If you have something in your salad

that you want to be able to cut

and not just spear or scoop,

it comes in very handy.

It has a broader base here in relation to the handle

which allows you to more easily take up delicate leaves.

One thing to remember, if you come to a table

that has many forks spread out

to the left of the dinner plate,

you always start with the fork that is on the outside edge.

This is an oyster fork.

You can see how small it is.

Oyster forks have actually been known since ancient times

unlike the dinner fork.

What was a Roman to do when faced with an oyster

and nothing to eat it with?

That's how the oyster fork developed.

They can have either two or three tines.

To use the oyster fork, you simply pick up the oyster

in the half shell, spear it.

Mm.

And that's all there is to it.

This is a pastry fork.

It was specially designed to be used

with pies and other desserts that have a firm crust.

This thicker tine allows you to use the fork

almost like a knife so you can get through the crust.

You take it and put your index finger on top of the handle.

And then you cut down through the pie

and it cuts very smoothly.

Scoop underneath the pie.

Mm.

It's really good.

Oh my God.

It's really delicious.

Like the spoon, the knife was a very early introduction,

when people were still hunters and gatherers.

The earliest knives were made of sharpened flint,

and they were used to process the meat that had been hunted.

Over time, they came to appear on the sideboards

of wealthy families in the dining room

to carve whole joints of meat.

But it was much later that they became

individual implements at the table.

This is a steak knife.

You can see how sharp it is with a very pointed blade

and also lots of serration which allows it

to cut through the meat.

They often have decorative handles made of wood.

Before the late 17th century,

individual sets of flatware

were not provided at table settings,

and wealthy people traveled with their own kits,

including their own knives.

I have a pork chop here that I'm going to cut into

by placing the blade upright and just slicing.

Now I'm setting the knife on the edge of the plate,

transferring the fork to my right hand.

Mm.

Oh my God.

[Woman] Really good?

It is so good.

This is a fruit knife and it's absolutely adorable.

Serving fresh fruit was considered

a very elegant way to end a meal.

And one of the ways that people used to display prestige

and show their wealth was to have handles

that were made of precious materials.

Sometimes it would be amber,

you could have them encrusted with jewels.

Many of them, instead of having silver

or stainless steel for the blade are gilded,

so that there's no chance of any acidic reaction

with the metal because gold will not react with acid at all.

The way you use this knife is to take a firm fruit

like an apple or a pear,

and simply slice a wedge from it, just like this.

Mm.

This is a standard table knife.

As you can see, it's about seven and a half,

eight inches long.

Unlike the earliest knives, this is much blunter.

It doesn't have a pointed tip.

And this developed really in around the 1600s

for a couple of reasons.

One reason is that people were picking their teeth

at the table with a sharp knife,

using the point of the knife as a toothpick.

And it was considered very uncouth.

The other reason is that in the 17th century

there was a fashion for new foods like fresh peas.

The fork had not come into widespread use yet.

And the knife was actually used

for scooping peas and other vegetables.

So it had to have a somewhat broader and blunter blade.

When I was growing up, my mother told me always

to place the blade of the knife facing inward.

It's because it signals a friendly host.

In the past, when knives were sharper,

if you had the blade facing outward

it could be used as a weapon.

Fish is much more delicate than meat,

so you want to make sure that you're not damaging

that tender flesh.

The blade of the fish knife is always blunt, not sharp,

and it's considerably wider than the blade of a table knife.

It often, particularly in the 19th century,

developed to have a very dramatic scimitar shape.

This is called a pistol handle,

a shape that became very popular in the 18th century,

partly because ergonomically it's really comfortable.

What I do use it for is for lifting skin from the fish.

So I use the fork to stabilize the fish

and slice just underneath the skin.

And then I can lift it off very, very easily.

But if you wanna eat the skin,

it's sharp enough that you can cut into it.

As with other knives, once you've finished the slicing,

lay the knife along the rim of the plate.

Nothing like fresh salmon.

Here we have a butter knife.

It's an 18th century innovation.

