When I’m eating, I keep my fork in my left (non-dominant) hand and knife in my right (dominant) while I’m eating my meat or anything else that requires knifing, and then switch to fork in right, knife on table while eating mashed potatoes or whatever. Is this European, American, or a hybrid?
I grew up learning and practicing European style, which makes sense since my parents are European immigrants. I was an adult before I learned that others did it differently.
Good point - combining things onto the fork is most certainly easier and more elegant with the two-handed method.
I had the most wonderful steak dinner on a day trip to France last week - a huge, thick fillet steak, topped with a slice of fried foie gras, cream sauce, with a piped rosette of pea and mustard puree alongside - the two-hands method meant it was easy to take a piece of steak and add small pieces of the other items onto the same forkful.
I’m wondering where my second generation parents learned the cut and switch method, but they did and taught us kids. Later, after I had been to Europe, I started using a modified method. If it could be cut with the edge of a fork, I did that with the fork in my right (dominant) hand. And many nights I never use the knife at all. Otherwise, I cut with the right and eat with the left.
As for the question of what people did in the 1600s, they mostly used just one implement: the knife, which they brought to dinner. Mostly they ate with their hands and used the knife if they had to cut.
From the Wiki entry on forks, Fork - Wikipedia, I learn:
They favor ACA and oppose voter ID
In traditional American table manners, though, this is incorrect. You’re supposed to take a bite-sized portion of one foodstuff onto your fork, together with whatever sauce or garnish fragments may adhere to it, and put it in your mouth. Not use a knife or other utensil to load up your fork with a mini-smorgasbord of different dishes all in the same bite, which is considered borderline playing-with-your-food and hence a bit gross.
Mind you, I’m not saying that your eating style is improper in the context you employ it. Just that the issue of “ease and elegance” of fork-loading with different items is irrelevant to formal American table manners, because in American etiquette such fork-loading is improper anyway.
Yeah, I’m a big proponent of fork-loading. Even if food doesn’t require cutting, I feel awkward at the table without a knife in my right and fork in my left, because how else are you gonna get all those peas unless you gently guide them onto your fork with a knife, possibly using a bit of mashed potato as glue? It just feels weird to me to eat with my fork in my right hand (which is my dominant hand) or, even worse, cut with left and fork in right. It’s awkward in the way that playing a guitar by fretting with the left hand and strumming with the right is to me as a right-hander.
That just seems bizarre to me. Instead of letting each bite of food be a game of chance (and hope eat forkful happens to have the right amount of garnish and sauce adhering to it), holding the knife in the right hand allows you to control the exact garnish and the amount you desire to be in your next mouthful.
I’ve dined in a few three Michellin star restaurants so far (the last one was the French Laundry in Napa), and I can honestly say I have never seen anyone using their utensils the “American style.” You just wouldn’t have enough control over the food without using your knife.
I’m the only person I know who eats “European-style.” I picked up the habit during travels in Europe and never really dropped it. But like Chronos and others, if there isn’t food to be knifed, the fork stays in the right hand. But also like others, I tend to use my knife to load the back of the tines with bits along with the bite of meat. I’m not one who gets invited to formal dinners, so no-one is aghast at my manners.
Well, it’s not completely random: you pick up on your fork a fairly standard “bite-sized” amount of food, after cutting a standard “bite-sized” amount with your knife if the dish required cutting. You can also inconspicuously smear your forkful into your desired sauce/coulis/whatever as you’re collecting it.
But deliberately piling up mini-portions of separate dishes onto the same forkful for each bite is viewed as a bit too, um, architectural for proper table manners. In traditional American etiquette, customizing the composition of your individual bites of dinner with such scrupulous care comes across as somewhat gormandizing/piggish.
That’s not at all to say that you can’t eat that way if you want to, or that many Americans don’t eat that way, or even that it would be wrong if we all ate that way. I’m just pointing out that according to traditional American table manners, it’s considered rather improper to eat that way.
I cut Steak and eat from left hand, no switching. Everything else right hand, no switching.
In the unusual circumstance that I don’t finish off the meat before nibbling on the veggies/taters/rice/noodles/soup, I may/will switch hands, depends on which hand is occupied by the bread/dinner roll, being used a food pusher towards the fork shovel.
As long as you don’t use the caveman approach to silverware grasping, all is ok to me. 
Watch the judges on Iron Chef America some time. The varieties of hold on silverware is astounding. Some of the best and most insightful judges hold the fork like a three year old.
obviously because they already put the spoon and knife on the right. Where else would you put the fork after that!!!?
Well, you could put the forks even further to the right.
But, as I said above, forks are more middle-of-the-road than that.
I’m a right-handed Brit and I’ve always used fork right hand, knife left. I just find it easier. I used to get a hard time from the oldies when I was a kid, but I never could see what the big deal was.
You make a fair point - I guess maybe the presentation of dishes might be tailored too. There’s certainly no nice way that my weekend meal could have been eaten properly with just a fork, even if it had all been cut up first - it was explicitly designed and presented so that the steak, the foie gras, the sauce and the vegetables would be eaten together - and given their all very different consistencies, there just wouldn’t have been an elegant way to do it one-handed.
because they believe in egalitarianism over enforcing laws equally
By using bread with a real crust, of course.
We do that occasionally, too. But I typically don’t have bread with dinner.
I find it very distracting in a movie, to see an eating scene where the actor, playing a rather boorish and uneducated character, always eats with fork in left hand, popping in food with the tines pointing down. It seems so jarring to me, that I lose the thread of the picture for a while. For some reason, actors always eat in that style, no matter how unsophisticated you expect them to be. A mass murderer eating his last meal on death row would eat that way in the movies.