This week's PhotoHunt theme is "Utensils" and I'm thinking about the Fork.
Venice is often given credit for inventing the fork in the early 11th century. Throughout the Middle Ages, civilized Venetians were dining with forks while the slobs in the rest of Western Europe were still eating with crude spoons or with their hands.
The truth is, the fork might have been brought to Venice by a Greek princess named Maria Argyra, niece of the Byzantine Emperor and daughter-in-law of a Venetian Doge. A grumpy priest blasted this princess for “the luxury of her habits”:
“Nor did she deign to touch her food with her fingers, but would command her eunuchs to cut it up into small pieces, which she would impale on a certain golden instrument with two prongs and thus carry to her mouth.”
You might think that it was the food-cutting eunuch slaves who upset this priest, but no….it was the fork!
"God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks - his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to Him to substitute artificial metallic forks for them when eating."
Whatever. Perhaps such wild and crazy religious objections explain why the fork was so slow to catch on. It took several centuries for the use of the fork to spread from Venice to the rest of Italy and eventually all over Europe.
Anyway, my photos were taken in Venice last year and show a few memorable things I ate with a fork.
Spaghetti con vongole veraci (clams). These clams were so tiny but so sweet and delicious.
Moeche con polenta. Small crispy soft-shell crabs over polenta. These little crabs are amazingly good.
Pizza with mozzarella, smoked ricotta, and arugula. In Italy, the pizzas are left whole, not sliced like they are in the USA, and Italians eat them one bite at a time using a fork and a serrated knife. I prefer to eat pizza with my hands but when in Venice, I use the utensils.
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Thanks for visiting and have a good weekend.