The fork was not deemed a necessity for the dining room table until well into the nineteenth century. Its increasing popularity prompted authors of etiquette books to counsel readers against eating with their knife blades, encouraging them instead to use the fork “even at the peril of seeming affected than to offend the taste of another by making a mess with the fingers. . . .”

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.