Today in History—May 13: How the Table Knife Was Introduced

Armand-Jean du Plessis, cardinal et duc de Richelieu, or l’Éminence Rouge. He was Louis XIII’s chief minister, and if you think his name is a mouthful, just wait until you read what he did at the dinner table.

According to tradition, it was the cardinal who introduced the table knife on this day in 1637.

Forks existed, in theory. But even among nobility, they were rarely used at this time. Most people ate with their hands, spoons, and personal knives—daggers, really–skewering their food. (Charming.) After dinner, guests often used the sharp tips of their daggers to clean their teeth. (More charming still.) And because this was the age of dueling, it wasn’t unheard of for arguments to come up over dinner and escalate into stabbings with those very same knives.

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Richelieu—a deeply religious, ruthlessly authoritarian, wildly influential statesman who was unpopular with basically everyone except the king—found the entire spectacle unpleasant. The bad manners bothered him. The violence bothered him. And given how often he found himself a target of conspiracies and plots, he may also have had some practical reasons for wishing to see his dinner companions disarmed.

He had a solution: He ordered his staff to grind the edges and tops of all his knives to round them. The result was a less pointed blade that could still cut most foods but was drastically less useful as a toothpick or weapon.

(Don’t get the table knife confused with the butter knife, which was invented a century later. And don’t get that confused with the butter spreader, which didn’t grace our tables until Victorian times. The history of cutlery is surprisingly contentious.)

There is one other early instance of a rounded table knife. Philippe the Good, duke of Burgundy, reportedly owned one a full two centuries before Richelieu was annoyed by his dining companions. But his efforts didn’t catch on, and Richelieu’s did.

Soon everyone who was anyone owned sets of table knives—less danger, more dinner.

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