The Romans didn't have forks, so they picked the food with their hands. It is known about the rich that after every course they wiped them and received from their slaves pots with perfumed water to wash them. A further claim is that the rich used metal thimbles to minimise how much they got dirty.
The English Wikipedia page on thimbles apparently quotes an article found on the magazine Aramco World:
Oddly, neither the Romans nor the Greeks before them appear to have used metal thimbles. It may be that leather or cloth finger guards proved sufficiently robust for their purposes. There are so-called Roman thimbles in museum collections, but the provenance of these metal thimbles is, in fact, not certain, and many have been removed from display. No well-documented archeological data link metal thimbles to any Roman site.
On the other hand, the Italian page states that "open" (on the tip) iron thimbles were found in Pompeii, and on many Italian sites I've read that they dined with silver thimbles. However, I could find no sources for these claims.
Is there any evidence?