Etiquette and Reaching That Right Fork

 
How many of my utensils can you name? Pictured above are a British bread fork, a cold meat serving fork, a butter fork, a butter pick, a large hot meat serving fork, a Mexican mango fork, a cucumber server, a lemon serving fork, a small hot meat fork, a youth spoon, a bacon serving fork, a potato serving fork, a youth fork, a melon fork, a pickle castor fork, a British sardine fork, a sugar spoon, an ice cream fork, and an olive serving fork and spoon.
            

There was an oft used phrase when I was growing up, which inferred that someone was “well-bred,” or in some way more refined than I ever hoped to be. It meant someone was beyond polite, had special knowledge of the social graces, or was not only well-mannered, but exhibited a special level of “class” which only a few could hope to exhibit. The phrase was, “She knows the correct fork to use.” or “He knows the correct fork to use.” 

It always seemed an odd phrase to me, seeing as the one thing I enjoyed doing that had anything to do with the social graces, was setting the table. I knew the correct forks, knives and spoons to use, but that knowledge did not make me polite or socially distinguished in any way, shape or form. In fact, I didn’t even know how to use them correctly or gracefully, until I was given instructions by my tremendously helpful, Aunt Virginia, back when I was in junior high school.

What I didn’t realize until I was older and more self-confident, was that knowing the correct fork to use, and being able to use utensils gracefully, allows people to relax more at social functions. And when people feel relaxed socially, especially when dining with others in public, those people are less likely to feel self-conscious. The opposite of what I describe, feeling socially self-conscious, can lead to overindulgence in alcohol, reverting to bad habits, or doing and saying inappropriate things in an effort to sound witty or impress others. 

I know one woman who, when feeling self-conscious at public events, will start arguments with those around her. Another’s husband will start speaking in odd accents that sound ridiculous, but his wife cannot get him to stop. Many years ago, a friend explained her problem with alcohol to me over dinner in a restaurant by saying, “When I start to drink a glass of wine, I immediately feel like I fit in... Like I am sexier, funnier, smarter and prettier!” I remember responding with, “When I drink a glass of wine, I usually feel sleepy.” But I was thinking to myself, “Thank God I don’t need alcohol to make me feel any of those things!” 

I felt as if I had discovered the secret. I had already cracked that code. I had developed they key to feeling as if I not only fit seamlessly in to any social situation, but that I added something to the group with whom I was socializing. I had started feeling less self-conscious publicly the moment I started learning basic social graces, which is why I started teaching etiquette so long ago.

Don’t get me wrong... I can still feel a bit intimidated now and then, especially as I have gotten older. But I don’t let it show if I am feeling self-conscious. I know how to control that and still have an enjoyable time. I can laugh at myself and not feel like an outsider. I learned the necessary etiquette. Not all at once, and not everything there is to know, but I can always look things up. It’s one of the reasons I began teaching etiquette nearly 30 years ago. It’s why I continue to maintain the Etiquipedia – an online Etiquette Encyclopedia.  

The post below is one originally posted on Etiquipedia after my last book was published. It’s a list of correct utensil usage from the book, “Reaching for the Right Fork.”

Using Your Utensils

Using “first” forks — Cocktail forks, oyster forks, escargot forks, and the like, are used with the right hand only. If snail or escargot tongs are being used, they are held in the left hand to hold the snail shell in place.

All spoons are used with the right hand, including individual caviar spoons and caviar spades.

Using dessert forks alone— Pie forks, ice cream forks, fruit forks can all properly used in the right hand, if no cutting with a knife is involved, with one notable ex-ception being the mango fork. A mango fork is held in the left hand while using a fruit knife or fruit spoon in the right hand.

Using dessert spoons alone — Ice cream, pots de crème, and other soft desserts eaten with spoons in the right hand.

Using a dessert fork and spoon together — Dessert eaten using 2 utensils is nearly always done in the Continental style, except this is done with a fork and spoon as opposed to with a fork and knife. The fork is held in the left hand with tines facing down, and the spoon is held in the right hand. The fork is used to hold or keep a dessert in place as the spoon cuts off small bites. This works well with desserts such as Baked Alaska or certain types of cakes.

An exception to this rule is pie or cake, à la mode. These are both eaten with a dessert fork and spoon. The spoon is used to cut and then place a bite of cake or pie and a bit of ice cream on the fork, which is held in the right hand and used to eat the dessert.

For all other dining with a knife and fork, the fork is in the left hand and the knife in the right when dining in the Continental style.

Fork tines point down for all cutting and eating in Continental dining, save for stringy pasta.

Fork tines point down only for cutting food, in the American style of dining.

From the book, Reaching for the Right Fork... the evolution of tabletop utensil 

Etiquette Sleuth and Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Etiquette and the History of Forks

Thomas Coryat was an English traveller and writer of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean age (c. 1577 – 1617). He is principally remembered for two volumes of writings he left regarding his travels, often on foot, through Europe and parts of Asia. He is credited with introducing the table fork to England, with “Furcifer” (Latin: fork-bearer, rascal) which then became one of his nicknames. The fork he described had two tines. Since then, forks have been designed with many more than 2 tines. Some forks have up to 7 or 8, depending on what one is serving.

An assortment of forks for everything from pickles, shellfish, cutter, cheese, corn, lemons, pie, pastry, bread, ice cream and more!

