When Brooke Black and her Danish husband first lived together in the United States, she doesn’t recall their different dining habits ever really being a thing.
It wasn’t until the 44-year-old mother of two moved to Denmark in 2020 that she became acutely aware that she didn’t use eating utensils like her husband — or pretty much any of the Europeans around her.
Growing up in Illinois, Black says her mother only set their family dinner table with forks, unless there was something being served, such as steak, that warranted a knife to cut it.
“I have not used a knife my whole life,” says Black, who shares cultural commentary about her daily life in Denmark on her Instagram account. While she jokes that she “stands by that a fork can also be a knife,” she never learned to eat in the “zigzagging” manner of many Americans who will cut meat with the knife in their dominant hand before switching the fork back into that one to eat.
But in Denmark at family gatherings, with her fork held in her right hand from the get-go — tines up — and her knife largely untouched beside the plate, Black soon realized she stuck out.
“I get made fun of constantly by my husband’s family. At the dinner table at my mother-in-law’s house, they’re all just like, ‘What are you doing?’ because they do all eat with the fork in their left hand, tines upside down, and the knife in their right,” she says.
Black says she has adapted, in public at least, to what’s widely called the Continental style of dining, digging into Danish foods like the dainty open-faced sandwiches called Smørrebrød with her fork in her left hand, turned down to eat, and the knife in her right to cut.
But even when dining like a Dane, she still often feels like the odd woman out.
“They all have their quiet, sensible ways of doing things. And I’m just a loud lady stabbing things,” she says.
The nuances of how silverware gets wielded on either side of the pond can be dizzying. While there are some obvious differences, the subtleties can be harder to master — and how those differences came to be is murky.
Continental and ‘labor-intensive’ American style
Tables may be set similarly across the Western world, but it’s clear that the two dominant styles of using silverware (or cutlery) — American and Continental — have some variations to navigate.
Jacqueline Whitmore , a business etiquette expert and founder of The Protocol School of Palm Beach, Florida, offers her summary of the differences between the two main styles of dining with a fork and a knife.
“In the Continental style, you use both the knife and fork at the same time, bringing the fork to your mouth with the tines upside down, never putting the knife down while you’re eating,” she says. The knife remains in the dominant hand, poised to cut when necessary or push food that can’t be speared atop the fork’s overturned tines.
What’s considered American style takes a cut-and-switch approach. The knife is held in the dominant hand to cut, with the fork in the non-dominant hand pinning food in place, tines down. The knife is then placed into resting position on the plate so that the fork can be switched to the dominant hand, tines facing upward to eat.
“The American style is kind of like a zigzag style. You cut your meat, you put the knife down on the side of the plate, and you switch the fork from one hand to the next. So it’s a little more labor-intensive,” Whitmore says.
To make matters more confusing, British dining has its own style that differs, however subtly, from Continental, according to British etiquette coach and expert William Hanson, author of the book “Just Good Manners.” British and Continental styles are often confused, says Hanson, who has nearly 4 million followers on Instagram.
As if that’s not varied enough, not all etiquette experts are on exactly the same page about which practices define each style. But at its essence, etiquette is about being gracious and making guests feel comfortable, no matter how they’re holding their forks.
So if you’re visiting Europe, or other places where Continental-style dining dominates, as an American accustomed to zigzagging, should you switch up the way you use your silverware?
It depends on the nature of your visit, says Lizzie Post, co-president of The Emily Post Institute and the great-great-granddaughter of renowned etiquette expert Emily Post.
When on a business trip in Europe, Post says she might try to fit in by dining the Continental way. That said, she would not expect anyone visiting her in the US from overseas to choose the American way of dining.
Overall, it’s okay to dine in the way you feel most skilled and comfortable, Post says.
“If you come from somewhere else, do the best you can with what you know how to do — and how to do it comfortably,” she says.
But if you’re up for a challenge, Post says it’s great to have the ability to adapt to the country you’re visiting.
Instead of wondering if you’re being rude by holding your fork with the tines up or down, it’s far more important you don’t hold your silverware improperly in your hand, Post says. (Clutching it in your fist, for example, is never appropriate).
A fork should be held with the handle of the fork resting in the palm of your hand with your index finger stopping before the bridge of the fork, Hanson says. The knife is held with your index finger stopping where the blade and handle meet with the rest of your fingers tucked around the handle in your palm.
Post laments that general dining etiquette is not something that’s taught widely in the US.
“There’s nothing in our school system that teaches this to make it universal for us, and it really ends up being a household-by-household moment for people,” she says, referring to the rules of the table.
Some etiquette is standard across all styles of dining. Silverware, for example, should never touch the table once you start eating, says Post, resting instead on the plate when you’re taking a pause.
But other practices, for example where silverware comes to rest when you want to put your fork and knife down while eating, vary.
