Over the course of hundreds of restaurant reviews, I’ve mentioned forks and knives in print only a few times. Not because I don’t use them – I do, with gusto and precision – but simply because they are so standard a part of the meal that they warrant no attention. But it wasn’t always so, as a new exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt makes clear. “Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500-2005,” which opens Friday, tracks the capricious evolution of tableware from the fork’s early struggle to gain credibility as an alternative to fingers, to the present day. The exhibit, artfully curated by Sarah Coffin, Ellen Lupton, and Darra Goldstein, presents some 500 utensils, of which 70% are part of the museum’s permanent collection.

The widely varied utensils are interesting enough in their own right, but the organizers have cleverly contextualized them under a dozen or so rubrics. Before the end of the 17th century, hosts didn’t typically set the table for their guests. Instead, both men and women carried their own flatware in decorative cases worn at their belts; an appealing practice, and one I wouldn’t be too surprised to see reinvented at a gimmicky new “BYOF” restaurant. A “travel” section of the exhibit spotlights these folding and holstered utensils, as well as elegant modern dining kits designed for airlines and picnics.

Originally only used for serving and handling meat, forks gained popularity slowly at European tables, first just for eating sticky preserved fruit in syrup, then for more general use. The story of the fork’s progress is an interesting one, detailed in the hefty book accompanying the exhibition: early on, it was regarded as effeminate at best, if not downright Satanic. Even after it caught on in Europe, the utensil’s adoption in freethinking America was gradual, and there are embarrassingly recent citations advocating fingers over forks. In the accompanying book published by Assouline, Ms. Goldstein quotes an 1837 American etiquette authority who suggests that “if you think, as I do, that Americans have as good a right to their own fashions as the inhabitants of any other country, you may choose the convenience of feeding yourself with your right hand.”

One of the most entertaining parts of the exhibition is a section focusing on the 18th and 19th centuries’ proliferation of specialized tools for every sort of food. The tools verge on the absurd. Capitalizing on the growing wealth of their customers and the prevalence of novel foods, flatware manufacturers introduced so many new forms that they were eventually curtailed by American legislation that limited flatware patterns to 55 different pieces. So the exhibition includes such essentials as grape scissors, ice cream saws and hatchets, cake tongs, fried chicken tongs, four kinds of asparagus server, and even more delightful elaboration.

Perhaps the silliest, to modern sensibilities, is a Tiffany potato-chip scoop, a graceful, ornate silver spoon designed in 1880 to serve the newly invented snack. But history has its reversals, and fingers are now the one and only accepted potato-chip tool. Our medieval forebears would approve.

“Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500-2005” through October 29 (2 E. 91st St. at Fifth Avenue, 212-849-8400).