When people started serving bread

on side plates at the table.

It's only about six inches long.

Instead of being elongated, it is rounded right here,

which makes it very good for spreading.

So to use it, if you wanna be hoity toity

and follow perfect etiquette,

you don't put it right on your bread.

You put it on the side of the dish

and only then do you cut down into it

and spread it on the bread.

And because this hasn't touched your mouth at all

you return it to the side of the plate,

but then you can dip it in the common bowl

whenever you need to.

But one thing you should not do is leave the knife

stuck in the butter bowl.

That's a real no-no.

Spoons are the oldest eating utensil.

In the beginning we just used hands.

But if you had some hot liquid boiling in a cauldron,

you obviously couldn't scoop it up.

So you reached for a shell and you picked it up that way.

But if the flame was hot,

you would want to protect your hand

so you attached a stick to it.

And that evolved into the spoon that we know today.

This is a soup spoon, the mother of all spoons,

and these were considered to be in the shape of the tongue.

And actually the Latin name for them

was related to the word for tongue,

either lingula or ligula.

The spoons originally were really large

and they were meant to be grabbed in the fist

and shoved into the mouth,

but that was not considered good etiquette.

So over the years, they evolved to be even more elongated

and to be held gracefully in the hand

with two or three fingers.

Of all the spoons that we're looking at,

this has the largest bowl

and it's really become the prototype

for what we consider the tablespoon.

The proper way to use this spoon,

we're going to eat the soup from the side,

not from the front.

Really delicious.

That is so good.

I'm sorry, I can't resist.

One of the ways in which soup spoons evolved

is that instead of having a completely flat handle,

it became slightly curved

so that it could rest on the rim of the bowl

without the spoon sliding into the soup.

If you happen to be a meat lover,

you know that there's very delicious marrow inside bones.

The marrow scoop or spoon dates from the late 17th century

when eating the marrow out of bones came into fashion,

primarily beef bones, but here we have lamb bones.

To use this, you would take the bone

and I hope you don't mind using your fingers

because after all, they're the best utensils of all.

And you take the narrow end of the scoop

and you put it into the bone

and you see this beautiful marrow is coming out

and you put it onto toast.

And then you can take the longer end of the scoop

and you can spread it.

After the 19th century, marrow fell somewhat out of favor

because it was considered too fatty.

And certainly in the United States

in the second half of the 20th century,

people were avoiding many forms of fat.

Nowadays, as marrow comes back into fashion,

you're likely to see one of these marrow scoops

at your local steakhouse.

Here we have the teaspoon.

We tend to take utensils for granted.

We say hand me a teaspoon and we don't really think

about what that means.

But actually the teaspoon is a fairly recent development.

It came about only in the mid 17th century,

when tea was introduced to the west from China

and it became the rage.

It was a really big fad.

And of course, people wanted the proper utensils

to serve it with,

especially in England, where they added milk and sugar

to their tea.

The French teaspoon is a little bit smaller

than the standard English one.

And as you might imagine,

the American teaspoon is a little bit bigger,

cause everything is super sized here.

We call it a teaspoon, but it's evolved into just

our basic dessert spoon.

And that's why I'm going to enjoy some

ice cream with it right now.

Although the proper etiquette for soup

is to scoop away from you,

with a teaspoon you can eat it however you like.

You don't have to eat from the side.

Here we have a caviar spoon,

which is one of my favorite utensils ever,

partly because I love caviar so much.

It does not have a metal bowl.

This is a very important point.

With caviar, you don't want any metal at all.

You want mother of pearl or horn or, in the past, ivory,

so that the fish roe would not get a tainted flavor

from the metal.

But I think mother of pearl is the best

because it comes from the sea, it's oyster shells.

Until the sturgeons became endangered,

caviar was a much more everyday food.

Over the years, as more and more sturgeon were fished,

it became endangered and it was really in the 19th century

that special implements developed to serve it.

So caviar should always be served highly iced.

What you technically should do is spread it on a tiny blini.

These are little Russian pancakes.

