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From: laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton)
Newsgroups: net.misc
Subject: How to eat dinner in England
Message-ID: <1520@utcsstat.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 5-Dec-83 19:16:42 EST
Article-I.D.: utcsstat.1520
Posted: Mon Dec  5 19:16:42 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 5-Dec-83 19:41:53 EST
References: fortune.1816, <613@avsdT.UUCP>, <470@dartvax.UUCP>
Organization: U. of Toronto, Canada
Lines: 29

The Americans and the English eat dinner differently. Americans tend
to serve dinner already cut up into tiny bits and tend to slice their
meat into lots of pieces. Then they don't need their knives any more,
so they put their knives down, and transfer their fork to their right
hand, and start packing it away. 

But people who were raised in the English tradition of food eating
(credentials -- I was living in England as a child) get told that you
cut one piece and then eat it, and then cut the next piece. Thus
English eaters need to have their knife all through their meal.

This is related to the phenomenon of "hacking your dinner roll open
and smearing it with butter and jam" rather than breaking off a
piece and then applying a dab of butter and jam. (If you haven't tried
it this way, **do!** -- it tastes *much* better!) 

The other great difference is that Americans (and Canadians) tend to eat
a bite of this, and then a bit of that, while it is in the English
tradition to put a bit of meat on the fork, and then a bit of veg, and
then s bit of gravy and then take the bite. This is called "mixing the
full flavour of the dinner". Personally, i think that this is a
euphamism for "playing with one's food". I have nothing against playing
with food, but I  think that if you are going to mix it all together
you might as well have made a porridge and handed out the spoons.

I would rather eat with chopsticks, in any case.

Laura Creighton
utzoo!utcsstat!laura