Knives and forks...
Thread Starter
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: United Kingdom
Age: 57
Posts: 84
Knives and forks...
When did people start swapping hands for cutting and stabbing, and turning their cutlery upside down to make the fork to mouth movement so awkward? I am definitely getting old. And miserable. What's more, I am enjoying a bloody good grumble😊😉
Join Date: Nov 2009
Location: Dreamland
Posts: 578
Originally Posted by TLDNMCL
When did people start swapping hands for cutting and stabbing, and turning their cutlery upside down to make the fork to mouth movement so awkward? I am definitely getting old. And miserable. What's more, I am enjoying a bloody good grumble😊😉
Join Date: Feb 2007
Location: Spain
Age: 78
Posts: 57
Originally Posted by RedhillPhil
When people were stopped being taught how to use cutlery. Never mind knives and forks, have you seen the way people hold a pen/pencil nowadays?
Ecce Homo! Loquitur...
Join Date: Jul 2000
Location: Peripatetic
Posts: 10,982
[I always thought that was an Americanism, seemed to appear in the eighties.
Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: SW England
Age: 74
Posts: 3,865
My late brother who never left these shores in his whole life always used to eat "American style", ie cutting his food then transferring his fork to his right hand to eat. Never knew where he picked the habit up.
Join Date: Nov 2013
Location: apogee
Age: 66
Posts: 60
Knife skills and fork and knife skills.
When mastered are wonderfully efficient (including fork tines bending down - consider that it is the lower jaw and tongue that move ), are implement poetry in motion and can be done fluidly as second nature.
Good efficiency precludes switching forks from hand to hand and is totally unnecessary. Just a bad habit.
One of each is all that is required. An array of 8 or 9 implements in military formations around a plate are wasteful overkill and pretentious.
I've yet to see someone eat peas with knife, but I'm sure it is very entertaining.
but then, I'm left handed and write well with an easy, efficient grasp and motion.
With the proliferation of keyboard and voice controlled devices - it is a slowly dying skill - much like cathedral stone masonry.
When mastered are wonderfully efficient (including fork tines bending down - consider that it is the lower jaw and tongue that move ), are implement poetry in motion and can be done fluidly as second nature.
Good efficiency precludes switching forks from hand to hand and is totally unnecessary. Just a bad habit.
One of each is all that is required. An array of 8 or 9 implements in military formations around a plate are wasteful overkill and pretentious.
I've yet to see someone eat peas with knife, but I'm sure it is very entertaining.
but then, I'm left handed and write well with an easy, efficient grasp and motion.
With the proliferation of keyboard and voice controlled devices - it is a slowly dying skill - much like cathedral stone masonry.
Last edited by meadowrun; 25th Apr 2019 at 11:57.
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: Midlands
Posts: 186
Even we unswitching Brits have problems. How to eat peas, not with a knife of course but which way up should the fork be held? Spear four or scoop a dozen? One wonders how Mrs Queen handles them, perhaps she only eats mushy?
Join Date: Apr 2009
Location: A place in the sun
Age: 79
Posts: 984
Have you ever watched some Americans holding down the food with the knife and trying to cut it with the fork? I have, and they were somewhat bemused as to why it would not work. Despite what the Guardian link said, I still see some French eating that way round now. It defies all logic!
Join Date: Apr 1998
Location: Mesopotamos
Posts: 1,430
Being right handed I prefer to have the fork in right hand and the knife in my left hand, however these days the knives at restaurants are blunt and I need to transfer the knife to my right hand to cut the food safely. A few weeks ago at a German restaurant I was cutting into a sausage with the usual blunt knife and with my right hand when the silly thing squirted a stream of fluid onto the shirt of the person sitting at the next table. Fortunately he didn't notice but I only just kept a straight face because it would have been too absurd to explain what happened.
Join Date: Aug 2015
Location: 5Y
Posts: 525
Originally Posted by Tone
Even we unswitching Brits have problems. How to eat peas, not with a knife of course but which way up should the fork be held? Spear four or scoop a dozen? One wonders how Mrs Queen handles them, perhaps she only eats mushy?
I've done it all my life
It makes them taste quite funny
But it keeps them on my knife
Join Date: Jan 1999
Location: SEUK
Age: 73
Posts: 650
When etiquette can be disregarded, cut the food (if not already so) into smallish pieces with knife and fork and then eat it with a spoon, using the fork to load the spoon, as you would a dessert. No more scattered peas! No more wasted gravy!
(You mean, eat in the same manner as a 3-year-old? Ed.)
Yes.
(You mean, eat in the same manner as a 3-year-old? Ed.)
Yes.
Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Richard Burtonville, South Wales.
Posts: 1,959
Originally Posted by kkbuk
This may be the reason that cursive writing has more or less disappeared from the communication skills of those under the age of forty.
CG
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Just north of Chester, UK.
Posts: 271
It's one of those cultural differences between Brits and Americans which has always fascinated me; when did our cutlery habits diverge?
Whenever travelling on a cruise ship and seated at a table with some of our transatlantic cousins I always ask if they have any idea when it happened. Most haven't even noticed (this isn't a dig at them, by the way) and virtually all of those who do notice have no idea when and why. Only one man ever came up with a theory, which mirrored the one further up the thread; everybody used to do it that way and when Europeans changed to the two hands at once method, America didn't notice and just carried on with the old-fashioned way.
Whenever travelling on a cruise ship and seated at a table with some of our transatlantic cousins I always ask if they have any idea when it happened. Most haven't even noticed (this isn't a dig at them, by the way) and virtually all of those who do notice have no idea when and why. Only one man ever came up with a theory, which mirrored the one further up the thread; everybody used to do it that way and when Europeans changed to the two hands at once method, America didn't notice and just carried on with the old-fashioned way.
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: UK
Age: 82
Posts: 698
I live in an area where one can often be seated in a cafe with “footballer’s wives”.
Fascinating to watch them trying to cut their food with the point of their knives when said knives have a perfectly good cutting edge.
They also seem to think that cutlery has to be held at the extreme ends.
Is it me?
Fascinating to watch them trying to cut their food with the point of their knives when said knives have a perfectly good cutting edge.
They also seem to think that cutlery has to be held at the extreme ends.
Is it me?
I don't own this space under my name. I should have leased it while I still could
Join Date: Dec 2002
Location: Lincolnshire
Age: 77
Posts: 16,742
I wonder if it is more to do with right hand eating by Arabs and Indians? I fancy this was a sensible hygiene reason where water was always scarce? It would fit with the same logic whose reason was long forgotten.
Maybe this thread should be merged with beer bottle drinking thread.😇
Maybe this thread should be merged with beer bottle drinking thread.😇
