After getting interested in medieval-European cooking, I found out that forks didn't come into fashion in England until long after they had become common in Italian and French cuisine. Since most of what I cook and eat is basically CHinese, I eat with chopsticks, but I can't imagine trying to eat a burger and fries with nothing but a belt knife.
A burger and fries would have been on the easy side, because you'd have had a piece of bread to pick up the burger with, and fries are finger food anyway.
Despite the title, the book also talks about spoons, which deserve more attention that they getnerally get. Spoons, plus chopsticks or forks, make a rule against eating with your bare hands possible.
Apparently spoons were a very early invention. In the archaeological sites associated with kitchen middens of clamshells, someone figured out that if you fastened a clam shell to a stick, you could dip hot cooked food out of a pot and consume it more easily. As Neil deGrasse Tyson points out, people don't credit prehistoric humans with any common sense or inventive abilities. "The ancient Egyptians couldn't have built the Pyramids, because they didn't have heavy lifting machinery." But by observing contemporary pre-technological people, we discovered that our ancestors weren't really all that stupid. "Primitive" systems for distributing well water to irrigate fields turn out to be pretty sophisticated. And in Africa, people discovered that if you take a plastic water bottle and fill it full of water, and insert it through your ceiling, you can illuminate a study area brightly enough with sunshine for a student to do schoolwork at twilight. So, without construction cranes and earthmovers, how did medieval French builders create Notre Dame cathedral? With lots of people with shovels and some basic knowledge of levers.
And people probably also figured out that eating with one's hands led to illness, and began the custom of washing one's hands before a meal. A medieval feast always begins with a hand-washing ritual, with herbs or flower petals in the water and a servant standing by with a towel.
I just have to giggle at the thought of medieval lords and ladies, in their cloth-of-silver and brocade gowns, trying to eat fried chicken, or bacon and eggs. (Fabulous Feasts has recipes for various forms of omelets; I assume you'd use your knife to cut off a manageable piece and then stuff it in your mouth with your fingers.)
And reading Fuchsia Dunlop's marvelous "Invitation to a Banquet" (a history of how Chinese cuisine evolved), she makes the point that cutting up the ingredients before cooking them is one way to prove you're not barbarians - who roast whole oxen or sheep over a fire, and use their swords to hack off a chunk to eat, and using chopsticks to eat is further proof. And how anyone with any refined sensibilities would find their appetite ruined by the sight of knives on the dinner table, which would remind them of the violent ways humans obtain food.
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Despite the title, the book also talks about spoons, which deserve more attention that they getnerally get. Spoons, plus chopsticks or forks, make a rule against eating with your bare hands possible.
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And people probably also figured out that eating with one's hands led to illness, and began the custom of washing one's hands before a meal. A medieval feast always begins with a hand-washing ritual, with herbs or flower petals in the water and a servant standing by with a towel.
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And reading Fuchsia Dunlop's marvelous "Invitation to a Banquet" (a history of how Chinese cuisine evolved), she makes the point that cutting up the ingredients before cooking them is one way to prove you're not barbarians - who roast whole oxen or sheep over a fire, and use their swords to hack off a chunk to eat, and using chopsticks to eat is further proof. And how anyone with any refined sensibilities would find their appetite ruined by the sight of knives on the dinner table, which would remind them of the violent ways humans obtain food.
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