Count the
forks at the next grand dinner you attend (what you do mean you don't have an
invitation yet?) and you might assume that the more silver laid out beside your
plate, the grander your host must be.
But by a set of unwritten and peculiarly British rules, the opposite is
true.
Too many
forks is vulgar!
In this
film I trace the fork’s surprisingly bumpy journey to the British table, from a
medieval world in which a great lord ate with his knife, his spoon, his bread
and his fingers, to an Edwardian dinner party at which ten guests might face
five hundred pieces of cutlery and crockery.
Along the
way we meet Henry VIII picking at candied fruit with a little two-pronged
silver “suckett fork”, and Thomas Coryat, the Jacobean traveller who came home
from Italy in 1611 full of enthusiasm for forks, only to be mocked as
“Furcifer” for his trouble.
We’ll see
why it took Charles II and his courtiers, returning from exile in 1660, to make
the fork respectable at last, and why that same year also brought back the
oldest object in the Crown Jewels, which happens to be a spoon.
Then
comes the nineteenth century, when service à la Russe, with dinner served
course by course rather than all at once, gave hosts the perfect excuse to go
shopping for cake forks, fish knives and fruit knives.
And then
comes the backlash, because once everyone could own forks, the real test of
class became knowing which ones to leave in the drawer.
I finish
with John Betjeman’s merciless satire on suburban pretension, the 1950s panic
about “U” and “non-U” vocabulary, and the one word lying on the dinner table
that a certain kind of Briton would never, ever say out loud.
You’ll
have to watch to the end to find out what it is!