In the American style, says Whitmore, the resting signal is when the knife, blade pointed inward, is placed across the top right edge of the plate at a subtle angle. The fork, with its tines up and handle facing outward, should be placed with its handle pointing at 4 o’clock, midway down the plate to indicate resting. (For servers who understand the etiquette, this position is a silent service message not to ask, “Are you still working on your meal?”).
In the Continental (and British) styles, resting position involves a crisscross of the fork and knife in the middle of the plate, with the fork placed atop the knife, tines facing down, according to Hanson and Whitmore. There are also different silverware positions that indicate you are finished.
Whitmore, who says she dines in the Continental style despite being American and living in the US, finds the technique “less noisy and obtrusive” and says learning it will allow you to fit in anywhere in the world that silverware is used to eat.
“Why not learn another way so that you can have options — so that you can blend in and that your table manners are secondary to the conversation,” she says.
In addition to the American and Continental styles of dining with silverware, which are the most widely used, there are other variations around the world.
In British style dining, for example, fork tines should never, ever be facing upward in formal settings when the knife is also being used, according to Hanson. (In informal settings, when eating things like risotto that don’t require a knife, that is considered acceptable, he says).
Beyond which hand holds what and which direction tines are turned, some questionable table habits definitely will be noticed.
“We wouldn’t say anything, but we would notice if an American cut all of their food up on the plate, which is what we really do for children in this country,” says Hanson, referring to the United Kingdom.
Whitmore says that among her world travels she has seen the most “egregious acts” of improper tableside etiquette at home in the US, ranging from people licking their knives or stirring something like iced tea with a fork or knife because a spoon wasn’t handy.
As with all rules of etiquette, Hanson says “knowledge is power.”
“You can choose when to use it and when not to use it, or how formal or informal you want to sort of turn the dial depending on the context of your environment,” he says.
And while many people in Britain, the US and Europe know how to dine casually, “there are still occasions, and there always will be occasions when, actually, you do need to do this end of the dial,” Hanson says, referring to dining more formally.
Rest assured that encountering “minefields” when dining outside of your own culture is normal, says Hugo Strachwitz, a director at Debrett’s, an authority on British and international etiquette protocol.
But he says any confusion is secondary to the importance of being a good guest in someone’s home or at their table.
“Be kind, courteous, accepting of the dominant culture or whatever rules prevail. And if you encounter something you haven’t encountered before, or you’re not familiar or comfortable with, you might inquire, politely, ‘Gosh, I’ve never seen that before. How does that work?’” he suggests.
It’s a host’s responsibility to put guests at ease in their company, Strachwitz says.
“Be unapologetically yourself. So that can mean dining in your own style. So for an American dining in a non-American environment, the onus is on the host not to draw attention to the difference in a way that would cause offense or cause the guest to be self-conscious,” Strachwitz says.
How these dining differences came to be is not entirely clear. But historians have noted that table forks arrived on the scene much later than knives and spoons.
By the 16th century, forks were commonly used at tables in Italy, according to an article in Smithsonian magazine, and their use later spread throughout Europe. But it wasn’t until the mid-19th century that the use of tables forks was well-established in the United States.
It’s safe to say that how people dined influenced how they used their silverware, says Strachwitz.
In the period before the early 19th century Napoleonic Wars, he says, the typical way of dining in Europe was service à la Française, or banquet-style, with all the dishes set on the table at once. By the beginning of the 19th century, however, service à la Russe, with course-by-course platings that required different cutlery for different dishes, was introduced to France from Russia. By midway through the 19th century, it had truly taken off, spreading to Britain, too.
Where and when exactly the manners of wielding silverware drifted apart, however, is harder to pinpoint. A food scholar told Slate.com that Americans took the cut-and-switch method from the French, who ultimately abandoned it.
Helen Zoe Veit, associate professor of history at Michigan State University in East Lansing, worked as a historical consultant for season one of HBO’s “The Gilded Age” (CNN and HBO share the same parent company). When she set about researching how Americans held their silverware in the United States in the 1880s, when the show is set, she wondered whether it was in keeping with the British style or not.
“It’s not like there was some definitive authority,” Veit says.
What was clear, however, is that by the mid to late-19th century, Americans were “very insecure about their manners.”
“They were really trying to establish what it meant to be elite, what it meant to be fancy, what it meant to be educated and refined. And so they were trying to establish an American set of manners,” she says.
And people disagreed.
“They didn’t always know what that meant, wondering if they should follow British etiquette or what the French do. And some people said, ‘To heck with Europe. We should just establish our own way of doing things culturally,’” Veit says.
That might provide some solace for Americans who find themselves befuddled at a European table.
“I think as long as people are eating nicely, we don’t hear any noise, you can keep the food on your plate and it doesn’t roll off onto the table and down your shirt,” Hanson says, it should suffice, adding that there are bigger things in life to worry about.
The most important thing Hanson tells his students to remember is to hold their cutlery properly and to only begin eating when everyone is seated and has their food in front of them.
Strachwitz puts it more simply still: “The essence of good etiquette, wherever you are, is care and consideration of others.”
On that note, be nice and dig in.
