What kitchen utensil was considered sinful in the Middle Ages?
Monday, October 9, 2023
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| Forks were considered sinful in the Middle Ages. | | While forks are now a mundane and commonplace item at most dining room tables, they were once quite controversial. In the Middle Ages, many Christian Europeans considered the act of eating with a fork to be a sinful affront to God. According to some clergymen of the time, God had already given human beings 10 natural forks, in the form of the fingers on their own hands, so daring to use an artificial accessory to spear food was an offense to the Lord and his divine gifts. Not only did using a fork insult the fingers that God gifted to humanity, the thinking went, but it also insulted the food God had provided: To use a fork meant you thought the Lord's bounty was unworthy of being touched by your hands. Forks were so frowned upon in medieval European society that when a Byzantine princess living in Venice died of the plague, her death was said to be God's punishment for her ostentatious and hubristic custom of eating her food with a fork. |  |
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posted by June Lesley at 12:02 PM
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