Palitos de Coimbra
Palitos de Coimbra are hand-made toothpicks from Portugal . They are usually 15 to 25 centimeters in length. They are mostly made from the wood of orange trees. The toothpicks were said to be as smooth as ivory and not to splinter.
Hand-making wooden toothpicks was common until the second half of the 19th century when machines were developed that could make wooden toothpicks. Machine-made toothpicks were cheaper, but around 1950 there were around 9,000 people in Portugal making the hand-made toothpicks. It was mostly women who carved toothpicks. The center of production was the village of Lorvão in the Coimbra district . The main sales markets for toothpicks were Argentina and Brazil . However, the industry largely came to a standstill when trade agreements with the South American countries did not take into account the Portuguese export of toothpicks.
However, as recently as the 1970s, women were still making these hand-made toothpicks. The toothpicks were carved from pieces of wood that were 2 centimeters wide, the thickness of toothpicks and a little longer than 60 centimeters. The women made three vertical cuts in the wood. Placed on a leather strap, the women sharpened the wood with four cuts per toothpick and then separated four toothpicks from the piece of wood with a horizontal cut.
swell
literature
- Henry Petroski: The Toothpick: Technology and Culture. New York: Random House, 2007. ISBN 978-0-307-27943-9
Single receipts
- ↑ Petroski, p. 43.