Table setting – Table and service cutlery
With the term cutlery, we mean primarily a tool (such as fork, knife or spoon) that is used for eating or cooking avoiding contact between food and hands. Cutlery is primarily made of metal; once of silver, brass and nickel silver, stainless steel today, but there are also wooden cutlery, horn or porcelain.
They can be divided into table cutlery, those used for eating, serving cutlery, used to serve, and those used in the kitchen for food preparation.
If you could draw up a curious statistic to find out what are the most useful and most employed tools in the course of our lives, at the top certainly we would find cutlery. Among these, the fork is certainly the queen; not surprisingly, in italian the gourmand is called ‘buona forchetta’, literally a “good fork”.
The spoon is the first cutlery that is used to give the baby food and is probably the oldest used by man. The name derives from the Latin cochlea (snail) because maybe the first rudimentary spoon was a shell. For our culinary habits is used less than its sister Fork but his place in the table must be guaranteed because from the pasta soup to the proper soups, to finish with the tiramisu, we cannot do without.
The knife is the tool we are talking about less because that was intended primarily as a cutlass, anthropologists believe that the knife is one of the first tools designed by human beings to survive. In the Middle Ages along with the wooden spoon it was constantly present on the tables of the riches.
Laying the table
Even the most informal and quick table deserves to be layed properly, with cutlery and glasses in the right position. But how to remember the location of all elements? And who, at least once, did not feel as in the famous scene in the movie Pretty Woman at grips with the escargots? Here is a small scheme that can help us memorize the different positions.<