Eating dirty and has dirty the hands, mouths and clothes of diners throughout history. To fight for cleanliness and neatness, different solutions were developed: from edible napkins to cloth and paper napkins, including the sleeves themselves.
We know from the Greek playwright Aristophanes (444 BC – 385 BC) that at the time it was common, during a meal, to clean one’s hands with bread. They called it apomagdalia and they were the pieces of bread crumbs that a loaf contained. In his work Los Caballeros, the character Choricero says to Cleón, with whom he is arguing: “and for my hundred stabs, I hope to defeat you in this contest, or if not, this corpulence acquired by dint of eating crumbs destined for me will be useless to me.” “Wipe the grease off your fingers.” We know that the phrase alludes to his humble condition and that those crumbs were edible bread but, usually, they were not eaten afterwards, so Cleon responds: “Crumbs, like a dog! And you, wretch, who have fed like a dog, do you want to fight with a cynocephalus?
It seems that the custom of cleaning oneself with bread continued for centuries, although it is true that the wealthy Egyptian, Roman and Greek classes used a type of cloth napkins as well as scented water to clean their hands after the agape, according to the archaeologist. Hugo Blümner in The Home Life of Ancient Greeks (Casell
What is completely ruled out is the attribution of the invention of the napkin to Leonardo Da Vinci. According to myth, the artist was hired by Ludovico Sforza to find a hygienic solution for his diners, and Da Vinci thought of tying live rabbits to the legs of chairs so that they could clean their hands with their fur. Of course, the story makes no sense and is from Jonathan and Shelagh Routh’s humorous book, Leonardo’s Cooking Notes (1987), based on an invented codex.
Julián Climent, from the Spanish tablecloth and napkin company Athos, which supplies the best restaurant tables in the country, refers to a Valencian saying related to cleanliness during a meal: “aquest no es torca amb mitja mànega” (‘not it is cleaned with half a sleeve’). Its meaning has to do with giving importance to oneself and literally refers to the ancient use of the sleeves of shirts or dresses to remove dirt from one’s hands.
Napkins, as well as cloth tablecloths, did not gain importance until the modernization of French cuisine with Escoffier. “In France, table trends evolved more quickly than in Spain, and from there we received (and continue to receive) habits such as dressing tables with elegance,” explains Climent. But there are exceptions: Adrián de Roo and Baltasar de Kiel, originally from the Netherlands, built their second factory in 1684, in Sada, “to imitate in Spain the goods of Flanders and Holland” and supply the Spanish Royal House. Following in his wake, in 1786, José Coderq Pérez from A Coruña was successfully dedicated to the sale of “fine and ordinary” tablecloths and had fifteen looms that manufactured tablecloths and napkins of different ranges, mostly also used by the Spanish Royal House.
Domestically, it seems that kitchen cloths were also used to clean oneself during meals, and later restaurants commissioned warehouses and fabric stores to make tablecloths. “In the 50s and 60s, they were mostly made of acrylic checkered fabric, which when burned formed a major disaster,” says Climent.
The appearance of paper napkins came at the end of the 19th century. The John Dickinson company, after observing the product in Japan, decided to export them and give them multiple uses: they would be napkins but also souvenirs, since advertising was printed on them. From them descended the napkins that do not clean, nice with their borders or bar logos, made of satin sulfite paper on one side and arranged intertwined in zigzaz napkin rings or in the so-called ‘miniservis’.
And if not so long ago it seemed normal to put the napkin inside the collar of the shirt or, directly, tie it as a bib, today the practice has fallen completely into disuse, unless we want to enjoy a calçotada in our lands or of a lobster in Maine.
