There may very well be an early 20th-century fork designed expressly for every type of food you can imagine: Olive forks, fish forks, salad forks, oyster forks, pickle forks, and pastry forks once graced the tables of even middle-class homes. The specific shape and number of tines were supposed to be helpful for performing specialized tasks, but they instead led to etiquette confusion. Today, four-pronged dinner forks are considered standard, while their oddly pronged cousins are destined for the antiques store.
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