Fork and Knife or Just Fork?
My daughter was criticizied by her mother in law for not using her knife at the meal.
Her mother in law was of the opinion that one must use the knife to aid in picking up all food and not trying to navigate just with a fork. I have always been of the school that you only use a knife when needed to cut meat .
What is the correct opinion? Thanks.
I’m not Emily Post, but whether you use a knife to guide your food onto your fork seems like an awfully nit-picky thing to sieze upon for a critique of manners. Because, so long as you’re using a fork (and not your fingers), who really cares? The only time a knife as a guide is necessary is when the food in question doesn’t want to sit on the fork on its own, in which case a knife is the polite mechanism with which to guide the unruly morsel.
In fact, even if your daughter were using her fingers for an occasional nudge, what could her mother-in-law possibly accomplish by calling her out on it? Among adults, unless someone is behaving as a total boor, it seems to me that a courteous person would turn a blind eye; or at most mention the matter quietly when others weren’t around.
March 12th, 2007 at 10:36 am
She British? When I was there on business some years ago and ate many of my meals with the locals, I noticed that the standard handling of silverware was left hand fork, right hand knife, and they continuously worked together on everything.