Forks and the Pea-eating Rules

The same goes for the prongs of your fork. When the fork is being held in your left hand and used in conjunction with a knife or spoon, the prongs of the fork should always point downwards, not upwards. �Well-brought-up’ English people must therefore eat peas by spearing two or three peas with the downturned prongs of their fork, using their knife to hold the peas still while spearing, then pushing a few more peas on to the convex back of the fork with their knife, using the speared peas on the prongs as a sort of little ledge to help stop the slightly squashed, pushed peas on the back of the fork from sliding straight off. It is actually much easier than it sounds, and, when one describes the procedure in proper detail, marginally less idiotic than all the jokes about English pea-eating would suggest. Although it must be said that the lower-class pea-eating methods – turning the fork over and using the knife to push a larger quantity of peas onto the concave side of the fork, or even abandoning the knife, transferring the fork to your right hand, and shovelling up peas with it as though it were a spoon – are clearly rather more sensible, or at least more ergonomic, in that more peas per forkful are transported from plate to mouth. The socially superior spear-and-squash system carries no more than about eight peas at a time, at best, while the prongs-up, scoop-and-shovel technique can hold up to about thirteen, by my calculations – depending on the size of the fork, and the size of the peas, of course. (I really should get a life.)

There is obviously, then, no practical reason for Debrett’s and other etiquette guides to insist on the prongs-down method of pea eating. And again, it is hard to see how adopting the lower-class prongs-up practice could possibly have any adverse effects on one’s eating companions, so the consideration-for-others argument doesn’t wash either. We are forced to conclude that, like the knife-holding rule, the pea-eating rule is a class indicator and nothing more.

In recent years, the �uncouth’, prongs-up style of pea eating seems to have spread somewhat further up the social scale, particularly among younger people, perhaps because of increasing American influences, so one does now see more lower-middle and middle-middle English people eating peas in this fashion (it used to be just those of working-class origin, inadvertently revealing their roots). Most upper-middles and uppers, however, resolutely continue to spear and squash.

Дата добавления: 2015-09-06