Sushi can be eaten with a fork. Some people might give you a look, but it can certainly be done.
Smallish (one-bite) maki is the easy with a fork – the dine may either use the fork as a forklift to raise the roll to the mouth, or the roll may be speared dead center and brought to the mouth. Either approach allows dipping into soy sauce, in desired. Large maki is harder with a fork … though one could resort to slicing the roll into pieces with the side of the fork (provided the *nori * cooperates). Inelegant, yes, but it gets the food into the mouth eventually.
Nigiri is more difficult to eat with a fork, but it is possible. The forklift technique can still work with a steady hand, but the dipping tends to wet the rice instead of the topping. Spearing can work if there is nori holding the nigiri together.
And of course, Asians were using chopsticks while Europeans were still eating with their fingers.
I suppose the fork developed more naturally in the West than in the East, because before the fork, people would stab their food with their knife and eat it off the tip of the knife.
I’m right-handed, and cut my food with the knife in my right hand, but I don’t shuffle the fork. I bring it to my mouth with my left hand. When eating food that doesn’t need to be cut with a knife, though, I hold my fork in my right hand.
When I eat sushi, it’s usually with my fingers. Have I committed some terrible breach of sushi etiquette? Can I expect some irate sushi chef to come after me, flay me with a sharp knife and wrap me around rice?
I began eating Asian food when I was a small child and I was very sensitive to the difference in taste between wood or ivory of chopsticks and the metal flavor of a fork. Now that I am older, I don’t notice it as much. Maybe (get ready for the pun) I’m getting jaded (I didn’t say “get ready for a good pun”).
No one has mentioned the portability of chopsticks. As I said, I was very young when learning to use chopsticks and pretty much everybody had their own (some quite works of art) and was responsible for the upkeep of them. You always knew that yours were clean and well taken care of because you cleaned them and wrapped them away and put them into your valise or book bag or whatever. The first time I went through an American school lunch line and saw a bunch of metal forks and spoons that I don’t know how many people had touched and slobbered on, I was stunned and my stomach went a bit queasy.
Being an outsider eating with Chinese families, I always subtly felt that the chopsticks were something of an extension of the discipline of the culture. Two simple pieces of wood or ivory which when used correctly took on aspects of a ballet. I became rather competent with sticks, but I always felt ham-handed when dining with adult Asians.
Well, to answer the OP I think the real reason chopsticks have stayed around for as long as they have is that Confucious is said to have condemned the use of knives at the table because they were “tools of war”.
Given the great respect religion had in the West, I can imagine if the Pope said something similar in AD 600, we would have abided by that so long that even when we went secular in the past century the “we’ve always done it this way” thinking would have kicked in.
Also, chopsticks are only part of it. The Chinese usually serve food on platters and have small bowls that you use to eat. In Chinese culture, it’s apparently not considered offensive to move the bowl close to your mouth and almost “shovel” the food into your mouth. At least it wasn’t when I worked at a Chinese restaurant back in high school. The owners would always serve dinner after the restaurant closed - what a WONDERFUL introduction to authentic Chinese it was! - and that’s how they ate. Someone else might come along and say something different, but this was my experience. Also, it was funny that I remain the only anglo person I’ve ever seen working at a Chinese place - nouveau “Chinese bistro” places like PF Chang’s excepted.
Also - this might be an urban legend - but I’ve always heard that the “fork switch” was one of the hardest habits for OSS agents to break during WWII and that more than one US agent was killed because of this tiny slip-up. Am I imagining things, or did that actually happen?
Ya gotta imagine a bowl. Lift to bowl to your lips, then, the rice simply is shoveled in from the bowl into your mouth with the chopsticks held quite close to each other.
Imagine doing it with your index and middle finger, and translate that into chopsticks.
That said, if you get it on a plate, normally I would eat it with a fork and spoon, South East Asian style. Ditto for rice and food with a lot of gravy on a plate, like what I usually get in hawker centres. YMMV.
Likewise here. I use the coordination of my right hand for the knife, but with the fork, it’s easier to just use my left than to switch every bite. Right-handed American.
Incidentally, I was at a friend’s for dinner a few weeks ago, eating Thai food. The three Americans, the Frenchman, the Ukrainian, the Turk, and the Argentinian in attendance (graduate physics departments are great for ethnic diversity) all ate using chopsticks, but the fellow from Taiwan used a fork. He was showing off his skill with the more difficult utensil.
