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For late 19th-century North Americans and Europeans, a display of tableware (餐具)could reveal much about someone’s social position, as the wealthy took great care to get different kinds of forks for everything. Before the 18th century, people of all classes usually ate with a knife and a spoon.

The fork’s path to the table was hard-won and slow. In ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, forks were used for slicing food into pieces or lifting meat from a pot or fire.

Following a reduction in size, the fork appeared to have entered dining areas in the courts of the Middle East and Byzantine Empire by the eighth and ninth centuries, and became common among wealthy families there by the tenth century. Early in the 11th century, it appeared in various pieces of European art. In the late 11th century, St.Peter Damian from Ostia wrote about a Byzantine princess who used forks and regarded her dying of a disease as punishment for such “luxury”.

The fork’s slow conquest of Europe was carried out from Italy. Motivated by the same concerns for hygiene(卫生)，forks were bought by wealthy Britons，inspired by Queen Victoria, who regarded fork use as a sign of good manners.

The fork’s introduction to North America dates back to 1633, when John Winthrop, a founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was gifted a set of forks. The Industrial Revolution strengthened the fork’s presence on dining room tables as production of flatware became less expensive. Writing in 1896 inSocial Eriquere，Maud C. Cooke declared the fork had finally conquered the knife in America and “any attempt to give the knife importance at table is looked upon as an offense(冒犯)against good taste.”