Note that I am not talking about a specialty fork like an oyster fork. I am talking about a silverware set you get at Walmart, Target, etc…the ones we all have in our kitchen.
Sometimes I will pick up a smaller fork and go back for the larger one, but in the almost 45 years of my life, I have never thought that the fork I have is just too damn big and need one of the smaller ones.
Why are they even made?
To eat cake.
It’s the salad fork.
OTOH, my wife prefers the smaller fork and almost always uses it.
I use it, as noted upthread, for salads and/or desserts.
This x 1000, close the thread and goodnight.
I use them when I’m beating up an egg, like for scrambled eggs or a meatloaf mixture. Also for relish trays, so maybe three times a year BCE (Before the Covid Era.)
It’s a runcible fork.
The big fork would work for none of the above applications?
Take it up with the manufacturers. The idea is that in a formal place setting, you can clear the table of the used salad plate and salad fork, and everyone still has a clean fork for the dinner course.
Yes, it would, but it’s always been a matter of etiquette which cutlery item to use for special foods, so (at least in Germany) the small forks are for cake and other baked goods.
My little forks have narrower and sharper tines. That would work for delicate greens.
That’s always been my understanding as well.
Sure, you could have two identical forks, but there is an aesthetic satisfaction to matching a utensil to its purpose: salad generally being a lighter, more delicate dish than whatever you’re eating as a main course, it makes sense, when people started to codify these things, that you’d have a smaller fork for salad. It also looks nice to have a smaller fork on the outside.
Like @Kent_Clark 's wife, I tend to prefer the smaller fork. I virtually never put on formal dinners any more where more than one fork is needed and much of the time I’m just grabbing some leftovers in a bowl. But the smaller fork suits me better.
Cake salad Annie.
This.
There’s more to a salad fork than merely being a separate fork for a different course. Salad forks have–or are supposed to have–broader tines, the better to cut through raw vegetables, such as those used in salads. Some salad forks have a thicker left-most tine for that very reason.
A dinner fork, on the other hand, has longer, narrower tines because it’s made to spear food.
It’s so the Duke doesn’t have to keep his fork for the pie.
If you do a search for “Table Settings infographic”, you will get a lot of great hits, and clicking on “images” for the results will be even better (as an infographic, of course, is an image). They run from the most informal to extremely formal table settings. A lot of them show settings with both salad forks and cake or dessert forks, and a number also show settings with fish forks and fish knives.
I kinda enjoyed formal dining on a cruise ship. The waitstaff shuffling around silverware each course was cool.
I’m sure the big fork will work - but then my service for 8 would have to come with at least 16 big forks. If I need 16 forks to set a table for 8, I’m not sure why 16 dinner forks is preferable to 8 dinner forks and 8 salad/dessert forks.
Forget the salad: eat more cake.