Foods You Can Eat with Your
Fingers
- Artichoke
- The artichoke is actually the
leaf-enclosed flower bud of a plant that is in
the thistle family. It is usually served
steamed with a dipping sauce. To eat it, pull a
leaf off, dip it, scrape the flesh from the base
of the leaf with your top teeth, and discard the
leaf on the plate provided for that purpose. (Or
you may encounter a special plate made with a
central niche for the artichoke, a niche for a
small bowl of sauce, and a sort of moat all
around on which the leaves are to be discarded.)
Continue eating the leaves until the prickly
"choke" is revealed -- this is the point when it
is clear you have a species of thistle in front of you.
Switch to fork and knife, first to remove the
choke, then to eat the heart and base.
- Asparagus
- Asparagus may be eaten with the fingers as
long as it is not covered with sauce or
otherwise prepared so it is too mushy to pick up
easily. Of course, it is also just fine to use a
fork and knife to eat asparagus, even when it is
perfectly al dente and sauce-free. But
you might appreciate getting to act like a rebel
without breaking any rules.
- Bacon
- When bacon is cooked until it is very crisp,
and there is no danger of getting the fingers
wet with grease, it is okay to pick it up to eat
it. This is an instance of practicality winning
out over decorum, since trying to cut a crisp
piece of bacon usually results in crushing it
into shards that are quite difficult to round up
onto a fork.
- Bread
- Bread must always be broken, never cut with
a knife. Tear off a piece that is no bigger than
two bites worth and eat that before tearing off
another. If butter is provided (and at formal
events it customarily is not), butter the small
piece just before eating it. There is an
exception to this rule: if you are served a hot
roll, it is permissible to tear (not cut) the
whole roll lengthwise down the middle and place
a pat of butter inside to melt.
- Cookies
- It is never necessary to try to eat the
cookie that comes as a garnish to your dessert
with a spoon. Unless it has fallen so far into
the chocolate sauce that there isn't a clean
corner by which to pick it up.
- Corn on the Cob
- It is unlikely that it will be served at a
formal event, but if you encounter corn on the
cob, it may be picked up and eaten. The
approved method of doing so is to butter one or
two rows at a time and to eat across the cob
cleanly.
- Chips, French Fries, Fried Chicken,
and Hamburgers
- All these items (which could also probably
be classified as "fast foods") simply will not
be served in a formal setting. Most are
intended to be eaten with the hands, although a
particularly messy hamburger could be approached
with fork and knife, and steak fries (the
thick-cut, less crispy variety) may be best
eaten with a fork.
- Hors d'Oeuvres, Canapes,
Crudités
- Almost everything that is served at a
cocktail party or during a pre-meal cocktail
hour is intended to be eaten with the fingers.
Some of these foods make appearances at regular
meals as well (although not often very formal
ones). When they do, it is still permissible to
use the fingers to eat them. This includes
olives, pickles, nuts, deviled eggs, and chips.
- Sandwiches
- The straightforward sandwich -- that is, any
sandwich that is not open-faced, not too tall to
fit in the mouth, not saturated with dripping
sauces or loaded with mushy fillings -- is
intended to be picked up and eaten. Otherwise
use fork and knife.
- Small Fruits and Berries on the
Stem
- If you are served strawberries with the
hulls on, cherries with stems, or grapes in
bunches, then it is okay to eat them with your
fingers. Otherwise, as with all berries, the
utensil of choice is a spoon. In the case of
grapes, you may encounter a special scissors, to
be used to cut off
a small cluster from the bunch. If not, tear a
portion from the whole, rather than plucking off
single grapes, which leaves a cluster of
unattractive bare stems on the serving platter.
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