At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

As well as a generous array of more or less conventional knives, forks, and spoons, the diner needed also to know how to recognize and manipulate specialized cheese scoops, olive spoons, terrapin forks, oyster prongs, chocolate muddlers, gelatin knives, tomato servers, and tongs of every size and degree of springiness. At one point, a single manufacturer offered no fewer than 146 different types of flatware for the table. Curiously, among the few survivors from this culinary onslaught is one that is most difficult to understand: the fish knife. Though it remains the standard instrument for dealing with fish of all kinds, no one has ever identified a single advantage conferred by its odd scalloped shape or worked out the original thinking behind it.

I cannot wait to hear what Consider the Fork has to say on the subject of fish knives. Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!