Your Definitive Guide To Holding Cutlery
Finally, it's March!
It's been a thoroughly joyous couple of weeks, travelling hither and thither for business and pleasure.
The cutlery chronicles
Cutlery typically refers to the ensemble of implements we use to help us eat a range of foods. Thus, you would think cutlery is pre-historic - to an extent it is - but not as we know it today. For hundreds of years, a sharp knife was all you needed. In fact, the word 'cutlery' derives from 'coutel' meaning 'knife'.
The earliest knives were symmetrical, double edged copper daggers. The first single-edged knife emerged in the Bronze Age approximately 4,000 years ago for hunting, cooking, and carpentry.
Holy fork
Forks, on the other hand had a more controversial journey to the modern dining table, with one Roman Catholic clergyman in the 11th century denouncing them as sinister:
God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks — his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to him to substitute artificial metal forks for them when eating.
Cutting a long story short
After some thousand years of innovation, Holy indignation, and royal interference (the great blunting of knives by King Louis XIV in 1669), we end up with three items of cutlery in one form or an other: forks, knives, spoons.
How to hold cutlery correctly and easily
Holding cutlery is often taught with the caveat of 'This is how the British Royal Family would hold a knife and fork', however, the following methods go beyond 'establishment' rules: it is also the most efficient as, after all, a knife is effectively a saw to cut food, and a fork a stabber to lift food to the mouth.
Holding knives and forks
Fork in the left hand and knife in the right, always. Start by holding your hand out flat palm upwards. Place the knife on your right palm with the blade facing upwards, resting along your index finger and handle resting in your palm. Do the same with your fork with the tines. Then wrap all other fingers on both hands around the handles and flip over so the cutlery is facing downwards. Index fingers should be running down the top of the handles.
ℹ️ A knife is never be held like a pen. Alas, Jonathan Pryce’s version of Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, in ‘The Crown’, got it very wrong.
Holding spoons and forks
In this case, forks are held in the same manner as described above, with the spoon sitting between the index finger and thumb in a way that is comfortable for you. The fork is used as a pusher; the side of the spoon does the cutting and the food is eaten from the spoon, not the fork.
Holding soup spoons
Soup spoons are held in the dominant hand with the spoon facing 9 o'clock for you to push away from you into the soup, never towards you.
Fork only
Some dishes (e.g. risotto, spaghetti, salad) require a fork only, in which case you hold it in your dominant hand with the tines facing upwards. The same applies to dishes for which you hold a spoon only.
How Billionaires Eat
Now, this did raise a cautious smile when I saw a programme I featured in pop up again on YouTube a few days ago.
From 23:20 onwards, you can watch me teach a crash course in table manners to "confused foreigners". The narrator's words, not mine.
Do billions buy taste and manners? Find out below.
Once again, do feel free to join me at the Winchester Books Festival, or if that is not in your neck of the woods, other exciting events are just around the corner, which you can view here.
With spring delights,
William