A thousand years ago, the typical English table setting consisted of a wooden bowl, a wooden plate, a wooden mug, and a wooden spoon; these utensils were made of wood not because it is an excellent source of fibre, but because other materials\u2014such as glass, earthenware, and pewter\u2014were either not invented yet or were too expensive to be used by the common people. The usual name for such wooden table utensils was treen, so called because they were made from trees (the n that appears at the end of treen is the same suffix that turns gold into golden or wood into wooden). Today, treen is a rather unfamiliar word because wooden utensils have been replaced by china and metal alloys; salad bowls, however, continue to be treen because the porous surface of the wood better retains the dressing, preventing it from pooling in the bottom of the bowl.<\/p>\n
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A thousand years ago, the typical English table setting consisted of a wooden bowl, a wooden plate, a wooden mug, and a wooden spoon; these utensils were made of wood not because it is an excellent source of fibre, but because other materials\u2014such as glass, earthenware, and pewter\u2014were either not invented yet or were too […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-t"],"yoast_head":"\n