I was out at lunch with a friend who ordered a plate-sized omelet. He then took the shaker and systematically covered every square inch of the surface with a thick coating of pepper.
Additionally, there’s no need to cut one bite at a time, right? It’s true (I think, haven’t had the occasion) that dicing an entire steak before eating it looks odd at a formal dinner. But I’d think one can slip in a few extra cuts before transferring the fork back over. Then eat three or four bites (five, maybe?). Rinse, repeat.
And yet hundreds of millions European righties eat that way, because they learned to eat this way, without any problems. I never ate with the danger of stabbing an eye with my fork operated with my left hand. 
ETA: another atrocity I have to report: most Germans eat their pizza with a fork and knife. Fork in left hand, of course.
I at least would cut a strip, then make multiple bites of the strip, but I don’t know if that was “proper.”
It kind of depends on what one is doing with the fork, too.
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I’m a right-hander. Plate me a steak. Fork in the left hand, knife in the right. I use the fork to pin the steak down and cut a strip like @BigT describes above. Then I keep the fork in place with the now pinned-down strip of steak and cut that strip into a few bite-size pieces (2-4 pieces is typical). At the end, I have a few bite-size pieces ready to go, with one still pinned down by my fork. I do not switch hands here – I have no problem using a fork in my left hand to bring the “forked” steak piece into my mouth. I also have no problem bringing the fork back down to the plate – still in my left hand, now – to eat the remaining bite-size pieces. I can even dip the steak into horseradish or something like that along the way.
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OK, I’ve had enough steak for the moment and decide to start on the mashed potatoes that’s served on the same plate. I can’t well stab and pin down pieces of mashed potato – I need to scoop a mushy food like that. Were the potatoes served in a bowl, a spoon would be fine. But the potatoes are on the plate. I could spoon the potatoes all the same, but the rounded spoon against the flat plate surface … yeah, I COULD do it, but the scooping is a bit compromised at the spoon-plate tangent. A fork gives you more “scooping surface” against the plate. But yeah … here, switching from steak (a knife-&-fork maneuver) to mashed potatoes (a fork-only maneuver), I do put the fork in my right hand. I could manage with my left hand, I imagine, but it’s awkward enough that the hand-switching is worth it in the moment.
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Any spoon work will be with my right hand: ice cream, mushy food in a bowl, etc.
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I might stir a drink or something with a spoon in my right hand, too. Never my left.
So: Do right-handed Europeans ONLY ever use a fork in their left hands, for all purposes public or private? How about spoons? Or is there variation? How would you handle each of the four instances above?
That’s easy, I hold my fork in the left hand and load it with the knife in my right hand. The same for vegetables.
If I eat a soup with as spoon, I’ll do with my right hand. All other dishes are left hand fork and right hand knife, except for pasta. Germans have developed a spaghetti (and other long pasta like tagliatelle) eating method. Unlike Italians, who just roll up their spaghetti with a fork on the rim of the plate, we use to hold a spoon in our left and a fork in our right to scoop and roll up the pasta on the spoon.
I think I’ve written about this before. I worked with a guy who has many brothers and whose mother died while birthing him. His father was a martinet who decreed that at the table, any kid who finished their food could eat off of anyone else’s plate (to ensure no one dawdled). So being the smallest, he learned to hunch low over his plate and shovel his food in his mouth as fast as possible. As an adult, he still ate like that. It was sort of tragic.
That’s horrible.
Let me be more specific. How do you address fork-only meals? For instance, in my household, we don’t have steak knives. Or really any kind of table knife. All our knives are food preparation knives, or butter spreading knives.
So, you’re at my home and I played for you a dish of red beans and rice. I hand you only a fork. Upon asking, I regretfully informed you that we have no table knives, and that all our butter knives happen to be dirty. It’s gonna have to be the fork alone.
Fork, left hand, or fork in the right hand. That this situation is contrived is acknowledged.
But for real, I can count the number of meals I eat with a table knife per year on one hand. And never at home.
Fork on my right hand, but lefties are the opposite.
I concur that it’s very contrived, and that just never happens in my household. A meal of rice and beans I would always eat with fork in left hand, knife in right to shovel the beans and rice onto the fork.
Naturally, the fork – the primary eating utensil as I keep saying – would naturally be in the dominant hand.
You seem to have undermined a previously very cogent argument. ISTM that the primary eating utensil – the fork – should be in the dominant hand with the most dexterity, and the “helper” utensil – the knife, merely used for shoveling and gentle cutting, in the control of the less dexterous hand.
Who knows – maybe the American system evolved because early pioneers had to eat tough cuts of possum for dinner, and maybe the British system evolved for some arcane reason related to why they drive on the left side of the road, which I believe had something to do with knights keeping their right hand (their sword hand) at the ready should an enemy knight appear on the other side of the road. So eating your dinner with your knife in your right hand makes it easier to stab an enemy suddenly attacking you from across the dinner table!
None of it makes sense to me in the 21st century.
You and three friends have taken my hypothetical, jumped it in a back alley, and put it in the hospital 
Next time I’m in Germany, I’m going to entertain the locals by handily and neatly eating a schnitzel with but one fork. No knife needed 
I, a left-handed American, would also eat that plate of rice and beans with the fuel in my left hand and the knife on my right, and use the knife to help maneuver food onto the fork.
I did not visit Germany until i was an adult with fully-formed eating habits, but this feels natural to me.
I could probably do this, but have no desire to. 
I’ll use a knife if I need a knife; and if I do I’ll probably hold it in my right hand just like I was taught (but see below). Mrs T and I have a barrel load of dietary restrictions - most meats are ruled out - so most meals I’ll have a fork in my (dominant) right hand and never think of using a knife. I don’t need one.
But there are exceptions. Tonight friends cooked us fish, and at one point I realized that I was pinning fish bones against the plate with a knife held in my left hand, and scraping flesh off them with a fork held in my right. For me it’s just about being right handed and making the best of the two tools. If I have to use both, I’m going to use them in the most practical manner. That’s not what I was taught. So what?
j
Amen, brother!
At the church dinner today they had pulled pork sandwiches.
Like with sloppy joes, I just get the bottom of the bun with the meat on top and eat with a fork.
Americans do the fork-and-spoon twirl also. I know how to do it, but I hate it. I take my knife and fork, cut the noodles into small pieces, and then eat them with the fork.
Not really.
The American way is use the spoon as a blocker at the end of the fork tines while winding the spaghetti onto the fork. As stated by @EinsteinsHund, the German way winds the spaghetti onto the spoon.