In my experience, skewers are used for cooking the food, which people then don’t bother to remove from them. I’ve never seen anyone pick up a skewer and use it to eat other food.
Though I suppose toothpicks do count as skewers…
ETA: I see now that Wallaby said the same thing just a couple posts after yours.
The Victorian era was the high point for cutlery variety in the West. We’ve simplified dinner a lot since then.
But they were all basically variants of forks, knives, spoons, and cooking utensils like spatulas and tongs. Do cooking and serving utensils fall under the “cutlery” umbrella?
Scr4 made a great point about bowls being utensils, too. There’s not exactly a clear demarcation between utensils and dishes like plates, bowls, cups, gravy boats, etc. I mean, what is a spoon but a small bowl with a handle?
Happy to be of service.
Flat bread.
Essentially by a thinking about the categories of utensils. The west went for a large set of specialised implements, and divested some of the responsibility for dismembering the food to the eater of the food. Asia went for a very simple general purpose tool, but responsibility for making the food bite sized went to the cook. India and what we now call the Middle East solved the problem by keeping the responsibility for bite sized with the cook, and solved the problem of avoiding getting their hands messy by wrapping/scooping it up with flat material. As a bonus, their utensils were edible, and could be made to taste good.
Other “edible utensils” include ice cream cones, seaweed (e.g. temaki sushi), tortillas (tacos, burritos, fajitas), and just about any type of bread (sandwiches).
Agree, however I stopped at pre-prepared food items - such as sandwiches and ice-cream cones - as these cease to be utensils. Splitting hairs I agree. But you can go to any curry house and not order the bread, and eat the curry with a knife and fork. Or you can go traditional and order bread as well, and eat with that. So in that respect the flat breads are an optional way of eating the prepared food. They are not an intrinsic element of the dish.
There was a medieval implement called a ‘pricker’ which was, I suppose, a skewer with a fancy handle, or a fork with only one tine, depending on how you look at it.
One problem with the question is that, as** DrCube** mentioned, the Victorians went hog wild with cutlery, trying to invent every possible food transfer device. It’s hard to believe they missed much.
The pre-precursor of the fork was single-tined. It was originally meant for pasta. [ETA - ninja’d]
I haven’t read it yet, but I’m looking forward to Consider the Fork.
Maybe those little tongs intended to pick up sugar cubes?
I think it was an episode of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century that showed a future eating implement consisting of a chopstick-shaped rod that food would cling to by artificial gravity.
Also, on Star Trek: Enterprise what did T’Pol do in the episode where she considered eating with your fingers too uncouth?
Don’t forget antimatter chopsticks: The Light Switch - Red Dwarf - BBC - YouTube
And of course the often-lethal Mercurian Boomerang Spoon
She just deftly used a knife and fork (European style, I believe) to cut and eat a piece of breadstick
Even within “knife fork spoon” you can get an array. My grandparents’ dinner service comprised 8 each of
Dinner knife and dinner fork (the big ones, forks with 4 tines))
Desert knife (also used as a spreading knife) and desert fork (smaller ones) and desert spoon
Fish knife (blunt - for pushing rather than cutting cooked fish) and fish fork (3 tines)
Cake fork (with the broad tine to daintily cut cake and then eat it, also 3 tines)
Tea spoon and coffee spoon (even smaller)
Soup spoon (the bigger circular spoons)
There were also varying numbers of sugar tongs (for sugar lumps), serving spoons (big ones), winkle pickers (or pins) to get the meat from a winkle or a whelk, crab/lobster hammers (smaller than for nails!) and hooks to break the claws and hook the meat out, resters (little bars to rest other utensils on), butter knives (short broad knives used to transfer butter from the butter dish to your plate - none of your knives should ever touch the butter and leaving toast crumbs in the butter was a big no-no).
All in all, over 100 pieces for 8 people. Without melon spoons, apple knives and all the other utensils that were hardly ever used. And that’s just within the knife fork spoon range. I can’t see how chop sticks could be so different though.