This Side of the Pond

I’m sorry, but you can’t have my knife. I might be an American now, but that doesn’t mean I will – or even can – eat my meals using nothing but a fork.

What lunacy is this, anyway? I’ve never been able to fathom why it would be considered a good idea to set aside half your available tools.

Logically speaking, it’s much the same scenario as using a hammer without the bother of a nail. In both cases, the two things were designed to go together, so surely this is just a good way to make life 50% more difficult for yourself?

Not to mention I’ve noticed that many of you will then swap your fork from your left hand to your right – an added step that makes the whole experience even more trying.

I did try to restrict myself to a fork, when I first arrived in the land of the knifeless diner. The dogs certainly enjoyed the experience, because the food I chased off the edge of my plate fell directly onto their noses.

My American family have always been gracious about this particular British quirk. At every Thanksgiving, family dinner or holiday meal, there is always a sole butter knife laid out next to the pile of forks.

I never have to worry about anyone else picking it up.

The husband has always found it entertaining that I don’t know how to operate without a knife. I can’t figure out how any of you manage to get food onto your fork without a knife to brace it and stop it from running away.

It just isn’t going to happen – for me, the symbiosis is permanent. My knife needs something to push the food onto, and my fork needs something to stop it from pushing. The alternative is for the food to just keep going, until it’s gone, and that’s a waste of a perfectly good potato.

The only time I ever see my fellow Americans using a knife is when there’s meat to be cut into chunks, and even then it’s just as quickly discarded.

(On the plus side, I am sufficiently adept at using a butter knife to cut my food that I have not ever required a steak knife, and will only grab one if there’s no other option. At least I’m not doubling up the dishes on grilling night.)

After having this conversation with a friend, I got to wondering. A knife and fork were quite literally designed to be used together, which means someone on these shores, at some point in history, actively made the decision to stop using one half of the set.

Whose idea was this, and why? In the name of science, I got to researching.

As it turns out, this wasn’t an American idea. Only using your knife now and then, when you’ve run out of morsels of meat, was something the French decided was the best way forward.

According to the founding editor of “Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture”, putting your knife down once you finish cutting and then swapping fork hands became stylish in France in the early 18th century. The French were the “arbiter of elegance” for Americans at that time, so the fashion was adopted over here.

And it stuck – as evidenced by how you, my friends, all eat your dinners today.

It did not, however, stick around on the other side of the pond. By the 1850s, an etiquette book written in France said, “if you wish to eat in the latest mode favored by fashionable people, you will not change your fork to your right hand after you have cut your meat, but raise it to your mouth in your left hand”.

And so we come to the present day, in which there are two recognized ways of using your cutlery: the American style, and the European style.

So ingrained are these customs that a 1946 movie called “O.S.S.”, staring Alan Ladd and Geraldine Fitzgerald about Americans infiltrating Nazi-occupied France during World War II, featured a scene in which a spy was exposed by the Gestapo because they put down their knife in a restaurant.

I may not be able to let go of my knife, but I confess to adopting one American cutlery habit since I moved here: I no longer exclusively use my fork with the tines pointing downwards.

Just as I use a knife because I need one, rather than because I’m a slave to protocol, my fork decisions are practical in nature. A fork was designed to stab the food and hold it still while you cut it into morsels.

Consequently, the intent is for it to remain tines-down at all times, with the morsel firmly attached to the end. For less solid food, such as mashed potatoes, European etiquette requires that you use your knife to scoot food onto the back of the fork.

Under no circumstances are you supposed to twirl your fork so the tines point upwards. I, however, have given my mother numerous grey hairs over the years by failing to follow the rules.

I find this method ungainly. Don’t even get me started on the misery of trying to coax a pea up the back of your fork and then convince it to balance there while you lift it to your mouth.

If the inventor of the fork hadn’t wanted me to use it to scoop up my potatoes, they shouldn’t have made it in a handy shovel shape.

After thinking about this at length, I humbly submit that my hybrid method seems the perfect blend of two cultures: I fork like an American and knife like a Brit, adhering to the etiquette of neither. I didn’t realize I was a cutlery rebel, but sometimes you just have to break the rules – this way, I can eat my legumes in peace.