On the Cutting Edge

It was a change in the table knife that put forks at every place—and forever separated how Americans and European eat. Cardinal Richelieu of France supposedly was so disgusted by a frequent dinner guest’s habit of picking his teeth with his knife that he had the tip of the man’s knives ground down. The fashion-conscious French court followed suit. In 1699, to reduce the risk of dinnertime knife fights, French King Louis XIV banned pointed knives outright. Since blunted knives were useless for spearing food in the old two-knife dining style, forks replaced the knife held in the left hand.
When the newfangled blunt knives reached the American colonies in the early 1700s, though, few forks were available on this side of the Atlantic. Americans were forced to use spoons, upside-down, to steady food for cutting. They would then switch the spoon to the right hand, flipping it to use as a scoop. Even after forks became everyday utensils, this “zigzag” style (as Emily Post called it in the 1920s) continued to divide American eaters from the “Continental” style of dining.