Though the fork’s early history is obscure, the fork as a kitchen and dining utensil is believed by some to have originated in the Roman Empire, or perhaps in Ancient Greece. Others believe the fork’s origins to be in Africa or the Middle East.
The origins of personal table forks are believed to be in the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire, when, according to “1843 Magazine” at the party celebrating her marriage to the son of the doge of Venice in 1004, Byzantine Princess, Maria Argyropoulina, niece to the emperor of Byzantium, scandalized the guests by using a fork to eat. Prior to that, forks were large, two-pronged utensils used for toasting or carving foods, and smaller versions could be used to retrieve food from jars or other containers, but no one had used one to eat with publicly. Her actions were immediately condemned. One priest declared that “‘God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks – his fingers.’ When Maria died of the plague two years later, it was seen as divine punishment for her decadence.”
Use of the fork spread slowly during the first millennium CE and then spread into southern Europe during the second millennium. Forks did not become common in northern Europe until the 18th century and were not commonly used to eat in North America until the 19th century. By the mid 1800s, forks were being designed for nearly every type of food, and were considered necessary to every proper home's table.

It is common knowledge (and a flattering social myth for us) that our own ancestors used to have very different -- and much cruder -- table manners from those we practice today. We have “come on,” in other words; we have “progressed.” The simplest historical novel or movie can make an exotic effect by presenting a scene in which dinner guests gnaw meat straight off bones gripped in their greasy fists, then hurl the remains into the corners of the room. These, the audience accepts without difficulty, were the manners of the past, before we became modern and civilized. (This sense of superiority does not prevent us from feeling proud, at the same time, of modern simplicity and lack of pomp. We are as capable of despising our ancestors for their tradition-bound complexity as for their rudimentary standards of propriety.)

Forks had also to be made and sold, then produced in versions which more and more people could afford, as they slowly ceased being merely unnecessary and became the mark of civilized behaviour.

Manners have indeed changed. They were not invented on the spot, but developed into the system to which we now conform. Since manners are rituals and therefore conservative -- part of their purpose is always conservation -- they change slowly if at all, and usually in the face of long and widespread unwillingness. Even when a new way of doing things has been adopted by a powerful elite group -- using forks instead of fingers, for example -- it may take decades, even centuries, for people generally to decide to follow suit. Forks had not only to be seen in use and their advantages successfully argued; they had also to be made and sold, then produced in versions which more and more people could afford, as they slowly ceased being merely unnecessary and became the mark of civilized behaviour. After the eleventh-century date of the first extant document describing (with wonder) the sight of someone using one, the fork took eight centuries to become a utensil employed universally in the West.
—From Margaret Visser’s, “The Rituals of Dinner”

“It’s a dinglehopper!” Scuttle the seagull, answering an inquisitive mermaid Ariel, after she presents a dinner fork for his expert identification of a human item that she is unfamiliar with, in Disney’s 1989 The Little Mermaid ~ From “Let Them Eat Cake... The Strange Saga of the Mango Fork and the Unique Dining Habits of the Dutch” by Etiquipedia Site Editor, Maura Graber

Meet Fork In Box. Fork, meet reader. “Meet Fork in Box” was the misspelled listing I found on eBay that allowed me to snag my second Dutch mango fork. Obviously a misspelling, I am sure the German Ebay seller who listed this beauty meant to list a “meat fork in box”. Before I go any further however, I should tell you a bit of my history with this odd utensil. In reality, I have never met a fork I didn’t like. My preoccupation with forks began not too long after Disney’s Ariel made her landing at the box office. Katie, my daughter, was almost three. She was enthralled with the precocious sea maiden who had red hair the color of her own. By the time the VHS tape was running continuously at home, I was starting an etiquette business for children and teens. The majority of the kids I taught were so used to fast foods, they rarely ate at a family dinner table. Showing them interesting and odd looking forks, along with other unusual utensils, was a way I found that kept kids interested when I talked of setting the table at home. I needed to do something to catch their wandering attentions, and strange utensils filled that need.

Several Dutch mango forks ~ Many Dutch feel these forks are better suited to cake. All of these pictured are Dutch, save the fork on the far right. It was from South America.

My husband was great at sussing out unique forks for me in the beginning. We stopped in thrift and antiques shops to find odd things for the table that were relatively inexpensive. Utensils over $10.00 seemed pricey. After all, these were props for my students to pass around and examine. Sales of very old used books on silver at the local library were how I did my research on pieces we’d found. Some were sold for only a quarter. I use them for reference still. Anything Victorian was popular during the 1990s. Tea rooms were sprouting up in malls, while magazines and books devoted to the subject were readily available. Over the next few years, as my collection of table silver oddities grew, my forays for the rarest of forks became more time consuming. Any weekend outing meant a side trip to a thrift shop or antiques mall. I was asked to give talks and lectures on not just my collection, but how people in America once dined with grace and forethought. At least more forethought than wondering if “... you want fries with that?”, before being handed a bag of fast food through the car window.– This was originally published on the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Famous Thoughts on Forks and Dining

1860s Melon Fork by John Cox, Silversmith

    

On Chinese food & Chopsticks: "You do not sew with a fork, and I see no reason why you should eat with knitting needles." -Miss Piggy, in 'Miss Piggy's Guide to Life' (1981) 
 

“How should melon be eaten? Not with a spoon, as is usual in restaurants..... The back of the spoon anesthetizes the taste buds! In this way, it loses half of its flavor. Melon should be eaten with a fork-melon.” From 'Propos de table'  by J. De Coquet in 'Figaro' - June 1982
 

“They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.” Jonathan Swift - “Polite and Ingenious Conversations” (1738)
 

"Forks are made of iron or steel: noblemen eat with silver forks. I have gone on using a fork even now that I am back in England. This has occasioned more than one joke and one of my intimate friends did not hesitate to apply to me in the middle of a dinner the adjective 'Furciferous'.” Thomas Coryate, English traveler
 

“The two-pronged fork is used in northern Europe.  The English are armed with steel tridents with ivory handles - three pronged forks-but in France, we have the four- pronged fork, the height of civilization.” E. Briffault, Paris a table (1846)

“No rule of etiquette is of less importance than which fork we use.” Emily Post