And just turn it upside down

and then pop it into your mouth.

Or if you're a caviar taster,

you can put it right here and eat it like that.

I'm gonna eat this whole thing.

It's terrible.

But now that I've put my spoon in it,

no one else can eat it.

Do you like to eat grapefruit in the morning?

There is an ingenious spoon for eating it.

As you can see, it's of a small size

and it has very sharp serrations here.

It's extremely pointed compared to either the soup spoon

or the bouillon spoon or even the teaspoon for that matter.

At the end of the 19th century

refrigerated train cars started traveling

across the United States from California to the east coast,

and bringing with them oranges and grapefruit

and all kinds of other citrus fruit

which suddenly became more accessible to people.

And so the grapefruit spoon was born.

And all you do is you start digging in along the segments,

and you cut the segments as though it's a knife.

And then because there is a bowl to the spoon,

it comes right out in one beautiful piece.

This one you can put right in your mouth, bowl forward.

This is a bouillon spoon.

One of the interesting things about utensils

is that many of them developed in response

to culinary trends.

Instead of having thick soups, it became fashionable

to eat thin soups called bouillon or consomme in small cups.

So you needed a smaller spoon

in order to eat it with elegance.

This is only about five or six inches long

as opposed to the larger soup spoon.

The reason there were so many soup spoons,

and forks for that matter,

is because people wanted to display their wealth.

It was performance.

So you would go into a banquet table

and you would see so many forks

and so many spoons that you really didn't know what to do.

You had to understand etiquette.

Ah.

The spork was invented in New York City in 1874,

when a doctor named Samuel Francis took out a patent on it.

He actually had a three-way utensil

that had a sharp cutting edge as well.

But this fork and spoon combination became the standard.

The problem with a spork from my point of view

is that the tines of the fork are never long enough

to actually spear anything.

And the bowl of the spork is not really so good for scooping

especially if you have something like soup.

So I think it's a pretty useless utensil,

but it's the kind of utensil that you'll find

at all kinds of receptions and buffets.

Sorry, I can't get enthusiastic about it.

I just really feel like it's not good for anything

[woman gasps]

Here we have the demitasse spoon.

As you can see, it's quite tiny.

It's only about three and a half inches long.

And it's designed for serving specifically

with after dinner coffee in a tiny cup.

Demitasse means half a cup.

Since teaspoons weren't used as much in France

as in England and coffee was more prevalent there,

the demitasse spoon evolved from the teaspoon to be smaller

and more suitable for the after dinner coffee.

And so what you wanna do is take your sugar,

drop it into the coffee cup, take your spoon and stir.

The reason the demitasse spoon is so small

is it's designed to rest on the saucer.

It's not really a utensil that you use for eating.

It's solely for stirring.

Here we have a parfait spoon.

As you can see, compared to all the other spoons

we've looked at, it has a very long handle,

and that's so it can reach deep into a parfait dish

which is tall and narrow.

Parfaits were invented in France in the late 19th century.

The word means perfect.

And they really are pretty perfect.

And what this spoon allows you to do

is reach deep down and not just eat from the surface.

These are delicious.

This spoon has another very important purpose,

and that is as an ice teaspoon,

because it comes in a very tall glass

and the long handle will enable you to reach

down to the bottom to stir sugar into it.

This is a straw spoon.

When you look at it front on,

you might not see what makes it so distinctive

but the end of it is actually a straw.

When you first get a milkshake,

it's really icy and cold and very thick.

So you want to dig right into it with a spoon.

But what happens as the milkshake begins to melt,

it turns into slush at the bottom,

and it's really hard even with a long handle

to scoop it all out.

That's where the straw part comes in perfectly handy.

I love this utensil.

And there you have it, every utensil you need

to enjoy a really great meal.

These tools tell us a tremendous amount

about the progress of civilization

and the desire for both beauty and utility at the table.

I hope this episode has given you a glimpse

into what utensil to use for what.

Thankfully the table has been transformed

since the Gilded Age and we no longer have to worry

about 146 different utensils and how to use them.