All the material on the etiquette of eating nigiri sushi says that you are supposed to dip the fish side, not the rice side, into the soy sauce and bring it to your mouth. It says you can do it with your chopsticks or with your fingers. It emphasizes that it’s a breach of etiquette to dip the rice side because (1) the soy should flavour the fish not the rice and (2) it’s bad form to let your nigiri fall apart and leave bits of rice in the soy sauce.
I find it extremely difficult to flip the sushi over with my chopsticks and dip it fish side down. When I use my fingers, I am always left with bits of rice sticking to my fingers, which I then have to lick off. Neither seems satisfactory to me. More importantly, I have never seen anyone in a sushi bar using their fingers or doing the complex flipping manoeuvre with chopsticks.
Come to a sushi bar with me. I eat nigiri with my fingers (even *maki * if my chopstick mojo is failing). I dip the nigiri in the soy sauce kind of obliquely – so that both topping and rice are exposed to the soy sauce at the same time. Inverting the nigiri seems awkward to me, even with the fingers.
Bits of rice in the soy sauce? No big deal to me. No one is grading me on neatness … and the sushi chef accepts my tip just as gratefully as he does anyone else’s. I am not barred from the establishment during future visits. Therefore I assume the rice-in-soy-sauce thing is more molehill than mountain.
Rice on the fingers? Yep. I get plenty of that. I usually ask to retain the hot damp towel offered at the beginning expressly for cleaning my fingers of rice throughout the meal.
From my (limited) experience in Bangkok, chopsticks are only offered with Chinese-style dishes. Thai food is eaten with a spoon in the left hand and a fork in the right. The food is shoveled onto the spoon with the fork, and the spoon lifted to the mouth. The fork is not used to put food in the mouth.
If the Thai restaurant offers chopsticks, it’s probably because there are Chinese-style foods on the menu. Anyway, I wouldn’t base authenticity on what utensils are offered, but rather on what the food tastes like.
About the nigiri sushi dipping controversy: While in America, I was told by numerous Japanese people to dip the fish side first, so I got into that habit. I was also told to put the whole piece into my mouth, rather than biting off sections. This was the hardest part, trying to eat the whole thing without bulging my cheeks out or anything vulgar like that. I don’t like using my hands, even though that seems easiest. Anyway, people rarely follow the prescribed etiquette to the letter.
About the fork/knife left/right switch: I always hated watching people do this. It looks like they are working on an assembly line.
Since coming here, though, I see people do all sorts of things with their nigiri. A lot of women dip one end of the fish into the soy sauce, bite off a piece, then dip the rest.
I had a WTF moment first time a Japanese guy explained the dipping the nigiri on the fish side and not the rice side. Next trip to japan I paid attention and that’s the way it is eaten. Just takes a little practice and getting used to, but it’s really not hard to do. Of course, predicated on someone making the sushi “correctly” and not one of the terribly not very authentic sushi attempts.
Around here, pretty much everyone flips. If you dip the rice instead of the fish it ends up absorbing too much soy sauce and you can’t taste the fish anymore. There’s also the “old lady” technique for nigiri, where you remove the fish from the rice, dip it, and put it back.
Though not seen very often, it is not a breach of etiquette to eat sushi with your fingers. When you eat with your fingers, hold the side of the fish slice with your thumb and middle finger, your index resting lightly against the rice. That way you can easily dip the fish in the sauce.
Incidently, although most people now use chopsticks, the traditional way of eating sushi was with your fingers.
As for fried rice, here, it’s always eaten with a spoon.
Chopstick design varies by country. Japanese chopsticks are smaller with more pointed tips than their bulkier Chinese counterparts. Korean chopsticks are often made out of metal and are somewhat flat.
Most of my chopsticks are Japanese, but I usually end up just using the disposable wooden ones. (I find that these are more popular at Japanese restraurants than at Chinese restaurants.)
As jovan notes, my Japanese chopsticks are thinner and pointed. They’re made of lacquored wood. Chinese (restaurant) chopsticks tend to be ivory-coloured plastic. They’re thicker and blunt. My Vietnamese chopsticks are similar to Chinese ones, but they’re made of ebony and have inlays. They’re very pretty, and I haven’t used them because I have the Japanese chopsticks and disposable wooden ones.
Question: What are disposable and non-disposable Japanese chopsticks called? I think the Japanese ones are called something like “otemo”. (I’ve forgotten how to read Japanese, so I can no longer just read the wrapper. )
Chopsticks in general: hashi (you can stick the o- prefix in front, so it comes out as o-hashi.)
Disposable chopsticks: wari-bashi. “Wari” is the nominal form of the verb “waru”, meaning “to split”.
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